

With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io - dhanji
http://fluentmail.tumblr.com/post/28767857337/fluent-is-closing

======
jaysonelliot
Am I the only one who would have liked a bit more detail behind the reason for
Fluent shutting down after just six months?

I watched and waited with anticipation for the launch, and was excited when I
got my invite and could start using the service.

It's a great product, with excellent UX and design, and while it still felt
technically like a work in progress, I was ready to stick it out as a user and
see where everything went.

Now, less than two months after getting my "golden ticket," it's all going
away with a vague statement: _"We feel that we couldn’t keep running the
service as it is, and now’s the time to move on."_

Was there not enough runway to survive beyond six months? Did something else
happen that they don't feel like discussing? If you're going to make
announcements like "The future of email, brought to you by ex-Google people,"
it seems like you should at least know that you've got the funding to keep the
lights on for more than a couple months.

It might seem like I'm being harsh on Fluent, considering that I'm just a user
who didn't pay anything and shouldn't have any expectations. I'm not thinking
about this as a user, though. I'm thinking about this as a would-be startup
entrepreneur. One of the biggest barriers to getting traction early on is
convincing users that you're going to stick around, that they can invest their
time getting used to your product, even trust their data with you. After all,
you're just some startup, maybe they should wait a year and see if you're
still there. Meanwhile, you're stuck in a Catch 22, because you need those
early adopters in order to still _be there_ in a year.

When a startup makes big claims, then closes their doors mere months later, it
puts another brick in the wall that makes it harder for other startups to make
the case that it's worth getting on board for early adopters.

I'm sad to see Fluent go. It was a good idea, and seemed to be well executed.
I just wish they'd be a bit more transparent about what happened, and why they
weren't able to see this coming.

------
xqyz
> Email is quite clearly a thing that needs fixing

Honestly, I've never seen it that way. Email continues to work fine. It's
platform independent and easy to use/setup. It's probably one of the best
things on the internet ever.

~~~
DigitalSea
Ever tried sending an attachment to someone over 4-5mb? One of the most broken
aspects of email right there and something that won't be changing any time
soon. Sure you can use a service like Mediafire or Rapidshare, but it's just
another step that shouldn't exist in this day and age.

~~~
bobbles
Dropbox should allow you to send a shortcut to a file (on dropbox) along with
your email so that the recipient can just grab the file when they actually
want it instead of clugging up the email systems with useless junk.

~~~
notatoad
This is my favorite feature of sparrow.

------
lkrubner
I feel that email needs fixing. I will explain my opinion by walking through
my history with email, chronologically:

1994-1996 - used AOL. Proprietary format that can not be updated to anything
modern.

1996-1998 - got a Geocities account. Geocities was later bought by Yahoo.
Yahoo did a terrible job merging geocities usernames into the Yahoo username
system, such that I was left with a strange, difficult to spell username, and
the system sends email with one return email address when the message is
original with me, but when I'm replying to an email sent by someone else, the
return email address is different. Both email addresses go to my account, but
my friends have often been confused about which my "real" email account is.
And so have I. All the same, to this day, I still use this account in
emergencies, when other email technologies have failed me. I hate, hate, hate
the fact that so much of my "Sent" history is locked inside of this system.

1998 - an intense period of experimentation during which I tried 8 different
email clients, many from very small 3rd parties, some of which only had a
single developer, but some of which were famous among that crowd of tech elite
who had been on the internet since the 1980s. All of these clients were later
abandoned by their developers, or the company that owned the software went
backrupt. There was one exception: Outlook Express.

1997-2000 - used Outlook Express. Downside was simply that it ran on Windows,
and I was never happy being on Windows. Also, when I was ready to move to
something else, I could not find any easy way to mass export my email, nor
save it in some format other than eml.

2001-2007 the year before I had started renting my own server and keeping my
email on my own server. In 2001 I switched to Linux as my main computer. After
some experimentation, I settled down to using Thunderbird. My problem was that
this client was incredibly buggy. At least on my Red Hat machine, and later on
my Ubuntu machine, Thunderbird had many, many bugs and would often crash,
causing me to lose a lot of work. Frustrated with Thunderbird, I would
sometimes switch back to using my Geocities account, which I sort of hated,
but which was more reliable.

2007-2009 - used Gmail, but hated having to rely on a 3rd party, and have also
had privacy concerns with Google. Since 2000 I have preferred to rent my own
server and keep my email on my own machine.

2010-2011 - used Pine. Also experimented with using Emacs as my main email
client. I love Emacs, but decided I did not like it for email.

2011 - by 2010 I had sort of given up on Linux and switched to using a Mac as
my main machine. Sometimes use the Mail.app for particular purposes, such as
subscribing to various newsgroups. In general afraid of vendor lock-in and
would prefer an open source solution. Mostly used Thunderbird. It is much less
buggy than what I had to deal with years earlier on Linux. But still, it is
somewhat buggy (sometimes search will stall, sometimes windows become non-
responsive, and HTML quoting does not work well, which drives me crazy). It
lacks some features that clients in the late 90s had, with the one big
exception that it supports HTML email. However, I prefer to use plain text
email, so that feature means nothing to me. When I try to use the HTML email,
I run into numerous flaws that strike me as bugs: invisible barriers that will
sometimes not allow the cursor to move up or down, when I'm using the arrow
keys, or sections that won't allow themselves to be selected, or sections that
can only be selected as a block. Drives me crazy.

It is 2012. I am unhappy with my email client. I would like something better,
preferably open source.

