I remember I start to pick up interest in email reengineering party last year when I read the post from Techcrunch introducing Xobni . The company picked up a 16 years old products where most of the internet users would have at least one, and some may have more than 10 inboxes (personally I tried to reduce from 12 last year to 5 right now), and try to reengineer it; and thats the reason Xobni is the ‘Reengineering’ of Inbox when you read backwards.

Since then, the industry start to refocus back on email again, and many starts to look back on how to enhance, connect, multiplex, increase efficiency of human interacting with email, and out of sudden, there are more than 10 already known startups that doing the emails development now. Ex VP of Engineering for Xobni had also leave the company and start his own new email company too (You can check out his blog at here)

In my list, there are currently so many new faces in email startup:
1. Xobni.com
2. WrapMail
3. unison.com
4. Zenbe.com
5. Inbox 2
6. Zimbra.com (acquired by Yahoo)
7. Xoopit

Lately, even Yahoo has unofficially announced that they are launching Inbox 2.0 but I’m not sure if it is same as Inbox2.com. You can check out the full post from GigaOM here.

In term of business model, Zimbra used subscription base, which pretty close to Gmail Pro version, while many others embebed the advertising engine (same old way as Hotmail started back in 90s, can’t we have some new business model for email please?!?!). Bottom line, I think email has reached a pretty simple milestone as Gabor has mentioned long ago, to improve users’ efficiency to handle ‘Urgent’ and ‘Important’ email, less attention to less important email rather than continue to ‘PUMP’ ads, information to users which at the end of the day, who border to read the ads in an email? Moreover, we all hate spam, same as we hate ads. Time to change, I love Inbox ZERO idea presented previously in Google Tech Talk, do less email, have more fun, life is simple. Don’t complicate users inbox with more ‘storage’ for email, instead, leave inbox to Zero email everyday as a best practices for all email users as the Mantra for email business that any new startups want to jump in. I will talk more on Inbox Zero practice later.

Below is the Elevator picth would like to share with you from Inbox 2.0.