The hard thing about designing an email service is that you're only ever in charge of half the experience.
The real question, for Edison and for everyone, is whether anyone's actually ready to quit Gmail. And the tech world is in the midst of launching a new generation of ideas. In other words, everybody knows what email ought to be.
#EDISON MAIL DELETING ADDRESS FREE#
"Unlike other free webmail services," the company wrote in the blog post launching Gmail in 2004, "Gmail is built on the idea that users should never have to file or delete a message, or struggle to find an email they've sent or received." And, for that matter, to the original Gmail idea. In fact, Hey'sĢ5-point manifesto listing everything wrong with email maps pretty directly to Edison's thinking. ProtonMail has found success with its privacy-focused email service, and Basecamp founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are preparing to launch their own service, Hey, in the coming months. Rather than keep stacking new ideas on top of old ones, Edison decided to wipe the slate clean and start over.Įdison's not the only company on this path, of course. Gmail just turned 16 and has only gotten busier and more complex in that time. More than that, it's a bet that email is just in need of a reboot. OnMail offers a number of new ideas about how email should work, like a better system for deciding who's allowed to email you in the first place and a simpler filing system for messages. OnMail offers a better system for deciding who's allowed to email you in the first place.
"Because Google is the competitor, we recognized we had to build it from the ground up," Edison CEO Mikael Berner told me. The service they like: It's the result of more than two years of work, as Edison wrote its own libraries, its own apps, its own everything. It's called OnMail, meaning anyone who signs up will get a new email address ending in About that name: The company landed on it after much debate and much domain-shopping, and still doesn't seem sure they love it. So instead, Edison built a completely new email service. Open standards and decades of history make email a uniquely valuable communication tool, but they also come with privacy problems, feature creep, and the never-ending onslaught of emails you'd rather not get.Įdison believes it can build an email experience that respects users' privacy and attention, gives them control over their inbox and doesn't require countless hours of maintenance. Eventually, the Edison team hit the same wall all the others do: that all the things that make email great also make it terrible. Its products make all the same promises countless other would-be-email-fixers do: faster, better-looking, fewer ads, get in and get out. And over the last two years, it's pushed the team to try and reinvent email altogether.Įdison's been building email apps for years. It's become almost a company motto, the answer to so many of Edison's recent product debates and design questions. There's a note stuck to the wall inside the San Jose offices of Edison, a startup that makes AI-heavy email apps.
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