Xoopit Team Blog

How Xoopit Manages Your Data

Xoopit is an email based service founded to give you more control over your information.

We are committed to giving you an outstanding product that you can trust. We maintain physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect your information.

In the spirit of keeping an open and transparent dialogue with our users, here are the answers to the most common questions on how we manage your data that came up today.

UPDATE: 11/6/08: Xoopit has evolved its service since this post was initially created. For the most up to date answers on these questions please see our Privacy & Security FAQ.

Question #1: Why do you need my Gmail email address and password?
In order for us to index all the interesting stuff in your email, we talk to Gmail via secure IMAP. You can think of us like a big Outlook or iPhone talking to Gmail in the sky. We would love it if there was a way to get at mail content without requiring your Google credentials -- i.e. AuthSub for IMAP (see this post).  We will support these APIs as the webmail providers make them available to us.

Question #2: What do you do with my password?
We currently use industry best practices to encrypt and store this data. We also have a rigorous internal policy to ensure your data is not tampered with. Finally, all communications with Gmail are done securely (secure IMAP and SMTP for you techies). This is no different from what happens when you login into Gmail yourself from a web browser, an iPhone or Outlook. All uses of your password are secure.

Question #3: Do you store a copy of my email?
We currently index and store a copy of your email on our servers so that we can help you discover new things lost in your inbox as we add new indexing features, like support for Facebook messages.

Question #4: Will you delete my account if I ask?
Yes, we will in 24 to 48 hours. No ifs, ands or buts. That said, please send us feedback.

Lastly a tip: https support
You may browse our service over https for an enhanced secure browsing experience in the same way that users can use Gmail over https.

We are strong believers in transparency. If you have any questions, please comment here or send us mail at feedback@xoopit.com.

We are back up

Thanks for your patience!

Quick maintenance break

Thanks for the huge volume of interest! Try as we did to avoid this, we got a tremendous number of signups in the last hour and need to do a quick maintenance to keep things humming again. We'll be back up in a jiffy.

Xoopit Announces Private Beta!

We’re excitedly announcing the arrival of Xoopit’s private beta. The team has put in a ton of hard work to get us here. Now it is your turn to see what is in your inbox.

We built Xoopit because we live in email. So do our friends. So do our families. Rumor has it even all those bloggers who like to write about the death of email are massive emailers themselves. Email is the largest untapped social network. It has remained relatively unchanged, until now.

So what does Xoopit do? Xoopit makes email more social, more fun and more useful. After you signup, Xoopit finds the pictures, videos and files buried in webmail’s gigabytes of free storage. You can then share, comment on and post these finds to your friends, social networks and blogs.

We find the stuff you really care about. Email-yes, email-does that for us. Email is a great filter – if someone emails you they really want you to see it. The folks on my Xoopit quick lists are my closest family and friends. Quite the contrast from the light relations I have on social networks.

We also make email insanely more productive. Xoopit turns your email into the file system you have always wanted. Quick example – whenever I talk to a recruiter we are working with, I just put his name into Xoopit search and I can instantly see all the resumes he has sent me. No wading through emails.

Lastly, we put the fun back in email. You can send comments and share photos and videos straight from Xoopit. And we keep those conversations where you spend your day – in email!

We’re looking forward to getting your feedback! We have initial support for Google's Gmail and Google Apps users. Whether you are using Xoopit directly within Gmail from our Firefox plugin, looking at new photos showing up in your mail via our iGoogle plugin or browsing your past email history on www.xoopit.com, we want to hear from you. First come first serve on signup with this invite code. If you miss the window, enter your email address and we'll get to you soon. And if you use Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL, enter your email address we'll let you know when we support your mail provider.

And finally, before I get back to watching server logs, we are announcing our funding today as well. Huge thanks to Charles Moldow at Foundation Capital and Theresia Gouw Ranzetta at Accel Partners for helping us turn our dreams into reality. They are rounding out our board along with Paul Gauthier, founding CTO of Inktomi and now at Ludic Labs. And we continue to have the incredible support of our amazing angel investors. Thanks again to all of them for getting us here!

Building the Inbox 2.0: Infrastructure Services

Ciao!

After spending a few months kicking it hard in our crib (SF Mission District), we're back and will soon be rolling out our early Inbox 2.0 private beta program.  If you live in Gmail and want to check out our sweet new Gmail plugin, request an invite here.

In early October, Rob (#9) jumped on the team, rounding out the core set of skills we needed to properly tackle the problem of building the Inbox 2.0.  Soon after, we asked about 200 of our friends and family to trial an alpha of our new inbox interface on our Xoopit.com web site.  Fueled by Ritual Roasters Coffee, Priya's organic raw food, keyboard synthesizers, and a whole lot of amazing feedback from our fans, we've built Xoopit into three new form factors, including our soon-to-be released Gmail plugin.

During our trials, we gained a few key insights which have influenced our product thinking:

1. People really do create and experience their lives using email as their tool-of-choice.  Email also serves as a filter to the web for many.

2. The inbox has become a dark, dreary place of overwork and maintenance, HOWEVER, the inbox does have a soul.  Really.  In fact, your feedback mails have been chock full of examples guiding us on how to bring back the funk to email.  Please keep the feedback coming!!!!!!!

3. Building the Inbox 2.0 requires a tremendous amount of compute power to process all the messages, files, images, people, and links sardined inside mail.  Xoopit has invented a novel email and web indexing architecture similar to a web search engine to support our compute, index, data mining, and fetching needs.  We're calling our platform a "personal search engine" and it goes further than traditional desktop search engines, webmail search, or your everyday RSS aggregation tool.

Over the coming weeks we will be refining two critical sub-systems to help us scale to demands of a real Inbox 2.0 application:

1. Fast front end technologies.
2. Rapid processing of the inbox and mail archives.

As you may know, the inbox is a whole world unto itself. We don't expect to get the user experience right the first time, so we have set ourselves up to measure activity and rapidly iterate on the Inbox 2.0 interface.

We are committed to making it FUN and FAST to explore your life as it unfolds inside the inbox.

ACHTUNG! If you are a hard core internet systems engineer with experience in email, indexing, data mining, file systems OR a web application developer passionate about designing and building rich media applications, we would love to meet you. (email: team@xoopit.com).  Building the Inbox 2.0 touches every aspect of internet life and we are looking for a few stellar team mates to take on weaving Xoopit into the fabric of the Internet.