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

ivelope.com

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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?! I would've said the same thing with joy! From the title I was immediately hoping that this was not yet another bloated electron thing.

But how do you think this is bloat?

I don't need yet another Chrome installation on my PC, one is enough.

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

#72
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.

He had 2 years not 5+

That is a matter of skills doing native UIs.

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

#73
post #31

looks nice - too bad it is not available for Linux.

I've been getting a few requests to release it for Linux, and as the other commenter here, since it is Electron, it will not be very long before it can be released on Linux (compared to if it were a 100% native app)

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

#74

This looks pretty cool, I'm really pleased to see people writing new email clients, and you've clearly worked very hard on this! I have a bunch of questions that I couldn't find out from the website (but are obscure enough that I shouldn't expect to): * Is this a purely native app, or an Electron / Javascript app? Personally I'm only interested in native apps & Electron would be a deal breaker - but I'm weird, most p…

1. It's an Electron app, but it is built to use as little RAM as possible, when I run it on my old Macbook Air, it consumes only around 300mb of RAM maximum, which is less than what Finder consumes, and I consider everything over this limit to be a bug. 2. Currently not supporting Mbox/Maildir but downloading emails directly from the server, however an import of this is on the todo list 3. Re: turn off conversation v…

300MB of ram sounds like a lot to me. What are you storing in memory that is that large? If I dont use the app for 1 hour will it stop using the memory?

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

#75
post #57

You are not weird. More and more people think that Electron is bad

This is an "all my friends voted for..." argument.

Electron applications such as Slack, Discord, and VS Code have ballooned in popularity over the last year or two. Hacker News comments are not representative of the whole.

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

#76
post #56

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…

I've downvoted you for your sheer negativity. This is a person who's worked 2 years on a project, in a neglected space where companies don't go because they can't make money. He deserves praise for taking the time, creating something that's different, and thinking through the idea. Well done!

I built a webmail client from scratch many years ago and I agree with the security concerns. In my case the credentials were not a problem with displaying inline HTML securely was difficult to get right. Back then there was no CSP.

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

#77

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…

> Lastly since email today is pure HTML

Where did you get that idea? If your email is pure HTML all I'll see is your markup, if it makes it through the spam filter to begin with which assigns a pretty stiff penalty for sending me HTML mail.

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

#78
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 po…

Notepad++ is also portable (can run from USB drive).

Electron apps' installation process is just madness. It breaks every convention. You can't even choose the install path FFS!

I think of Electron apps as BonziBuddy for today's hipsters.

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

#79

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…

For me, an additional concern is being tied to this client after using it. Every offline mail client has its own storage formats (mbox, maildir, SQLite, another database or a mix of these), and so moving across clients is not an easy exercise unless the clients support multiple formats for import. I would also like to see how the client behaves when one single mailbox is more than 20GB in size, with at least one of t…

> Claims that searches happen in milliseconds need to state the size of the mailbox

I'd honestly outsource the indexing and searching to something like mairix which is designed purely for this purpose.

(On my 4.5GB Maildir, 57 folders, 111k emails, mairix takes 205s to index from scratch. Incremental updates are <5s. Worst search I've yet done took 0.5s to return 13k hits for 'bank'.)

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

#80

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…

For me, an additional concern is being tied to this client after using it. Every offline mail client has its own storage formats (mbox, maildir, SQLite, another database or a mix of these), and so moving across clients is not an easy exercise unless the clients support multiple formats for import. I would also like to see how the client behaves when one single mailbox is more than 20GB in size, with at least one of t…

I think the largest inbox ever tried in Ivelope so far is around 10GB and from what I heard from that user, there were no major problems - but I haven't made any measurements. A few people have requested mbox import and it is on the todolist.
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