Inbox – The new platform for email
A startup formed by former MIT students and employees Dropbox offers developers a new platform for email, thanks to which it is possible to have functionality impossible to activate the IMAP communication protocol for receiving e-mail now considered ancient.
Inbox is a new platform for the management of electronic mail created from a startup formed by former students of the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and employees of Dropbox. Similarly, to what was done recently from Gmail with the availability of new APIs, the system allows you to take advantage of various features normally impossible to activate the IMAP standard communication protocol for receiving e-mail. The developers of InBox rather than bind and restrict the advanced features to Gmail, argue that these can be exploited even with Yahoo, Microsoft Exchange and other services.
Last month, during the I/O conference, Google has explained how taking advantage of the new API is now accessible globally boxes natively supporting labels, threading, drafts, set specific permissions for new and existing messages; if, for example, an application needs to send a message, it can only ask permission to ” create “. The idea is to reduce the need to use old protocols such as IMAP which for various reasons begins to show various limits.
Similarly to what has been proposed by Google, InBox proposes a kind of upgrade to ” archaic protocols and formats ” with which developers would otherwise have to learn to work. InBox supports basic functionality from simple to advanced features useful for the development of a real mail client.
The company was founded by MIT alumni: Michael Grinich, formerly an engineer at Dropbox and designer’s Nest, and Christine Spang, an engineer specializing in the Linux kernel previously used to Ksplice (a company acquired by Oracle). In the core team, there are other alumni of MIT, others with varied experience in Google and Firebase and two from the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group at MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) where she was born Meraki, integrated solution acquired by Cisco.
” Preparing the thesis at MIT on tools for email, I discovered how difficult it was to add new features to e-mail applications, ” he says, explaining how Grinich born InBox. ” A big problem is the plumbing below – IMAP, MIME, character encoding, etc.. – InBox solves tasks on behalf of the developers. ” The ultimate goal is not only to provide new tools, but to create a new standard for email, providing the infrastructure as the open source package.
” The synchronization engine is available on GitHub and discussions and requests are welcome, ” says Grinich. The open-source engine currently works with Gmail and Yahoo, but we will expand with all IMAP providers. Users of enterprise solutions that rely on Microsoft Exchange may require access to Inbox Developer program, which already includes support for ActiveSync and is available as a private beta.
Have been already developed app that will build upon the Inbox and services are available on GitHub examples that use the Inbox (SDK JavaScript or iOS). The dedicated API follows the REST principles (a particular software architecture that allows you to outline how resources are defined and addressed) allowing you to send email, create custom filters, access attachments, create sketches, and more.
Grinich shows that developers can have leverage the API in question for free, without the need to send data on the e-mail to third parties. We currently rely on a platform independent environment; will be available in the future the hosted version of InBox with which developers can create applications without scaling its infrastructure.
