Popular Subscription Email Service Newton Mail Is Being Discontinued (thurrott.com) 45
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.
Outlook is a POSH (Score:1)
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.
Shocking (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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I agree that $100/year is pretty steep
I pay $50/year for FastMail.com which gives me unlimited domain aliases, DNS control, 25GB of storage and as many aliases as I want.
I have no affiliation with FastMail, I just love the service.
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I have no affiliation with FastMail, I just love the service.
Fastmail'er here as well. It's been about 1.5 years since I switched from Yahoo! and couldn't be more happy.
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What's better than email? Not facebook, not texting, not video, so...?
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Very true. Roundcube is pretty good and old timers might like squirrelmail.
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Same here. And secondary for about the same with a different provider. Also my own DNS for that. But sadly, most people, even most people here today, are not capable of running an email server.
Baloney (Score:4, Interesting)
”[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.
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There can’t be that much overhead involved.
There can literally be any amount of overhead. They have a CEO, who may have a salary, and they might even have other employees.
It is true that the direct labor costs are low, and other costs of producing the product are low, but wages that go to providing the service aren't counted as "overhead." But administrative salaries are.
If they had enough revenue to account for overhead, they wouldn't be refunding people they'd just stop signing up new customers.
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I predicted this would happen when the guy moved out of his offices in downtown Palo Alto and changed the name of the product to Newton. CloudMagic was a great easy-to-use email client that access all my accounts from a variety of services, including Exchange, for free. Then the guy had the temerity to charge $100/year for it. Most people left him scathing reviews on MacUpdate, but I kept checking every so often when he'd update the Mac client. Still charging, still to much, still alive. It took 2 year
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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.
service? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I know of a market. (Score:2)
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then can someone at least do one-stop config? (Score:4)
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?
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Apple has something for mail. That doesn't really help you, but configurations can follow you to some degree between devices. It's not 100% though.
I wish a little more time would be put into Thunderbird or Seamonkey. Neither works well on 4k displays yet. It would also be good if there were thunderbird on more platforms. It's the closest thing we have to a cross platform mail app.
GNUMail would also be ok, provided the crashing bugs with IMAP would be fixed.
will miss it (Score:2)
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 di
Predictable (Score:2)
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.
Right... (Score:2)
How about a reasonable price? (Score:2)
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.