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I've spent the last two years building a new email client

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Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#21

Post by red_admiral »

blkhp19 wrote: post #2

It's unfortunate that this wasn't build with a cross-platform core, but native, first class UIs for each respective platform. Edit: I realized this was worded very badly. I’m saying I wish this was written with a cross platform core, and native, platform specific UIs for each respective platform. For example, MS Office is written this way.

I'd personally think "amazing" is a better adjective than "unfortunate" here - the value of an e-mail client, at least to me, lies almost entirely in its user interface. If using a native stack can squeeze out a few more tidbits of usability here and there, that's a good job well done. There's still a lot of value in native if it's done properly.

Electron and similar technologies are in my opinion not quite at the point where they can compete with the best that native platforms can offer. I'm sure that will change one day, but we're not there yet.

GTK integration on windows and mac is also less than perfect - I've been using geany on multiple platforms a lot recently and it's a great tool, but there's small annoyances like that the "swipe to scroll" speed varies massively between it and Notepad++.

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#24

Post by dogma1138 »

No offense but unless it’s a 1st party client email clients are something that is very hard to trust.

Who controls your client has access to your inbox with most services even the few that have separate IMAP/POP3 passwords like Hushmail can be compromised through it.

If your client also integrates with encryption or worse takes charge of it my encryption key is also now at risk.

Lastly since email today is pure HTML you also inherit all the possible vulnerabilities that come with having a DOM parser and a layout engine and even modem browsers still get both wrong.

And using something like Electron or even Chromium won’t implicitly save you because the way you implement them matters a lot and now you are tied with their update cycle which might break functionality forcing you to manually backport security fixes which is hard to accomplish.

So unless you have the source or show an audit from a respected firm (c53, isec etc.) its going to be quite hard to recommend to anyone to take the dive and try this out.

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#25

Post by qz3 »

gerardnll wrote: post #14
muszc-master wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of Privacy concerns! The thinking is that few people would enter their email and email password on a 3rd-party website, having it as a downloadable software ensures the privacy of users

Although, in reality, that doesn't make it more secure.

On a desktop app, you can see what kind of request the program makes and which servers it contacts. With a webapp, you'll never know what the app does.

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#26

Post by discordance »

_RedPanda wrote: post #13
muszc-master wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello! It has been full-time for the last 2 years!

This probably means that the software is not going to be free, right?

I hope it's paid. This guy deserves to get paid for his awesome work, and I will trust it more if I'm paying $.

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#27

Post by newscracker »

Flimm wrote: post #12

This looks amazing, I can't wait to try it out. My main problem with Thunderbird is that it doesn't have a conversation-based UI, but this looks like it does. Good stuff! (By the way, typo: "accessable" should be "accessible")

There is an extension for Thunderbird called Thunderbird Conversations [1] for a conversation based UI that provides a look similar to Gmail (though it may not look like chat, which is possible and would look nice only for those who exchange short one or two sentence emails). As that addon says, "Don't forget to hit View > Sort By > Threaded in the menus." to use it. Perhaps this extension would help you.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-con...

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#28

Post by crystaln »

qz3 wrote: post #25
gerardnll wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although, in reality, that doesn't make it more secure.

On a desktop app, you can see what kind of request the program makes and which servers it contacts. With a webapp, you'll never know what the app does.

How so? It's quite simple to tell what a web app does in my understanding. Chrome has many good monitoring tools.

Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client

#29

Post by red_admiral »

_RedPanda wrote: post #13
muszc-master wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello! It has been full-time for the last 2 years!

This probably means that the software is not going to be free, right?

If the choice is between paying with money and paying with my personal data, managing my e-mail is one of the things where I'm happy to pull out the credit card. (That's why my e-mail accounts are on places like fastmail instead of gmail.)

I get paid money for the software I develop too, after all.

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