Listen to this articlemxHero is a San Francisco based startup behind the Mail2Cloud project – cloud-based email and attachment management system. Mail2Cloud automatically uses the power of your existing cloud storage service to increase email productivity, security and reduce your email IT costs. Here is our recent interview with Alex Panagides, Co-Founder and CEO of mxHero:
Q: mxHero gives users powerful new ways to use and analyze email, tell us something more about the company and your apps?
A: mxHero was created on the premise that email can be made much better than it is now without having to substitute it, but rather evolve it. Over the last several years we have created many enhancements to email, ranging from self-destructing messages to automated signatures and footers. However, the most transformative enhancement we produced was our integration of email with cloud storage presented in our product Mail2Cloud. The result of the integration between these two technologies was completely transformative of email. Mail2Cloud has become the company’s focus since 2014.
Q: What advantage does mxHero have over its competitors?
A: There are many solutions that add cloud storage to email, but most of these are point solutions offering single capabilities like the ability to automatically upload an email attachment to the cloud. mxHero’s Mail2Cloud product is actually a suite of email and cloud solutions. We’ve added to Mail2Cloud everything that we could think of at the intersection of email and cloud storage. Mail2Cloud offers apps for saving email (messages and attachments) in the cloud to the complete integration of email and cloud storage in an app we call Fusion.
Fusion is particularly innovative in our opinion. Fusion is the complete replacement of email’s native attachment handling with cloud storage. The result is a truly hybrid class of email. Fusion is a server side implementation which means it does not require installation by the end user and it works regardless of device you use to send email, ex. tablet, desktop, mobile, etc. This is very different than most solutions out there that are client side apps. Unlike these other solutions, Fusion doesn’t require any end user training.
It was on the basis of Fusion that we were included in Gartner’s recent report, “Cool Vendors in Social Software and Collaboration, 2015”.
Q: You’ve recently announced Mail2Cloud Cloud Clips, tell us something more?
A: We believe Cloud Clips will solve a growing problem between email and cloud storage. As cloud storage adoption grows, people are getting more and more accustomed to sharing files by sending cloud storage links via email. Many of the apps in this space facilitate exactly this process. For example, Box and Dropbox both have apps that will automatically upload files to their respective services and add a link in your email. This is great because users are able to by-pass file size limitations of email among many other benefits. The problem is that this type of file sharing breaks the email paradigm. Standard email will signal added files with a paper clip image. Email users have grown accustomed to this mnemonic device to visually find messages with files. Also email programs allow attachments to be used as search criteria. The problem is that a cloud storage link doesn’t represent an attachment. The end result is that people that mix cloud storage and email end up disoriented because there is no way in the standard email UI to find that particular email in which you were sent a particular file. Cloud Clips resolves the issue by automatically detecting cloud storage links and adding an attachment to the email, thereby bringing back the paper clip. It is a simple concept, but a big help when mixing email and cloud storage.
Q: What prediction can you make about email in the next 5 years?
A: First, email will still be here. Seems monthly someone is declaring the death of email. But I doubt that will happen. Most people predict the death of email for the wrong reason. It isn’t a better communication product that will replace email, in other words, it won’t be a case of a better mouse trap. What make email so resilient and ubiquitous despite all its failings is that email is not a product. Rather email is a technology composed of open protocols. Put another way, nobody owns it. That’s the reason why everyone trusts it. Think of email as international waters. It is the fact that no country owns international waters that trade is even viable. I am pretty sure that if say a Facebook became the email substitute, many companies and individuals would be a little wary about using it. Google has long been challenged on its machine scanning of consumer gmail accounts.
Second, attachments will no longer be sent through email. In other words, email will no longer have “payload”. Email simply was never designed to be the file management system that it is often used as. Our work with Fusion showed us that taking files out of email is a really big improvement. We’re not the only ones who have perceived this. Mac Mail, in Apple’s latest Yosemite release, automatically delivers large attachments as links. Like Fusion, the process of linking the attachments is completely transparent to the user.
Q: What can we expect from mxHero in next 6-9 months?
A: mxHero is continuing to improve its Mail2Cloud product suite. We will expand the number of cloud storage providers we support. We are now working on adding Microsoft OneDrive to our growing list of integrated services.
Finally, we are seeing increased interest by companies in “Bi-Modal IT”. Essentially companies are increasingly looking for ways to introduce disruptive technologies without being disruptive. We feel Mail2Cloud addresses part of this need through its convergence of email with cloud storage. This will be one of our focus areas moving forward.
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