> This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee?
Because keeping track with the boatload of variety that email clients have and their updates is hard. You have MS Outlook in three different flavors (Windows, OS X, Android), Thunderbird on three major platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux), the various Android clients (Gmail, Samsung's custom thing they IIRC ditched for Googlemail somewhere over the last years, the custom clients by various mail providers like web.de and other), Apple Mail, iOS Mail on iPhones of various sizes and iPads of various sizes, the web clients every major provider has, I have no idea what Lotus Notes and Blackberry are offering these days... and then you have the hardcore nerds and privacy activists who have html mail turned off entirely and use commandline clients.
And literally every single client variation has a different subset of features they support or don't support, with the addition of spam filters and virus scanners randomly breaking things by injecting HTML somewhere in the message.
And then you also want your email to be forward-able without Outlook taking half a minute to think about each character.
Email is hard, cross-platform emailing is a nightmare and keeping up with all the stuff I just mentioned takes a massive amount of time to develop and to regression-test.
(In case it isn't obvious, I occasionally have to dabble in this area, and I hate it with a passion)
Because keeping track with the boatload of variety that email clients have and their updates is hard. You have MS Outlook in three different flavors (Windows, OS X, Android), Thunderbird on three major platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux), the various Android clients (Gmail, Samsung's custom thing they IIRC ditched for Googlemail somewhere over the last years, the custom clients by various mail providers like web.de and other), Apple Mail, iOS Mail on iPhones of various sizes and iPads of various sizes, the web clients every major provider has, I have no idea what Lotus Notes and Blackberry are offering these days... and then you have the hardcore nerds and privacy activists who have html mail turned off entirely and use commandline clients.
And literally every single client variation has a different subset of features they support or don't support, with the addition of spam filters and virus scanners randomly breaking things by injecting HTML somewhere in the message.
And then you also want your email to be forward-able without Outlook taking half a minute to think about each character.
Email is hard, cross-platform emailing is a nightmare and keeping up with all the stuff I just mentioned takes a massive amount of time to develop and to regression-test.
(In case it isn't obvious, I occasionally have to dabble in this area, and I hate it with a passion)