Today a team that includes multiple CSAIL alums launched Inbox, a more modern platform for building apps that access end users’ inboxes. As compared to Google's new "Gmail API," which is limited to Gmail, Inbox also works with Yahoo, Microsoft Exchange and others.
Wired describes it as "a software creation designed to make it much easier for developers to build email-centric applications, whether they be new email clients or something else entirely."According to TechCrunch, the idea is "to offer an upgrade of sorts from the 'archaic protocols and formats' that developers would otherwise have to learn today in order to work with email."
From TC:
The company was co-founded by MIT alums Michael Grinich, previously an engineer at Dropbox and designer Nest, and Christine Spang, an early Linux kernel engineer at Ksplice (acquired by Oracle). The core team at Inbox also includes several other MIT alums, plus those with experience from Google and Firebase, as well as two graduates from the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group at MIT CSAIL, which spun out Meraki (acquired by Cisco).
“I actually wrote my thesis at MIT on email tools, and discovered how difficult it was to add features to email apps,” explains Grinich of how Inbox came to be. “One big issue was the underlying plumbing – IMAP, MIME, character encodings, etc. – which is what Inbox fixes for developers.”