~~~
powera
It sounds to me like you're unhappy with Thunderbird, not email. You seem to
refuse to use other email clients (Outlook, Gmail, Mail.app) for various
reasons entirely unrelated to sending or receiving email.

~~~
lkrubner
Think about what you are doing! Think about how narrowly you are defining
this! You write:

"sending or receiving email"

And that's it? That is all we can expect of email clients? Are you arguing
that no consideration should be given to concerns like storage, security,
privacy, interoperability or any of the other concerns that we normally have
when we use software? Can you give one good reason why all of those concerns
are invalid?

~~~
benthumb
Not to mention message filtering that work as advertised ... I'm looking at
you Thunderbird.

------
waseemsadiq
(I used to run my own cloud based e-mail aggregator www.inbox2.com)

The primary problem with these services is that they have to _pull_ content
and have to do it regularly. That means going and checking your inbox every
2-5 minutes to be able to provide a descent experience. Your ISP e-mail
provider (or gmail etc) sit there and wait for e-mail to be sent to them
making it less processing intensive (push based systems).

There are some techniques such as imap IDLE to make this a bit more efficient
but 1. not every e-mail provider supports that and 2. for ex. with gmail idle
caps at about 35K connections per box.

You could also have for ex. gmail forward all email to a custom address but
average users generally found this very confusing and couldn't get this going.

We calculated that it cost us about _2 euros_ per month to support a free user
providing a 'good' user experience. Good luck making that back as paid service
is also not a (scalable) option; the general consensus being: "email is
supposed to be free" or "I am already paying for my gmail!".

------
cynicalmood
Its stuff like this that makes me very cynical about a big portion of the
startup world. I admire companies that stick to their vision for the long haul
and don't bow out because all of a sudden they don't have enough
attention/passion/whatever. You'd think that if a party comes out stating huge
ambitions and a big vision for fixing a problem, they'd have the determination
to match the cause.

~~~
drewjoh
I share similar sentiments. Start-ups _feel_ more fickle as of late... perhaps
just chance with Sparrow's recent buy out, etc. Unless there's a real reason
to keep going for the starters (monetary or personal drive/passion), then
there's no fountain to stand on.

It's disappointing! I was really looking forward to trying this out... but I
never made it past the waiting list.

~~~
chermanowicz
Agree, it's a shame, but the reality is and always was that execution is far
harder than coming up with an idea.

------
boyter
I was not aware of Fluent but it looks fairly similar to about 100 or so other
email sites, with a full list here
<http://blog.bartjellema.com/2012/02/22/email-startups/>

Why are there so many of these sites? Is there a low barrier to entry or
something? 90% seem to do similar things, so maybe someone should make one
that allows people to write plugins for their platform and allow people to
extend things that way?

~~~
LiveTheDream
Email itself is just a standard protocol; anyone can implement it. So, yes,
there is a very low barrier to entry. Also, there are various problems around
current email usage patterns that people want to solve: dealing with enormous
inboxes, dealing with long conversation threads, managing contacts,
integration with business workflows, etc.

------
DigitalSea
I guess when you go saying things like "the future of email" unless you're
Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft or Facebook that's all it's ever going to be: words.
From the limited glimpse I got to see of the service it looked pretty
promising and very visually pleasing, but sadly without the funding ideas like
this just can't and won't work.

I would like to see someone else take this idea and run with it because I
think it's definitely something that is bound to happen, someone at some stage
will make email better. I think the owners should open source the code on
Github, it would be a shame for such a service to fall by the wayside all
because the funding wasn't there.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Ironically Fluent was a team of "disgruntled ex-googlers"

~~~
DigitalSea
Haha yeah, I know that but a team of ex-Googlers without the budget of Google.
I'm honestly surprised nobody stepped up to the plate and funded these guys
though.

