Postbox

» see postbox-inc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

By the time Postbox existed I had no use for it, and neither did most people. Mail had moved into the browser years earlier. In Turkey a desktop mail program was something you found already installed on a machine at work, configured by somebody else, and the personal account lived at hotmail or gmail where it could be reached from an internet cafe or from a friend's computer without carrying anything with you. Paying for software to read mail was a proposition from a decade earlier that never came back.

Postbox was made by people with a good reason to disagree. Scott MacGregor had been running Thunderbird development at Mozilla, and in 2007 Mozilla decided that mail was not where its future was and began moving Thunderbird out to a separate organization. MacGregor left that autumn. He and Sherman Dickman, who had been a product director at Mozilla, founded a company in December 2007 to build the mail client they thought Thunderbird should have been.

It launched at TechCrunch50 on 9 September 2008, built on Gecko and starting from Thunderbird's own code. That inheritance was the pitch as much as the engineering. The people who knew that codebase best had walked out of the organization that owned it, and were selling their version of it back to the users the organization had stopped courting.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was for ~

The product argument was that email is work, and work deserves tools. Postbox indexed everything you had and made it searchable instantly, and it pulled attachments out of the archive into their own browsable view. It also let you answer from a saved snippet instead of retyping the same paragraph for the four hundredth time. Nothing here was visionary. It was a mail program that took seriously the idea that some people process a thousand messages a week and would like the twenty seconds back.

That is a narrow customer and Postbox knew it. The pricing said so: a one-time payment for a program you owned, in an era when the alternative was free and hosted by an advertising company. For a long stretch that trade worked well enough to keep a small firm going, which is more than most desktop software from 2008 managed.

~ the decline ~

In September 2019 Postbox 7 arrived and the license changed to a yearly one at around thirty dollars. Anyone who had bought during the preceding three years was grandfathered into a perpetual license, and everyone after that was renting. The reaction was what it always is when a paid tool moves to a subscription. Longtime users who had bought a program discovered they had been buying a service, and a share of them left.

The deeper problem was structural. Postbox rode on Mozilla's engine, which meant every large change upstream had to be absorbed by a company far smaller than Mozilla, for a product with a fraction of the users. Thunderbird itself came back to life in the 2020s with donation funding and a rebuilt interface, free, in the same place on the same engine. A paid fork of a free product survives on the difference between them, and the difference kept shrinking from the other end.

~ the postmortem ~

On 22 October 2024, eM Client acquired Postbox, Inc. The announcement went out the following day and said plainly that Postbox would no longer be sold or developed, with the company winding down. Support for existing customers ran to 22 December 2024, with refund requests due a month before that. The support site was promised until December 2025.

It is a clean ending by the standards of this site. Dates were given and refunds were offered, and the buyer put out migration discounts rather than pretending the product had a future. What it does not disguise is the shape of the thing: a competitor bought a customer list and switched off the software attached to it. The last release was 7.0.64. Sixteen years after two Mozilla engineers left to build a better mail client, the mail client with the users was the free one they had left behind.

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