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Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

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Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#371

Post by smt88 »

ultramancool wrote: post #262
jccc wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ultramancool wants a desktop email client. Many people strongly prefer to do email on the desktop outside of a Web browser. (Fellow FastMail user here. They're really great.) EDIT: Well, I see her/his comment about Webmail albeit as a second choice. It seems the preference is for a desktop client, but I shouldn't assume.

I'm basically okay with Webmail if it's self hosted and supports notifications on many accounts. If I recall correctly, fastmail cannot be self hosted and I really don't feel like trusting some random service with my personal and business email. Or paying them money for something I currently get for free for that matter.

Have you looked at Mailpile[1]? I haven't used it, but their idea was basically "self-hosted Gmail".

https://www.mailpile.is

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#372

Post by tjohns »

ultramancool wrote: post #358
johnsonjo wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw this on hacker news a while ago but it seems like a great alternative to thunderbird. I've used it and I really like the look and feel of it compared to thunderbird. I'm pretty sure I saw an option for IMAP too. It's called N1 and it's from Nylas. https://www.nylas.com/n1

Nylas N1 requires a custom server (Nylas Sync Engine) to do notifications. Why? Their FAQ is extremely vague about it. Apparently it suffers the same performance issues as plain IMAP for search. It seems this might be to support their Electron based UI, which seems... bloated to say the least.

The Electron UI is all local.

I believe the sync engine translates between IMAP and a custom JSON protocol they've created. I'm not sure what the performance difference is, but looking at the API docs, it looks a lot nicer to work with than IMAP: https://www.nylas.com/docs/

It also seems to more accurately represent modern semantics for working with email. For example, it allows using OAuth for authentication, and it has separate fields for folders and labels, depending on the backing email service. (And unlike IMAP, the labels field is actually useful.) You can also download a transaction log to make sync faster, which I don't think has an analog in IMAP.

Subjectively, I've found the performance to be rather snappy in most cases.

(You can also run a local client of the sync engine, if you don't want to trust their hosted copy: https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine)

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#373

Post by bad_user »

ultramancool wrote: post #368
bad_user wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be open source, but it's a thin client-side with your data being handled by the servers of a third party. No thanks, as trusting Google or FastMail with my email is a tough pill to swallow already, trusting an intermediary as well is way too much.

You can actually host the Nylas Sync Engine yourself so if you're seriously considering it, it's still an option.

Interesting. Will take a look.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#374

Post by grinich »

ultramancool wrote: post #358
johnsonjo wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw this on hacker news a while ago but it seems like a great alternative to thunderbird. I've used it and I really like the look and feel of it compared to thunderbird. I'm pretty sure I saw an option for IMAP too. It's called N1 and it's from Nylas. https://www.nylas.com/n1

Nylas N1 requires a custom server (Nylas Sync Engine) to do notifications. Why? Their FAQ is extremely vague about it. Apparently it suffers the same performance issues as plain IMAP for search. It seems this might be to support their Electron based UI, which seems... bloated to say the least.

Hi-- I work at Nylas. Happy to jump in here :)

The sync engine handles all the compatibility or dozens of IMAP and Exchange servers, and uses a variety of heuristics for real-time notifications. It also does the heavy-lifting for the huge amount of data in most people's mailbox. The N1 app can cache your entire archive in about 10% of the disk space required if you also download all unprocessed headers+attachments.

Right now our search implementation just sends a proxy request to the IMAP search, so you'll get the same performance as Gmail web, Mac Mail, etc. It's not ideal. We're working on our own faster search system, but it's tough to build a huge distributed search cluster that handles tens of terabytes. (And is growing quickly!) If anyone here wants to work on that, we're also hiring. ;)

N1 is built on Electron, which under the hood is Chromium+NodeJS so that comes with a bit of weight. But the app itself is pretty manageable. You can check out the source here: https://github.com/nylas/n1

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#375

Post by grinich »

vdaniuk wrote: post #110
Kunix wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 29, started coding at 14, I've built UIs based on mIRC Scripting, VB/Winforms, C++/Qt, C#/WPF, Java/Android layouts. Using IDEs such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, Qt Creator and Android Studio. I must say: Atom Editor is great. Using HTML/CSS/JS to build desktop/mobile apps really makes sense to me, especially given that: - You only have to support one rendering engine. - You have access to the latest Web Component…

The fact that you are being(edit: was) downvoted for constructive opinion shows unwarranted prejudice of HN hivemind towards web technologies. HN discussions on this topic are effectively useless, any constructive truth finding is drowned. edit: I'll take my downvotes with pleasure. The fact that I am able to use Atom or Nylas N1 or Nuclide on linux with 0 problems alone is enough to welcome proliferation of web tech…

Thanks for your support of N1. :) Feel free to ping me if you have feedback. I'm mg@nylas.com

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#376

Post by giancarlostoro »

shmerl wrote: post #219
ultramancool wrote: post #195

I think this is the 3rd time I've heard Thunderbird is/is going to be unmaintained and that I should avoid it, but I'm yet to see a good alternative. Claws was crashy and didn't DPI scale properly on Windows, OS X Mail had strange behavior with my IMAP server and I just wanted a consistent UI with my Windows and Linux system. My next option is webmail but there's no good IMAP webmail client that seems to be able to h…

KMail is rather good, though I find settings UI to be non intuitive and poorly organized. Hopefully KF5 based version will address some of that.

I feel the same way, I love KMail but it feels like a mess whenever I have to configure it.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#377

Post by grinich »

z1mm32m4n wrote: post #363

I've been meaning to look into Nylas N1 for a while now, maybe now's the right time. I didn't see anything that stood out like a sore thumb when compared with Thinderbird (except for maybe PGP), but it'd be really awesome if it had a snoozing feature like Inbox or Mailbox. [1]: https://www.nylas.com/n1

We're working on that (and more)! You can see our roadmap and vote-up features here: https://trello.com/b/hxsqB6vx/n1-open-source-roadmap

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#378

Post by grinich »

tjohns wrote: post #315
fl0wenol wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the web clients you've tried or N1 speak LDAP and support S/MIME with a local smart card reader?

N1 is still in the early stages of development. It's missing email aliases, for example. LDAP + S/MIME are definitely not implemented yet. That said, the platform seems to have potential. I don't see any reason why these couldn't be implemented as plugins.

Email aliases are coming next week. Some folks are working on a GPG & S/MIME plugin. Stuff is moving really fast. (I work at Nylas.)

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#379

Post by the_why_of_y »

feld wrote: post #252
ionised wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about Rust but the Wikipedia page says the original Rust compiler was written in OCaml, and that the new compiler is self-hosted and written in the Rust language itself.

"OCaml comprises two compilers. One generates bytecode which is then interpreted by a C program." Just look at its source, there's C everywhere.

The OCaml bytecode interpreter is implemented in C. The OCaml compiler generating said bytecode is implemented in OCaml, as is the other OCaml compiler that generates machine code.

Re: Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

#380

Post by [deleted] »

feld wrote: post #249
creshal wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Rust compiler was written in… OCaml. Nowadays it's self-hosting.

And OCaml is written in C. Also, there's an awful lot of llvm involved in compiler-rt on github. To think you can evade C on a Unix box is very wishful thinking. You can't escape C-generated bytecode in your stack. It's bound to be somewhere.

[deleted]
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