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Popular Subscription Email Service Newton Mail Is Being Discontinued (thurrott.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: CloudMagic, the makers of Newton, today announced that Newton Mail is being discontinued. The company is no longer allowing new users to purchase Newton Mail which costs $100 a year, and existing users will be provided with refunds. For those using the monthly subscription plan, it will immediately stop automatically renewing. And for those on the yearly subscription, you will be given a refund on a pro-rata basis. "We explored various business models but couldn't successfully figure out profitability & growth over the long term. It was hard; the market for premium consumer mail apps is not big enough, and it faces stiff competition from high-quality free apps from Google, Microsoft, and Apple," said Rohit Nadhani, the founder and CEO of CloudMagic. All of that makes sense -- when we have companies like Microsoft and Google making brilliant free email clients like Outlook Mobile and Inbox, there really is no space for paid apps like Newton on the market.
It was a piece of shit back in the day and its move to the web is as yucky as predicted: piece of shit microsoft proprietary formatted crap.
Man i hate it.
NO SIG
I'm shocked. Shocked! That a $100 a year email client didn't fly in 2018! How can this be? I'll be rethinking my investment in Friendster now, for sure!
for around 60/yr run your own mail server in the cloud. I pay 10/mo for the next tier up server. More than enough power to run a mail server.
Translation: our customers are wrong. By refusing to continue doing business with them, we are teaching them that they prefer our competitors' products. When they have no choice but to leave us, we think they'll finally do it.
”[W]hen we have companies like Microsoft and Google making brilliant free email clients like Outlook Mobile and Inbox, there really is no space for paid apps like Newton on the market.”
There are lots of paid apps which do quite well. What there Isn’t space for is a freaking standard email client which costs $100 a year.
Also... if this app really were “popular”, as the headline says - why would it be shutting down? There can’t be that much overhead involved.
#DeleteChrome
probably shouldn't have been skimming the books so much, Rohit
Yes.
If you're charging people $100 a year for e-mail and can't "successfully figure out profitability" then you're either:
(a) a moron
(b) stealing money
(c) all of the above
The title say "Popular Subscription Email Service" but I think it's really a client app subscription, an app that connects to other email services. So yea... might be tough to find a $100 market there. If it were a true service + client maybe they could offer something like privacy ... pretty sure you don't get that with the free email services.
There's a market for a separate email service if it can promise (and keep that promise) to never, ever, peek into your email, collect data on you, or otherwise violate your privacy, and furthermore provide end-to-end encryption and an overall high level of security of your account and their server(s) from unauthorized access.
I have about 8 email accounts I regularly use, and 7 devices I use (between desktops, phones, tablets - work and personal). I want them to stay separate. I DON'T want Google to get involved in any of them and screw them up or start offering me advertisements on the stuff I'm already spammed with.
With Newton, I could configure that ONCE and then each device I add automatically gets all of those configurations at once.
That convenience (plus the way that Newton could get past my office's firewall that normally blocks the SMTP and IMAP ports) was worth it for me.
Can somebody else PLEASE write an app that can magically do that for Samsung email for phone/tablets and Thunderbird for Mac and Windows so I don't have to go through that living hell of entering in all of those ports and tls settings and all of that crap?
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I wonder why I had not received an email about them shutting down. I would think their customers should have been notified first.
I use newton only because it it had a skill that would let amazon echo read my emails. I will miss it.
In the end, it killed itself, 100 bucks was way too high when there are plenty of other email services out there. No way I would pay that much. Fortunately I was locked in at a much lower rate. Oh well, back to searching for another one that will pick up email from all my different accounts and read them to me through the echo too.
Failure in what sense? If monetary, then sure maybe that applies, but that's not always an important measurement of failur and it was never the goal of BSD. That's like saying a random person is a failure for not being a billionaire. BSD is the foundation and influencer of so many things that it's a resounding success.
I would have simply taken a holiday somewhere remote and expensive and met in private.
when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!!!!
no ads, no nonsense, 2fa since forever, pleasant design, good customer service, and most of all....
i am not the product.
they make the product, and i pay them for it. fascinating concept.
I was an early user, and liked it. I paid for it, and was happy. Then they went to a subscription model with a ridiculous price. I canceled, didn't even use the 3 months free, deleted all my data (sure, at least I used their tools to delete it) and wrote a scathing review.
This is a predictable end of the road for them. Great idea, decent implementation, but fucking horrible economics.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
It was so immensely popular that I've never heard of it? I'll bet BOTH the users were really disappointed!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There's PLENTY of room for a decent mail experience; Outlook is not great, and Gmail app is no good for people who aren't using Google for e-mail service.
But $100 a year which is more than even Outlook and Eudora Pro used to cost... doesn't fly for a software mail client unless you're providing a major meaningful service above and beyond, such as cloud-based archiving and searching that client software alone cannot provide.
Try something like $20 upfront, plus $5/year for maintenance.
Donald Trump ate all my Wheaties.
BSD has failed to force the Stasi-backed gaping security hole called systemd onto its users.