Comment by PaulHoule

I spent about two years in early development of a "Zombocom" product and one question on my mind was "Whatever happened to Lotus Notes?" Superficially it seems the time is right for a rapid development platform for web apps based on an object database with synchronization support. I was sharply divided about the role of email in such a product:

I became a qmail fanatic around 1999 and enjoyed running a smart mail server but as we got into the early 2000's I experienced a series of crises involving worms, viruses, malware, spam, deliverability and such. Today I want nothing to do with running a mail server! It's not a problem where you can just invest once and it is done but instead it is like one of those service games.

I like the idea of email as a paradigm for asynchronous workflows, and if you're doing business by email (as in CRM) it is useful. On the other hand today the email market is pretty tied up with the likes of Gmail and Outlook