Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 91 posts

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

#21

Post by lloydde »

Lazare wrote: post #6

I used and loved Nylas Mail (aka N1), so I'm going to be taking a close look at this. 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 expli…

> At least, every implementation of email snoozing I've seen had relied on a third party server.

At least on Mac there are some client side only ones:

- https://sparkmailapp.com/

- https://canarymail.canny.io/

- MailTags for Mail.app has a “tickle” feature that meets all the requirements

That is from a few minutes searching.

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

#23

Post by bengotow »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #20

There are no Linux download links. The download page just shows image placeholders. But if you send an invalid download request like ".../download?platform=foo" then you get back a handy JSON error string indicating that the Linux downloads are: https://updates.getmailspring.com/download?platform=linuxDeb and https://updates.getmailspring.com/download?platform=linuxRpm Maybe Ben or someone will see this and comment w…

Hey folks! bengotow here—the linux version is /almost/ ready, though the debian and rpm packages above should work. I'm working with some folks at Canonical to get the app packaged as a Snap (Snapcraft.io) so that Linux users will finally get autoupdates and I can ship a single format to everyone. Back when I worked on Nylas Mail, we had a ton of trouble with Linux because users would download a .deb or .rpm and then never update it, so I was hoping to stop distributing those entirely.

Feel free to grab the version from the link above, just come back and switch to the auto-updating snap when it's ready!

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

#24

Post by chrismorgan »

Lazare wrote: post #6

I used and loved Nylas Mail (aka N1), so I'm going to be taking a close look at this. 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 expli…

At FastMail we’re hoping to implement snooze next year, as a first-party solution that doesn’t need the support of a client or third-party server.

There is no established convention or standard for representing snooze over IMAP. There’s not yet any consensus on how to represent it in JMAP, the emerging standard that we’re backing (and which our web UI will be using fairly soon), either. It’ll be a FastMail-specific JMAP extension at first, but it could well be standardised (though not in the core spec) after that. We’ll see how things go.

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

#25

Post by bengotow »

_kwmj wrote: post #4

Nylas (like other apps e.g. Airmail) kept the password on their servers (Nylas ID, now it's Mailspring ID) so basically they had (could have) access to all my data even when it's not lying on my computer. 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…

Hey folks! Just to be clear, Mailspring does /not/ send your email credentials to the cloud - all the mail sync is done locally, and your passwords are stored in your system keychain / keyring. I spent a good chunk of time re-implementing things like snooze and send later to work without a backend server.

That's actually mentioned a few sentences before the quote above in that GitHub issue ;-) The Mailspring ID stores metadata for things like read receipts and link tracking, but that's pretty much it!

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

#26

Post by bengotow »

gravypod wrote: post #2

Can this so plaintext and operate without contacting a third party? There are a few "features" in this that worry me. One being the Open Tracking. 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.

Hey! Mailspring maintainer here—the app doesn't support plaintext emails (at least not out of the box), but it's likely we'll add support in the future.

A lot of the features in the app, like read receipts and link tracking, are targeted at sales and business folks that send a lot of email and care about it being read. You can use the app without using them though! Unlike Nylas Mail, Mailspring implements all mail sync on your computer - your email credentials are not sent to the cloud and things like "unsnoozing" happen on your machine, not on a server. (Note that for many people, this is actually a /bad/ thing - if enough folks complain we might add the cloud sync stuff as an opt-in!)

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

#27

Post by bengotow »

the_common_man wrote: post #9

I wish the license was MIT. The author could then have simply made some sort of an open core model instead of resorting to this ID business.

Hey! Mailspring maintainer here—could you elaborate on the "open core model"? I'm not sure I follow. If it'd generate more than $~10k/mo in revenue and would allow me and others at F376 to sustainably work on Mailspring indefinitely, it might be a great alternative to the Mailspring ID and pro features.

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

#28

Post by bengotow »

Hey folks! Mailspring maintainer here — glad to see this on Hacker News. For anyone just catching up, here's the tldr on Mailspring:

- It's a fork of Nylas Mail with the entire mailsync codebase (~40k lines of JavaScript) replaced with a new C++ core based on Mailcore2. It uses roughly half the RAM and CPU of Nylas Mail and idles with almost zero "CPU Wakes" thanks to new C++11 features, which translates to great battery life. You might not even notice it's an Electron app.

- It still has the same great pro features, like snoozing and send later, but doesn't send your email credentials to Mailspring servers. All of these features have been re-implemented to run locally on your computer.

- The pro features still cost money ($8/mo). The goal is to use revenue from subscriptions to pay maintainers (myself, possibly other folks!) to maintain Mailspring indefinitely and/or put bounties on popular feature requests.

- The roadmap and website are still being assembled, but there's some really cool stuff in the works. Launching it and polishing the new C++ sync codebase is just step 1.

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

#29

Post by bengotow »

chrismorgan wrote: post #24
Lazare wrote: post #6

I used and loved Nylas Mail (aka N1), so I'm going to be taking a close look at this. 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 expli…

At FastMail we’re hoping to implement snooze next year, as a first-party solution that doesn’t need the support of a client or third-party server. There is no established convention or standard for representing snooze over IMAP. There’s not yet any consensus on how to represent it in JMAP, the emerging standard that we’re backing (and which our web UI will be using fairly soon), either. It’ll be a FastMail-specific J…

This sounds great - if you're interested in folks implementing the extension in third party clients, let me know!

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

#30

Post by [deleted] »

Lazare wrote: post #13
the_common_man wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me what is wrong with gmail? It seems to check all your boxes.

I prefer desktop clients (even the horrible electron things that pass as such these days), and I'm not thrilled with gmails UI which I find a bit cluttered and frustrating. It also doesn't support email snoozing, which I love. Google Inbox is a better UI, but goes too far the other way towards wasting too much space. It's also missing some key features, and is still not a desktop client. Also, neither one of them sup…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN