BlueTie Launches Free Ajax Email Suite

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1. Neil Ford
   

   October 29th, 2006 at 1:33 am

   This does indeed look like a good service and if I hadn’t been using Gmail for so long I would probably think of switching.

   The other thing Google need to do is allow POP collection to ONLY get messages in the inbox, so that the filtering becomes really useful. Umm… maybe the lack of that is a reason to look elsewhere.

   - Neil.

2. Santosh
   

   October 29th, 2006 at 3:43 am

   Michael Arrington: “Note that I would also list Google as a competitor, but until they allow POP access to third party email services its very hard to compare them to services that do allow that access.”

   I know Google/GMail offers hosted e-mail for small businesses (free for up to 25 users) with POP3 access. I am not sure what your referring to, could you help clarify?

3. Michael Arrington
   

   October 29th, 2006 at 3:51 am

   Santosh, I changed some of the language above. Google does offer email for a company domain, although Gmail still down not allow access to third party email providers. So while I can view Gmail emails in Yahoo, I cannot view Yahoo emails in Gmail.

4. Max
   

   October 29th, 2006 at 5:17 am

   I tried registering on the site and logging in. It told me my password was wrong, so I had to enter my user name to retrieve my pass. It told me that the user name doesn’t exist. I tried registering again and same thing happened. Either there’s a bug, or I’m doing something wrong. Oh well, at least I wanted to try it out.

5. Grant
   

   October 29th, 2006 at 5:35 am

   Max, same happened for me.

6. orangeacid
   

   October 29th, 2006 at 5:48 am

   If only gmail would allow me to collect email properly from other sites, I would switch and never look back.

   I think what Google needs to do is to create some kind of server extension that allows you to use Gmail for your server’s IMAP. The interface is soooo nice, but there are some places where I can’t use gmail and if I just forward all my mail to a gmail address, that means that I can no longer retrieve it via IMAP.

7. Andrew Hill
   

   October 29th, 2006 at 6:12 am

   Here I am, pen, er . . , keyboard poised to review BlueTie and I get dumped at the first hurdle as a UK resident. Maybe someone can rent me a square foot somewhere over the pond so I can do things and not just read about them.

8. Matt Burris
   

   October 29th, 2006 at 6:17 am

   I also registered and it won’t let me login. Forget password function says the username doesn’t exist. Bummer.

9. Larry Velez
   

   October 29th, 2006 at 6:54 am

   Wow - 10GB mailboxes for the paid accounts! Finally some real storage from others besides Gmail. Now if the hosted Exchange players would get off their ass and get with the real world. 100MB mailboxes is a joke.

   I think there is a huge opportunity for a hosted exchange player to enter the market right now with a cheap grid storage solution ala Google, PostPath back-end (for scalability and cost reduction) and Zimbra webmail interface.

   They would mop the floor with the current batch of hosted exchange offerings.

10. Victor Pinenkov
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 7:48 am

    Max, Matt, Grant,

    We are aware of an infrequent issue that is occurring during free sign-up that is causing the account to lock. We are working on it right now and should have a solution within a few hours.

    Thankks for your patience!

    Victor Pinenkov
    VP Engineering
    BlueTie

11. MichalT
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 8:13 am

    I had a problem with logging in and after a few tries and re-registration I found out that in the “login” input box you need to specify your login _and_ “enterprise name” like this: mylogin.myenterprise.

    “A polished product”? You call this amateurish attempt to ajaxify some old webmail “polished”? You name them Google’s competitor? You must be kidding me. The reviewer must have been drugged, blackmailed, bribed or all of the above.

    It doesn’t work properly (sometimes at all) in Firefox. It requires you to use a password with at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter and a number. The amount of personal data they require to even sign up for the free version is staggering. The registration form runs on javascript to the point of me not being able to tab trough fields, nor submit with Enter. The folder tree has a [+] sign (suggesting existence of child nodes) but clicking on it doesn’t do anything. New e-mail form opens in a pop-up, and if you want to upload a file or anything like that, it will open another pop-up, and another, and then one. Some of those get blocked by Firefox. I won’t continue, not to spoil the surprise.

    And on top of that they want to charge people for using this crappy thing. I’m lost for words.

12. Martin Edic
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 8:17 am

    A quick note- they will not be any advertising in the free accounts. We generate revenue by adding features driven by partners- for example, if you’re scheduling travel in your calendar, you’ll get a prompt that asks if you’d like to book travel (via Orbitz) and you’ll be able to see flights overlaid in your schedule, choose those you want and complete the booking within the application. Your itinerary appears in your calendar and you can store your credit info within the app for single click ordering. If you don’t want the service you simply ignore the prompt. Relevance and intent drive the prompts for services- no text or banner ads whatsoever.

13. Dante
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 8:18 am

    I also had the registration problem.

    This product is not well crafted. Seems like a bag of untested features to get press coverage.

    I would better stick to simpler services that do one only thing but correctly.

14. Craig Cockburn
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 8:25 am

    BlueTie currently open to people from the US only. Maybe some one should remind them what the first two w’s in WWW stand for?

    Until then, their address should be http://w.bluetie.com since they only have the “web” part and not the other two. Anything else would be misleading.

15. Grant Johnson
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 8:34 am

    Thanks for the reply, Victor.

    Another issue -
    When using the retrieve password function, the captcha show as this:
    http://img337.imageshack.us/im.....tiehx0.gif

    Grant

16. carl rahn griffith
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 8:38 am

    4.6hrs a day as an average!? on just email? who on earth was the sample audience?

    anyway, just how relevant is email nowadays? awash with spam, viruses and an irrelevance in modern communications terms - sequential, chronological, reactive, insecure, unreliable … just for starters.

    if everyone used the same ‘perfect’ system it might just get back to the 1990s when it was relevant/a revelation - but, with so many diverse email providers/etc, there is little hope that email will ever become as relevant as it once seemed it might be.

17. David Koretz
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 8:42 am

    Craig,

    We are expanding the service internationally very soon. We wanted to roll-out in a methodical way.

    We have already begun working on international versions.

    Best regards,

    David Koretz
    President & CEO

18. David Koretz
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 8:45 am

    All,

    We are working really hard at resolving the sign-up issues. The product itself has been around nearly eight years, and has hundreds of thousands of customers. The only new part of the application is the online sign-up for free, and we are working through those issues right now.

    We have been experiencing tremendous demand, so keeping up has been a challenge, but we expect to have them all resolved today.

    Thanks for your patience and feedback!

    David Koretz
    President & CEO
    BlueTie

19. Alex Bard
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 8:46 am

    Mike,

    A quick note about your breathe of services comment. At goowy (www.goowy.com) we offer email, contacts, calendaring, integrated IM, file storage, and widgets (minis) + games….

    Thanks

    Alex

20. lemon obrien
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 10:26 am

    i think you guys who complain about google’s email; yet refuse to change cause you love google, are idiots.

21. Jianing
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 10:28 am

    “BlueTie says that people spend an average of 4.6 hours on email every day, and many people spend far more time than that.”
    Please define “on email”. I have my email client open all day, but the time I spend interacting with it is far less.

22. Patricia
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 10:44 am

    I know AJAX well, I like the user experience it creates.

    None of the hosted email solutions i’ve used have had the kind of features a downloadable program offers, like automatically recalling emails i frequently use, email blasts, etc. If there were a service that had more functionality and tools like this, i’d for sure use it. i don’t know if there are companies out there offering this already, i’m unfamiliar with the space beyond what i use myself. but a lot seem to emphasize on storage, maybe more features and tools can be a way for new players to differentiate and carve a niche.

23. Victor Pinenkov
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 10:52 am

    All,

    The login issue was a miscommunication on our side. Our username schema is username.enterprise.

    This allows all the users of a company to be in a single account.

    When you point your domain to BlueTie, you can use your email address instead of your username.

    We have made this more clear, and now pass the login details to the login page, so all you have to type is the password.

    Eliminating the capital letters and number requirements from password is coming soon

    Keep the feedback coming!

    Victor Pinenkov
    VP of Engineering
    BlueTie, Inc.

