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Saturday, November 29, 2014

“Inbox”, a Next-Generation Email Platform by MIT and Dropbox Alums

MIT and dropbox alums have launched a new startup called Inbox, it hopes to be the next generation of e-mail platform. It is similar to the recently released Gmail API. Inbox facilitates users to build apps in a more modern way, these apps can then access user’s inboxes. Gmail API is only limited to Gmail but Inbox can be used to with Microsoft exchange, Yahoo and several others.
Inbox offers a wide range of features that can be used by those who wish to create complete email clients with lots of features, to those who want simple features.
Inbox was founded by MIT alums Christine Spang, who worked at Ksplice as a Linux kernel engineer, and Michael Grinich, who worked as an engineer at designer nest and Dropbox. The team of Inbox includes several MIT alums, two graduates from Distributed Operating Systems group and Parallel at MIT CSAIL. It also has people with experience from Firebase and Google.
Michael Grinich remarked that he wrote his thesis on email tools, and he found out how difficult it was for developers to add features to their email clients. The main issue he found was the underlying work required – Character encoding, MIME, IMAP etc. This is the issue Inbox fixes. But the main goal of Inbox is not just to provide a set of developer tools for email clients, it plans to set a new e-mail standard.
Inbox is currently offering an open source sync engine for free that works with Yahoo mail and Gmail, but they plan to expand to all other IMAP providers. Microsoft Exchange enterprise users can also request access to the developer program of Inbox that supports ActiveSync.

Inbox is based in San Francisco and is backed by SV angel, Fuel Capital, CrunchFund, Betaworks, Data Collective, and others. Details about funding have not been disclosed.

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