Mailspring: A fork of Nylas Mail by one of the original authors

The client looks great and I'd like to use it but I frankly don't know what I'm getting. With Thunderbird other solutions you know what it's doing and how. Some of the features of this are a little strange for someone like me.

I asked them about it and they never replied. I wish it was just a native (or not) IMAP client and I definitely want out of those Link and Open Tracking features.

(Edit):

There's a GitHub issue related to it - https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring/issues/33

The dev is very clear about it

--- but for now Mailspring needs to target paying customers with great pro features so I can continue working on it full-time. The Mailspring ID is a core component of these Pro features and a lot of exciting stuff on the roadmap, like team templates, read receipt analytics and shared folders. Unfortunately, it doesn't make sense to remove the Mailspring ID and make the mail client better for you, because it pulls us further away from doing a great job on the pro features for paying users that will ultimately make this a long-lasting open source project.

Hope that helps! I'm going to flag this as a wontfix for now, but I welcome everyone's thoughts and feedback here. ---

So no, not an email client I would like to use.

For the record, my needs in a mail client are: GUI, very clean UI, pretty themes, good search, works with gmail, ideally supports snoozing emails (a key feature if you like to pursue Inbox Zero), if at all possible should be a desktop app for OS X and Windows, and I wouldn't be adverse to open notifications and such. Also, I'm explicitly fine with their being an extra server in the mix; this is more-or-less required for snoozing emails to work properly[1], and I'm not really concerned about privacy.

If that describes you, you might like Mailspring too. If not (and I suspect that'll be the case for the median HN visitor), then probably not. :)

Edit: Totally forgot, I also have a strong need for supporting multiple email accounts. A merged inbox view that will automatically use the correct email address/signature for replying to an email based on where the original email was sent is critical.

[1]: At least, every implementation of email snoozing I've seen had relied on a third party server. And once I got addicted to it with Dropbox's much-mourned Mailbox app, I've found it very hard to use a mail client without it.

Out of interest, why would this be so? On the face of it a single client can keep its own snoozing metadata and use a helper process to do the work. I suppose if you want to ensure snoozing works across clients, you'd need a slightly clumsy workaround for the metadata (eg. encoded somewhere in the snoozed mails in a special IMAP folder). But it looks doable from the perspective of a shallow moment's thought. Admittedly, pretty much everything generally does.