------
nilsbunger
Ay chance of open sourcing it? Maybe the community can carry the torch
forward?

~~~
mmahemoff
This request happens for every startup that closes. I don't think it's
realistic most of the time, because projects like this are heavily tied to
specific infrastructure and the optimum level of technical debt for a startup
is much higher than the optimum level for an open source project whose
survivorship depends on the community picking it up and taking it over
(because it's unlikely the founders will spend much time working with it).
Furthermore, the team would need to devote time to auditing the security
aspects (e.g. looking for sensitive data that might have been in the code
base, by accident at best, sheer ignorance at worst) before releasing it,
which takes further time.

So I think it's more important to ask for user data to be handed over cleanly
and securely, and for certain data to be made public if it's of general
interest (though again, that requires diligent security auditing).

Anyway, it would be good to have some evidence that this common call for open
source has actually paid off in the past. Closest I can think of is Firefox,
but the circumstances were very unique - for one thing, it rose from the ashes
of a project had at one point been wildly successful.

~~~
mceachen
Firefox was not an open-source version of Navigator. It was a complete
rewrite:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Application_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Application_Suite#Rewriting_from_scratch)

~~~
mmahemoff
AOL released Mozilla as an independent project, which morphed into the
stripped down version, Phoenix. Anyway, it was already open source by the time
it was released, so it's a very different situation to this startup-releasing-
open-source wish, but still the closest example I can think of, when
considering only successful projects.

~~~
Joeri
Netscape committed to spinning off mozilla prior to the AOL deal. Also,
mozilla is an example of how releasing a closed source codebase often doesn't
work, because the mozilla project ended up throwing away the old code and
rewriting the engine and user interface.

A better example is blender, whose source was bought out and open sourced
through a community effort.

~~~
ldng
The Mozilla Foundation choose the rewrite path, it's true. Yet, the Sea Monkey
project [1] is still alive. It's not like the code base vanished in thin air.

[1] <http://www.seamonkey-project.org/>

~~~
Joeri
IIRC seamonkey is a rewrite of the netscape communicator codebase. The
seamonkey code was what firefox grew out of (firefox itself was not a rewrite,
just a refactoring).

------
juliangamble
@dhanji - thanks for all your work on this - you've inspired us all.

This post read a little bit like "This is more expensive to run in time and
money than we thought - so we're shelving it for now."

Can I ask - was this move triggered by (a) Google buying Sparrow? (and thus
shelving other email acquisition plans) (b) Marissa Mayer moving to Yahoo (and
killing a potential purchaser strategy) (c) The release of outlook.com
(creating a high speed competitor with lots of resources for distribution and
support and marketing).

------
ozataman
The design looks quite nice, but having to share my private and work emails
with yet another cloud provider was a no-deal for me.

------
jaequery
i'd like a premium email service where i pay for it. these days, i like
spending money for products. i'd have paid for fluent.io.

~~~
bromley
I've been very happily paying for a fastmail.fm business account for the last
few years. A rock-solid system, and great at handling lots of addresses on
multiple domains.

No affiliation, just a very happy customer.

------
imikay
I think it is because Sparrow has just been acquired by Google.

~~~
chmike
The lack of a business model ?

------
kausikram
Haven't heard much about fluent until now. It does seem to be a problem worth
solving and 70,000 signups, does imply that it is a validated problem. Still
coming out of the startups world, it feels eerie that a startup would shutdown
within 6 months. Is this one more of those many cases, where the cofounders
developed a solution for a valid problem, however failed to figure out how to
monetize it?

------
ABS
since someone is going to ask this I might as well be the first: why not try
and sell it?

~~~
nc17
Judging from the post, I would assume they tried and failed.

------
true_religion
Has anyone else used Fluent.io?

I did, and found it wasn't quite for me. The interface left too much detail
out, and I preferred GMail + Rapportive to do my emails.

Was there a mobile app that was better? I only used the web app.