24. Dan Nice
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 11:24 am

    Hey Dave and the rest of the Blue Tie crew,
    I just wanted to say congrats on the press release. I am a UR student who is involved in a web start up, and I have a lot of respect for Blue Tie to be able to make it as a web company based in Rochester NY. Keep it up.

    Dan Nice

25. Tim
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 12:14 pm

    What I need is a nice AJAX-based (or other very functional) web-based email where I can upload my existing *.pst file, setup my POP3 & SMTP accounts, and go. Simple and straightforward - just a web-based version of your standard email client like Outlook.

    Do any of the services listed throughout the article do that yet?

26. JP
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 12:22 pm

    BlueTie has a ‘pro’ version ($4.99 p/month) that looks like it’s got Outlook synching. They describe it as an alternative to MS Exchange.

27. David Mackey
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 12:56 pm

    I have been wondering lately about businesses and the advantages versus disadvantages of using externally hosted email services and whether there are any that would be appropriate for businesses. I think there would be several baseline requirements:
    1. Security/Encryption - The service must be secure.
    2. Archiving - The service must maintain all emails in archives, even if deleted by the sender.
    3. Administration - The service must offer significant back-end functionality to the Network Engineers/Administrators, e.g. for email recovery, legal issues, etc.
    4. Availability - The service must have at least a 99.9% uptime.

28. JOJOFACE
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 1:18 pm

    This is pretty impressive. But… The calendar is really sloppy. It’s slow, and the quick create isn’t quite up to par. “Concert Nov 14 7p” should create an event titled ‘Concert’ on November 14th starting at 7pm. I should also be able to just click a day and create an event (a la Kiko).

29. Jim
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 1:24 pm

    JOJOFACE,

    If you double click on the day you can create an event or right click to create the event.

30. Jake Stride
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 1:28 pm

    Zimbra is available as a hosted service. We at Senokian (http://www.senokian.com) offer the professional version as a Zimbra reseller on our servers.

31. David Kobia
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 2:01 pm

    The interface is very slick - love it. There isn’t much though, that separates it from the other players. Google Apps for your domain (http://www.google.com/a) doesn’t look nearly as slick, but does what it does pretty darn well. I think people will find love any app that helps them organize email… especially when searching, because it can become a real pain. At the end of the day, that is the key.

32. Giovani
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 2:29 pm

    This email service looks very nice and competitive, but for business? well if people were wondering before Gmail was launch about the privacy for user data imagine this company, they are not as big as google, they might work for some time but it feels like another Web 2.0 startup failure in progress.

33. Jim
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 2:40 pm

    They are a little different than the rest of the web 2.0 bunch. Check out their about us section.

    http://www.bluetie.com/smb_con.....boutUs.php

34. Jim Simpson
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 4:11 pm

    Giovanni,

    I’d like to respond to some of your concerns. We’ve actually been in business for over 8 years and have hundreds of thousands of users. We also have strong relationships with ISPs globally and take security/privacy very seriously. Please be assured we are not a startup destined for failure, nor are we casual in our approach to privacy.

    Unlike Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or Hotmail, BlueTie has been designed from the ground up specifically for the small business and SOHO markets. In fact, BlueTie Pro has been architected as a direct, highly cost-effective replacement to Microsoft(tm) Exchange. Our email client, as with all BlueTie services, does not deliver contextual ad content, nor does it deliver any other form of ad content.

    Our revenue model is based on what we call Featuretisements(tm), a patent-pending method for delivering value-added services to users. Featuretisements are features (not ads) embedded into the BlueTie application that enable users to perform relevant transactions from within the application using BlueTie partners’ services. Picture, for example, booking travel with Orbitz directly within your calendar without ever having to leave the application or visit numerous disparate websites.

    You can read more about our revenue model and our general corporate overview here:

    http://www.bluetie.com/smb_con.....erview.php

    I hope this provides a bit more clarity into our offering Your feedback is much appreciated.

    Regards,
    Jim Simpson

    BlueTie, Inc.

35. Bill Hutchison
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 5:38 pm

    Any idea about when this will be available for people outside of the US?

