My name is Waseem, I built www.inbox2.com a couple of years ago. I have not released any updates to that client since 1.5 years. I still have a new download every 5 minutes and people are still loving it (which astonishes me).
I ended up switching all my stuff to Macs and iPads so I cant use my neat Windows client myself, let alone work on it.
I ended up open sourcing the client (see the announcement and discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3083935), hoping someone else would pick up development but unfortunately no-one did (even with its 54 forks on GitHub).
I am currently using Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/) but we all know what happened to that and new updates to the client might be out of the question.
So I was just thinking about whether to do a Mac version of the Inbox2 client (there is a host of ideas that I have never implemented). If I did a kickstarter (or used any of the other funding platforms out there), would you help fund this thing?
I think it would be about a 100K project which is my time + hiring a designer + some extra development capacity for about 12-16 months (building these things takes really really long).
I dont want to make any money off this as I have been down that road before and its hard to turn this into a sustainable business and also most importantly it kills innovation. I want to build a client that actually helps you to get shit done and is not just another better looking mail.app clone and makes some cash. This thing will be open-source from the start.
I havent yet decided wether I will do it or not, that kind of depends on the reactions I get from my target audience, which is you HN ;-)
So what do you think?