Inbox, A Next Generation Email Platform For Cross Messaging Syncing

A new technology startup partnership called Inbox has recently been announced by Dropbox and MIT, where its solution is attempting to become the next generation of email applications. 

The processing resembles to the also newly launched Gmail API,  However, Inbox design does offer a more modern way to build apps that access end users inboxes. Furthermore, Inbox users do not need to rely simply on Gmail, rather they can also use it email from with Yahoo, Microsoft Exchange among others.

Google first announced its new “Gmail API” at its Google I/O developer conference earlier this month, which offers developers who build email applications new tools to access messages, threads, labels and other parts of the Gmail inbox without requiring full inbox access. The idea is to reduce the reliance on older protocols, such as IMAP. Inbox focus on a specific feature sets including snoozing email messages or only sending emails on behalf of an end user.

The strategy of Inbox is not to offer a suite of developer tools, rather to offer and create a new email standard. The sync engine is available for free on GitHub. It currently works with Gmail and Yahoo mail, with plans to expand soon to all IMAP providers. Enterprise users on Microsoft Exchange can request access to the Inbox Developer program, which supports ActiveSync.

Developers are able download the Inbox engine, sync an account, and start building on top of the platform in a local development environment.

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Goodbye Hotmail From Microsoft, Hello New Outlook

Email provided over the web directly on internet browsers reached its popularity peak in the late 1990s, by today's standards the service has greatly improved due to user demand capabilities, furthermore in a new development it has been announced that Microsoft will drop the Hotmail service after sixteen years since it began operating, as a result will replace and offer its users a new improved service at Outlook.com.

Microsoft will offer new rich features at Outlook.com where users will benefit from an much capable upgrade, this announcement comes in the context where the latest webmail upgrade came around eight years ago.

In spite of this, hotmail still has around 350 million users worldwide, however Microsoft sees that hotmail is lagging behind other services such as  Google's Gmail. Where in comparison, Google gmail users have grown to 425 million users just in the past five years.

It was published recently by web metrics company ComScore, that despite this apparent fewer users, Hotmail has nevertheless higher traffic when comparing to its near competitors. In June 2012, Hotmail had 324 million monthly visitors, compared to 290 million at Yahoo mail and 278 million at Google's Gmail.

Shortly, all Hotmail users will receive invitations and help procedures to enable to transfer and move their email accounts to the new Outlook.com.

Microsoft's Chris Jones stated: "Outlook.com would offer a less-obtrusive email experience, with fewer display ads and new connections to social networks including Facebook and Twitter. Users will be able to see status updates from friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter with a new feature on the revamped email site. We think the time is right to re-imagine email. We realised that we needed to take a bold step, break from the past and build you a brand new service from the ground up."

It can be envisaged, that in the medium term the new service may be based on an office 365 engine capabilities, including new functionality to be present on the new version of windows 8, where it may include custom tweaks, improvements and social networking features.