36. Mike
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 7:10 pm

    I second Tim’s request above (#25). Why is something that seems so simple so hard to find? I checked out Blue Tie today but there is no import function - I have a 1 gig .pst file i’d like to import. Also, for the pro account, it took some digging to discover in the support area that EMAIL synchronization is not available yet. I almost signed up for PRO just for that feature. glad i didn’t….

37. Search Engines WEB
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 7:17 pm

    Thank you for this suggestion - set up was a breeze - very easy to use interface and quite fast to load

    What sets this email apart from all the others is the ability to send attachments from ONLINE as well as from a local computer

    also being enterprise - it is great for Small Businesses

    Hopefully they will allow Pop3 importing and domain names.

    Good Find

38. ldg
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 11:24 pm

    Techcrunch - I know it’s harvest time but what are you guys smokin’? So what if someone is coming close to putting Outlook online in a web app. That’s not innovative or interesting. This Blue Tie thing has so many features that only people that love Microsoft Project will use it.

    The future of web apps is light apps and simple ways to bring data together - not monolithic goliaths like this dung heap.

    peace out.

39. Jevgenijs Cernihovics
    

    October 29th, 2006 at 11:34 pm

    to Viktor Pinenkov
    Viktor, can somebody from overseas just get a 20 bucks PBX hosted phone number in the US and register as Blue Tie customer?

40. brett
    

    October 30th, 2006 at 1:23 am

    I appreciate all of the information Michael publishes here, but I’m starting to see a growing conflict of interest. Here he says “I am on the board of directors of Foldera.” Just last week he said he “[remains] on the board of directors of edgeio and [is] a stockholder.” The disclosures section on the site also mentions three other companies he’s somehow connected with (Daylife, Spotback, Dogster). It seems like he’s joining a new one every two months or so. What company’s next on your list?

    So it makes me wonder, Michael: Are you here to be a journalist or just to cultivate hype? I think it’s great that you’re getting involved with these companies, but please realize the cost is your own credibility.

41. Les Faber
    

    October 30th, 2006 at 5:05 am

    I also had problems with the signup (more due to me not reading than anything). Also, for those that are interested, I am in Canada and was able to signup NP. But why are there any restrictions? I am always wary of so called “www” players who have a signup screen that has “Zip Code” instead of some variation of “Zip - Postal Code”.

    Looks promising and the free storage is a bonus.

    I agree with other posters. The best end-result will be a product where one can search on Tags (Labels) etc and find e-mails easily. For now I’ll stick to G-Mail. It ain’t pretty. But it works flawlessly.

42. Rochester Resident
    

    October 30th, 2006 at 7:18 am

    As being a resident of rochester(blueTie’s home), I have used and dealt with BlueTie from a business and as a System Administrator’s standpoint. BlueTie is a company who aims high and gives a user friendly service, however their backend is absolutely horrible. They have a single layer IT infrastructure which has issues almost guartanteed daily and they have incredibly poor customer service. When I mention that they are down daily, it is almost guaranteed that if you are relying on e-mail as part of your business, do not count on BlueTie. They will leave you hours without email and will then do hours of backups and re-blast email to people hours and even days after the outage occurred. They feature no redundancy which leaves them incredibly vulnerable to attacks and outages. BlueTie is a good company for cheap email services for low necessity email. If you are in an enterprise environment, look elsewhere.

43. RJ
    

    October 30th, 2006 at 7:31 am

    When does Foldera release?? Anyone tried and tested the beta?? What’s with this viel of apparent ’secrecy’ about Foldera?

44. rochester runner
    

    October 30th, 2006 at 9:07 am

    I have to echo the words of “Rochester Resident”. I have used Bluetie in the past and it as nothing but aches and pains from the beginning. There is no redundancy built into their architecture. I have personally lived through 36+ hours of my email being down when I was using Bluetie. This is completely unacceptable from a paid service. I did not get a very high comfort level that the appropriate measures were being taken to prevent a repeat situation. Personally, I do not trust the back end of their system as it does not look at overall data replication or system redundancy. Personally, I want my mission critical email to be redundant, secure and available! Personally this seems like a last ditch effort from Mr. Koretz and company to boost Bluetie into the Black.

