Astro (email app)

» see astro.ai as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

By 2017 I had stopped looking for a better email client. The problem had been settled years earlier by the browser, and the interesting engineering in my working life had moved to things with cameras on them, so a Bay Area startup promising that a chatbot would read my inbox for me was solving a problem I no longer had. Astro was built for people whose entire job happened inside Gmail or Office 365. There are a great many of those people. I have never been one.

Astro Technology was formed in 2015 and launched its app on 9 March 2017, for the Mac and for iOS, announcing an $8.3m Series A led by Redpoint Ventures the same morning. Android followed in a public beta a month later. The product was an email client with an assistant called Astrobot wired into it, and the assistant was the pitch. Astrobot offered to archive the recurring mail you always ignored and nudged you about messages you had left sitting. It also searched your mail and your calendar from one box.

There was also a version of Astrobot that lived inside Slack, and in hindsight that was the only piece of the company with a future. It pulled email and calendar events into Slack channels and let you search all of it from there. Slack had been trying to do something about email for years without much success. Here was a small team that had already built the bridge.

On 24 September 2018 Slack announced it had bought Astro Technology, its largest acquisition at that point, and that the twenty-eight people on the team were joining. In the same breath it set a date: the apps would stop working on 10 October. Users had sixteen days to find a new email client.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the four of them had done this before ~

Andy Pflaum, Ross Dargahi, David Connelly and Roland Schemers had co-founded Zimbra, the open source mail and calendar suite that Yahoo bought in 2007. They spent the decade after that watching their old product get passed between owners, and then built a new email client with a chatbot in it. The same four names appear on both companies, which makes Astro one of the few startups whose founders had already shipped the product they were now competing against.

~ sixteen days to move out ~

The shutdown was unusually painless for a product death, because Astro never held anything. It was a front end on Gmail and Office 365, so your mail stayed where it always was and the worst that could happen was losing messages you had snoozed or scheduled to send after the cut-off. The advice in the press at the time amounted to checking your snooze list and then deleting the app.

What ended on 10 October was the whole shelf: the Mac app, the iOS and Android apps, the Alexa skill, the Slack integration. Slack's own explanation was about interoperability between channels and email, and the Astro CEO's parting line described joining "the maker of the fastest-growing enterprise app in history". Neither statement mentions the users of the thing being switched off, because by then they were not the point of the transaction.

astro.ai has no answer on either scheme today. Slack kept the team, and the apps have been gone since that Wednesday in October.

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