Listen to this articleSan Francisco based startup Inbox is developing a modern API that works with existing email providers. It makes it easy to integrate with your users’ email data, and eliminates the complexity of old protocols like IMAP and MIME. Inbox is backed by Fuel Capital, SV Angel and CrunchFund.
Michael Grinich, CEO and Co-Founder of Inbox, shares with us some details about his startup:
Q: How long have you been working on Inbox and where did the idea come from?
A: I actually wrote my thesis at MIT on email tools, and discovered how difficult it was to add features to email apps. One big issue was the underlying plumbing (IMAP, MIME, character encodings, etc.), which is what Inbox fixes for developers.
Q: What are the biggest benefits of using Inbox?
A: Inbox uses standard interfaces that you’ve come to expect from modern APIs. We’ve taken care of the bugs and edge-cases with character encodings, MIME structures, misformatted socket protocols, and more.
Inbox allows you to access mail data inside the mailboxes of your users. For example, you could use Inbox to build an app showing detail from all the flight confirmation messages a user received last year.
You could certainly build a full-featured mail client with Inbox, and build it much faster with fewer bugs. Our free SDKs on GitHub make this easy for developers getting started.
Q: How does Inbox Sync Engine work?
A: The Inbox API provides simple REST endpoints for accessing, modifying, and sending mail, and is compatible with existing providers like Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Here you can find full technical info.
Q: Tell us something interesting about your team that people probably don’t know?
A: Christine (Christine Spang, Co-Founder) is a pretty hardcore climber, and actually took a few days off to climb Rainier last month. For whatever reason, a lot of our friends who have joined are also climbers. Our offices is now scattered with harnesses and ropes, and we’re just down the street from the local climbing gym. I guess some startups play video games or go drinking together. At Inbox, we go climbing together.
Q: What is your main goal at the moment? How do you see future of Inbox?
A: We’re laser focused on making Inbox the absolute best way to work with email.
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