45. Ian Hendry
    

    October 30th, 2006 at 9:41 am

    UK customers can get BlueTie also, as we opened an office in Windsor this summer. We market currently only the fee-based systems, that is Business Class Email and Business Class Collaboration; we are expecting to add the free version further down the line (see David Koretz’s e-mail above about a structured roll-out).

    You can see our UK website at http://www.bluetiebiz.co.uk, and I would personally welcome a call from any UK companies interested in looking at BlueTie on 0800 177 7047.

    We also expect to be announcing details of Service Provider customers providing BlueTie-based e-mail in the UK soon.

    Best regards

    Ian Hendry
    BlueTie UK

46. Victor Pinenkov
    

    October 30th, 2006 at 12:01 pm

    #42 & #44

    I apologize if you have had issues in the past. We had some issues as we grew quickly, but have made multi-million dollar improvements to our architecture. We now post our hardware architecture publicly, but here is the summary:

    -We use redundant Cisco routing, PIX firewalls, and switching
    -We now have multiple datacenters (350 miles apart)
    -We use F5 load balancing for N+N reliability on all servers
    -We implemented a new email architecture this year
    -We have implemented a new backup and disaster recovery solution.

    As a result of this, we have had greater than 99.9% reliability in 2006.

    We are also working on publishing a quarterly external security and reliability audit from a third party. This will give everyone complete visibility into our architecture.

    Victor Pinenkov
    VP of Engineering
    BlueTie, Inc.

47. knight17
    

    October 30th, 2006 at 12:44 pm

    I think Rediff has everything
    http://www.rediff.com
    check the mail section

48. Douglas Swehla
    

    October 30th, 2006 at 5:23 pm

    knight17 (#47):

    How? All I see is a sign-up link, no description.

49. Porcupine
    

    October 30th, 2006 at 5:31 pm

    Post 48, you did well to spot that. Has anyone come up with any viable options to BlueTie for SMBs?

50. eyea am
    

    October 31st, 2006 at 12:43 am

    Eye Am.

    Sofa king, wee todd ed..

51. passingthrough
    

    October 31st, 2006 at 7:18 am

    Okay, I’m gonna have to call bullsh-t on this one. I’m so sick of these Web 2.0 announcements that are all hype and no substance. Smelling fish, I spent 10 minutes fishing around… something apparently no journalist did. There’s a tool out there called Google. Use it.

    They claim “several patents pending” on their new revenue model. Boy, that always sets off alarm bells in my head. It just so happens that I too have several patents pending. They’re on my time transmogrifier. I’m sure I’m going to get approved any day now. “Patent pending” in the Web 2.0 world is code for “we’re desperately trying to convince an outdated and overburdened intellectual property system that there really is something new under the sun.”

    And unless I’ve missed something, here’s what they’ve achieved: Hold on. Wait for it. Here it comes… They’ve integrated one or two 3rd party services into their solution. Gasp! There’s a real software revolution! Oh, wait, they’ve also adopted a pay-per-action revenue model. Yup, Google has only indexed 33,600 prior references to that. I’m sure they’ll have good luck patenting their implementation of it.

    I also noticed some — shall we say — confusion regarding their user counts. Here they are back in 2001, citing 250,000 users and expecting 1 million users by the end of that year.
    http://www.privateequityweek.c.....WTUMC.html

    Here they are in 2006, five years later, citing “more than 100,000 mailboxes.” That’s a LOT less than the quarter million users they claimed in 2001. Ouch. That’s a lot of lost customers.
    http://www.internetweek.cmp.com/news/193401267

    But wait, here they are just two days later, this time with “several hundred thousand users.” I’m not a mathematician, but that sounds to me like their userbase went from more than 100K to more than 200K in just two days, after losing customers over the last five years. Huh.
    http://www.democratandchronicl.....50334/1001

    And finally, here they are the same day, forecasting more than one million users by the end of the year. So let’s see… eight years to get the first coupla hundred thousand users, and 2 months to get 800,000 more. Sure, seems reasonable.
    http://www.pcworld.com/article.....ticle.html

    Face it. They’re an eight year old software company that has never made significant inroads in their industry. They’ve got a good product but suffer from reliability issues (judging by the comments here). They’ve got an indeterminate number of users, but it’s certainly far, far fewer than companies who’ve been in the space much less time (Zimbra comes to mind). They’re desperate to stop burning up VC capital and finally turn a profit. They apparently couldn’t sell their service during the past eight years, so now they’re going to try giving it away. So they cooked up some PR with some highly suspect statements and numbers in it, and TechCrunch picked it up and gave it legs.

