Why we wrote every part of Email.eu ourselves
The mail server, the file storage and every app. It took longer, and it's the reason everything fits together.
Most business suites are several products under one name. Mail comes from one place, files from another, video from a third. They share a login, sometimes a logo, and not much else.
You notice it in small ways. A search that only looks in one corner. A meeting link you paste in by hand. A colleague who answers a customer you were already helping.
We wanted the opposite. So we wrote all of it ourselves: the mail server, the file storage, and every app you use in a day. Email, shared inboxes, calendar, Meet, chat, Drive, Docs and Sheets, the wiki, and even Sending, for the emails your website sends. One team, one design, and one set of data underneath it all.
What one set of data gets you
Because every app is ours and works from the same data, things can simply move from one app to the next. A few you'll meet in your first week:
- Invite people to a meeting and the video room is already there. Guests join with a link and need no account.
- A client picks a time on your booking page, and it's in your week and on your Today.
- Press ⌘K and one search finds people, every word of your mail, files, wiki pages and chat.
- Reply to a mail in a shared inbox and it's yours. Your colleagues see that you're on it.
None of this is a clever connection between two companies' products. It's one app, talking to itself.
One design, everywhere
When the same people make every screen, the screens look and behave alike. The calendar feels like the inbox, and chat feels like the wiki. Light and dark are both designed, and neither is an afterthought.
It also leaves room for small things that make a day nicer. On a train or in a café, press ⌘ and the full stop: names and text blur until you point at them.
None of this is a clever connection between two products. It's one app, talking to itself.
Your data doesn't have to travel
There's a second reason, and it matters more every year. When you glue other companies' products together, your data goes wherever those products run.
Because we wrote the mail server and the file storage ourselves, your mail never passes through someone else's systems. It's stored in Paris on OVHcloud, a French company, with backups in Gravelines. No American company handles your mail, files or messages. We wrote more about that in where your data lives.
What it costs us, and what it saves you
Honestly: time. Writing your own mail server is slower than renting one. We're a small team in Groningen with no outside investors, so the only deadline we answer to is our own, and we could afford to take the slow road.
For you it means one subscription instead of five. If you pay for Slack, Zoom, Calendly or Notion today, those are the jobs that chat, Meet, the booking page and the wiki do inside Email.eu. The Team plan includes all of them, at €19 per person a month without VAT. Sending, for your website's emails, is paid by use.
If you'd like to see how it fits together, start a workspace. You're inside in about a minute.
Written by the Email.eu team in Groningen.More from the blog