A few questions...

[Martin Streicher]

1. Are there instructions for running the sync engine on EC2 or another production-ready hosting platform?
2. How often does the sync engine check each user's mailbox for new mail? For many mailboxes per user, how often?
3. What do I have to do to work with Exchange?
4. I assume there is also an API that allows a user to add email accounts via my application? I see the command-line works for development but would not work for a web app, say. 
5. Do you have performance benchmarks?
6. How does one whitelist to protect outgoing email?

[Michael Grinich]

Hi Martin,

> Are there instructions for running the sync engine on EC2 or another production-ready hosting platform?

Not directly, but it should be the same process if you're using 12.04 on EC2.

 
> How often does the sync engine check each user's mailbox for new mail? For many mailboxes per user, how often?

The sync engine currently both polls and uses IMAP IDLE to check for new messages. The frequency is not dependent on the number of mailboxes.

 
> What do I have to do to work with Exchange?

Sign up for the pre-release Inbox Developer Program by sending more details to sup...@inboxapp.com.

> I assume there is also an API that allows a user to add email accounts via my application? I see the command-line works for development but would not work for a web app, say

The hosted Inbox product will have these endpoints, including full API authentication. The open source sync engine does not, so you are free to enable them however you want. We chose to add command-line functions so that developers wouldn't need to implement the entire OAuth flow when getting started.

> Do you have performance benchmarks?

These depend on a lot of things, including your network bandwidth, machine CPU, number of active syncing accounts, number of messages, etc. We haven't released stats for a specific installation, but we encourage you to let us know how it performs for your use case.

> How does one whitelist to protect outgoing email?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Email sent through Inbox is sent via the account that has been authenticated (ie: Gmail, Yahoo, etc.). The specific ESP is whitelisted, so you don't need to add SPF or DKIM anywhere within Inbox. Make sense?

Thanks for reaching out!

--Michael

[Martin Streicher]

Thanks for the answers. A few more questions...

A/ How many mailboxes can one server support? What characteristics of the server influence capacity? 

B/ Is there an advantage to installing inbox on a machine directly rather than use vagrant? 

C/ Can this be clustered? Sharded? 

D/ What is the timeline for the Exchange support? 

E/ If my user accounts already have access tokens for Gmail, can those be associated with one of the Inbox mailboxes to gain access without authenticating again?

F/ Do you have a roadmap for exiting beta? 

[Christine Spang]

Hi Martin,

a) Inbox is largely CPU-bound right now. We don't have hard numbers on the capacity of a single server yet, but we're currently working on a lot of performance optimizations.

b) If you're deploying Inbox in production, you should definitely forego vagrant.

c) The support isn't in there yet, but it's intended that Inbox be horizontally sharded.

d) We don't have a public timeline on the Exchange beta. If you've requested access, we'll let you know when we're ready. :)

e) We don't have a way to do this, no. Inbox stores some additional information from the auth request, which would make it difficult to just associate an already-issued token. What's the use case for doing this?

f) What are your criteria for "exiting beta"? It's a bit of an ambiguous term.

--Christine

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[Martin Streicher]

Christine:

My team is going to embark on a set of email browse and search features for our app starting on Aug 11. The front-end is React; we would like the back-end to be Inbox.

To prepare, I’d like to deploy in the next week to an EC2 machine and forego vagrant. Is there a way to do this? This machine would let me and another developer get a system up and running to play with. 

Re: Oauth. Our users already connect their Google accounts to synch contacts, calendars, tasks, and events. We’d like to be able use those permissions again rather than prompt for authentication and grants a second time. The use case is approve Google Mail, Cal, Contacts all at once and then use all the features. 

Exiting beta would likely mean code ready to deploy right to a machine not in Vagrant, support for Exchange, and features and documentation on scaling, tuning, and sharding. 

[Martin Streicher]

Christine: Do you have a reply for me? 

Martin Streicher
CTO/Co-Founder
Realvolve LLC

Raleigh, NC

email: martin.s...@realvolve.com
skype: martin.s.streicher

voice and fax: 919.751.4086

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[Michael Grinich]

Hi Martin,

You can easily install Inbox on EC2 by starting with a creating an Ubuntu 12.04 and running the `setup.sh` script found in the main git repo. Vagrant is just a utility that is used to configure a VM, and nothing else.

You could conceivably migrate your users by creating account objects with the correct Google OAuth credentials, though this can be tricky to do and is potentially error-prone. For example, Inbox also fetches the user's "name" parameter from the OAuth flow, so if you didn't save that originally you'll need to request it again.

Though it's still in "beta," we've soft-launched the Inbox Developer Program, which is our hosted solution that you can use for development and testing. It's priced at $99 annually and lets you sync up to 100 accounts, including Microsoft Exchange. If you need more than 100 accounts, please email sup...@inboxapp.com and we can discuss options for moving you to a production tier. 

Hopefully that answers your questions. Let us know how it goes! 

Thanks,

Michael

[Martin Streicher]

We were interested in installing natively on an OS and not in a vagrant running on an OS. I’ll have to look and our Oauth code. We may just keep the Google ID, access token and refresh token. 

We’d love to try the developer program to test with Exchange. How we do sign up? 

[Michael Grinich]

You can sign up here: https://www.inboxapp.com/register