    Welcome to Journalism 2.0, where the motto is “If they say it’s cool, it must be cool.”

52. Harvey Wallbanger
    

    October 31st, 2006 at 2:20 pm

    BlueTie just stepped into a time warp machine and got out in year 1999 — I fell out of my chair when I heard the business model was for someone to buy flowers on a fecal-tisement partner and make money. anyone else fall-out too?

53. David Koretz
    

    October 31st, 2006 at 3:29 pm

    The press gave a snapshot of the business model and company. Let me clarify a few things:

    -We have had revenue growth for each of the last three years. We expect this to accelerate based on current numbers.

    -We have never had a substantial decline in our user base (greater than a thousand users).

    -In addition to our direct sales (under the BlueTie brand) we also private-label our solution to several dozen ISP’s. They all pay us per mailbox, per month.

    -We also still have a paid version of our product, and we still have more than a dozen direct salespeople that sell that product. That division has also grown in revenue year over year.

    -To say that the entire paid model is “selling flowers” is inaccurate. There are more than 20 revenue generating opportunities, and we have announced three already which are all noted, large small business advertisers. We can actually generate more revenue on a free user than a paid user over time.

    -We don’t publish exact user counts, but our stated number to the press (in the releases, and in the presentation we shared with them was hundreds of thousands of customers. We were never more specific with anyone, and don’t intend to until we are at “millions of customers,” at which point we will update everyone.

    -Up until this year we have never published user numbers at all. Any numbers the media generates were based on their own estimates, or on our projections (which is where I take complete responsibility as they were admittedly overly aggressive in 1999-2001).

    -With regard to patents, we have many issued dating back to 2000, in addition to new ones pending. The patents are on a range of things from a method of secure email, to a method of utilizing a temporary time zone for scheduling meetings. We are not patenting the CPA model

    Hopefully this clarifies everything. We will be adding more content to our website in the next few weeks to detail our technology, our architecture, our business model, our partners, and our user growth.

    We really appreciate all the feedback, criticism, and comments. We have already made several enhancements to the sign-up process based on it.

    David Koretz
    President & CEO
    BlueTie, Inc.

54. Gerard Sorme
    

    October 31st, 2006 at 8:30 pm

    I registered two days ago and it still says “Invalid username or password. Please try again.”

    Polished?

55. Rando
    

    November 1st, 2006 at 4:02 am

    The format for logging in is ‘johndoe.acmeinc’, where ‘johndoe’ is your username and acmeinc is your enterprise.

    If you only enter ‘johndoe’ it won’t accept it because there could be a johndoe in multiple enterprises.

    Try the format ‘username.enterprise’ along with your password and you should be fine.

56. Joe
    

    February 7th, 2007 at 3:02 pm

    I have tried BlueTie Free, and my company was unimpressed by it’s slow and challenging sharing properties. 3 tech savvy students had a tough time setting it up and sharing anything related to calendaring.

    Logging into the site is slow, and the site automatically nullifies your password after about 3 months - you find out about this nice feature the hard way. While security is a plus, so is consistency and perhaps WARNING users ahead of time, like right from the start???

    After my experience with them, I am less than satisfied. Don’t expect to have any email forwarding AT ALL with a FREE account, and buyer beware that support for 20 emails at jane@yourcompany.com does not mean FREE (cost of domain and cost of lost productivity in communications by losing any pre-setup forwarding mechanisms)!

    They are underhanded in this regard, and I don’t care to have the word bluetie.com attached to my corporation’s emails if I’m to use a free service.

    They are an annoyance, and mislead startup businesses.

    - Joe Eckstein
    CEO Empowerus Tools Corporation

57. Duncan
    

    February 13th, 2007 at 9:13 am

    maybe you could integrate the best hot deals website Spoofee.com