What's so strange about that? Personally I think it's a brilliant strategy. It's the logical conclusion of having few users love you, and frankly I can't think of anyone better than Sam Altman to beta test a email app. Once they got him satisfied and hooked, they can easily go for the other big fish in the SF startup scene.

I'm sure they appreciate your two sentence dismissal of something you've never seen and haven't heard more than two sentences about.

I am not dismissing their new email client - I am dismissing the idea that a new successful email client is about email. I have four mail clients and god knows how many messaging clients and VoIP in regular use and none of them manage to do the things I need that are related to messaging other human beings - synchronising address books, synchronising who I talked to about what and when, booking appointments between two people without several emails of a phone call, and generally reminding me what I have forgotten .

I struggle to imagine that there is a single email client that will solve this - this is an integration problem - multiple devices, multiple slices of my life.

Executives pay good money, very good money, for PAs to solve these problems. And I get more and more frustrated by the siloes of data (Skype, iPhones call log) that actively make it harder for me to get metadata about what I am doing each day.

so an email client, by my definition of what a single client is, no, does not seem a good idea. but maybe a cross platform synchronising and intelligent solution, that might be worth getting excited about

so that's why I asked if anyone knew anymore. Not a dismissal of their app, a request for more info. And then a strawman of the idea of building a better email client.

I think building a better mousetrap is an outdated when a jungle is waiting out there.

Was that ReMail? If it was, they were acquired by Google, so in some sense it seems to have worked.