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Posted by skeptrune 11 hours ago

The Email Startup Graveyard: Why 80%+ of Email Companies Fail(forwardemail.net)
79 points | 23 commentspage 2
jiveturkey 8 hours ago|
> Techstars alone has 28 email-related companies with only 5 exits - an exceedingly high failure rate (sometimes calculated to be 80%+).

This is actually better than overall failure rate. At 80% I would absolutely be investing in more email companies!

The entire analysis is skewed to satisfy their own messaging or perhaps internal motivation. Mentioning Cyrus IMAP and SpamAssassin is ... being stuck in a time warp.

Being self-funded, their position is not surprising. However they really need some perspective.

JimDabell 9 hours ago||
This is a weird article. Email is a hodgepodge of terrible protocols that have progressively had more and more technical debt laid upon them for decades and decades. Vendor quirks are everywhere, and it’s incredibly unreliable. Its defining quality – it’s decentralisation – has been beaten out of it by IP reputation so everybody ends up sending through a handful of providers.

The article kinda acknowledges that it’s a shitheap that’s awful to implement, but somehow still champions the idea that it all works fine.

And what’s with the repeated jabs at the “terrible” exit rate that actually seems pretty good?

jesterson 5 hours ago||
> Email is a hodgepodge of terrible protocols that have progressively had more and more technical debt laid upon them for decades and decades.

May I know what is so "terrible" about those protocols ans what "technical debt" are you talking about?

> Vendor quirks are everywhere, and it’s incredibly unreliable

That has nothing to do with actual email protocols. Generic email protocols are extremely reliable and resilient to any sorts of disruptions. I wish any of modern protocols exhibit similar simplicity and reliability.

But of course if vendor would like to add their quirks and you would like to buy that - that's your choice innit.

dboreham 7 hours ago|||
> incredibly unreliable

The underly technology is very reliable. Email not getting delivered to the recipient is more about low/no-cost providers preferring to filter almost all messages rather than spend money on doing a good job of spam filtering.

landl0rd 7 hours ago||
To what lever can one apply money to get better spam filtering with even remotely constant returns to scale?
delusional 6 hours ago|||
> and it’s incredibly unreliable

I will never understand where this sentiment comes from. I've run my own mail server for like 7 years at that point. It's so incredibly rare for my mail to not deliver that I can't remember the last time I had to debug it. The most annoying thing I've had to deal with was dovecot breaking compatibility with their config format, but even that was a couple of hours of work to get back on track.

My most surprising experience was when I broke the mail setup while migrating servers once. Postfix was down for something like 7 days before I got around to fixing it. The cool thing was what happened after I fixed it. While my server was down, the other relays had been dutifully holding onto my mail, waiting for me to once again accept it. So after a week of downtime, I still got all my mail within 24 hours after starting up my server again.

That's fucking reliable in my book.

nojs 5 hours ago||
It’s AI slop
duxup 9 hours ago||
>But they ignore the fundamental reality: email works perfectly for what it was designed to do.

Yeah the fundamental thing is email does it's job, and if you want to change that job in any dramatic fashion ... it no longer does its core job.

aussieguy1234 6 hours ago||
If 1 in 5 takes off, is that really a bad success rate given that's widely considered the average startup success rate?
dvt 6 hours ago|
Average startup success rate is 1/10 at best. The "90% of startups fail" metric that's often cited is likely inflated by B2B companies which find significantly more success (like, an order of magnitude more) than B2C.
patchtopic 8 hours ago||
compared to other businesses this number seems OK :-)
scarface_74 8 hours ago||
> The Acquisition-to-Shutdown Pipeline

For the founders and their investors, that’s nut a bug it’s a feature

AbstractH24 52 minutes ago|
My heart goes out to those founders.

I think they need one of those star studded benefit concerts for them (oh, wait. It just occurred in Venice last weekend)

jpmi1 9 hours ago||
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throwaway843 9 hours ago|
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