Why do you spend 2 year of your live to build a new email client? Aren't there enought software for this scope?
I've spent the last two years building a new email client
211–220 of 608 posts
Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not about popularity, it is about the resources Electron apps use vs native. The apps that you mentioned do not have good native alternatives. I cannot see anyone preferring a native app over Electron app if both offer the same features.
I prefer VS Code over native alternatives. Don't conflate your anecdotal evidence with facts. Many users don't know much RAM a process consumes or what an Electron app is, they just care about what the app can do, how fast it is, etc.
I prefer Sublime Text.
Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Ask native thunderbird developers, why Thunderbird take 400 MB of RAM, only after start the programm.
Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure that a client like Mutt would use much less but considering that many emails have embed HTML and would ideally use a modern web view to render correctly, how much overhead is there from from using Electron/chromium if you're going to load all of that anyway? I couldn't find exact figures for MS Outlook but Office 365 seems to require 1Gb as a minimum. A quick look at the Gmail tab I have open in Chrome seems…
For reference, when settled, Gmail in Firefox uses 200MB or a bit more, while FastMail uses around 10MB. I’m tempted to make a FastMail Electron app just to demonstrate that Electron/HTML/CSS/JS doesn’t need to mean slow and heavy (it just normally does). Later: OK, so on Windows a trivial Electron “just load https://www.fastmail.com/login (and then log in)” app uses ~230MB of RAM. Not what I was hoping for, though i…
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Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client
#215The field really needs this so good luck. I'll test the first release that works on my os.
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Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure that a client like Mutt would use much less but considering that many emails have embed HTML and would ideally use a modern web view to render correctly, how much overhead is there from from using Electron/chromium if you're going to load all of that anyway? I couldn't find exact figures for MS Outlook but Office 365 seems to require 1Gb as a minimum. A quick look at the Gmail tab I have open in Chrome seems…
My Outlook (2016) client is using ~300MB right now while displaying a full HTML spam mail (taking one for the team, guys). I wouldn't say I'm a heavy user, but there's shared calendars and mailboxes, OneNote integration, task list etc.
Concur, my Outlook (2016/365) is currently using 250Mb. That's with 4 mailboxes open, and a heavy HTML email displayed in the reading pane.
Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think SyneRyder means what format are you storing emails on disk? If a user uses your email client to download all their pop3 email, is it available in a nice format on disk for whatever reason (backups/file recovery/migration to another client)? Or is it locked up in a custom file format.
>* I think SyneRyder means what format are you storing emails on disk?* Yup, that's what I wanted to know. Since Thunderbird & Postbox both used the same Mbox Unix format for my 20 year email archive saved on disk, it was very easy to switch between them. And since it's an industry standard, I'm reasonably confident I could export/migrate it to a new email client when I have to - or find someone who has written softw…
Recent version of Postbox switched to the Maildir format, which is still, from what I've seen, not production ready in Thunderbird.
Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client
#218Has anyone tested this using https://www.emailprivacytester.com yet? If not, please do so and report back here. I would test myself but I'm stuck in the queue for access.
Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
He isn't trying to take away from the achievement, just highlighting some legitimate security concerns. IMHO this is justified since people often overlook how critical an attack vector this would be. Imagine if a state-sponsored "hobbyist" posted a pet project like the OP to Reddit and started harvesting keys/password reset capabilities for huge amounts of users. Hell, people flocked to use unroll.me and then it turn…
Yea, I kind of feel the same way about it. "Great work but not my cup of tea for reasons A, B, and C" should be valid feedback on a Show HN.
Absolutely. But the OP forgot the "Great work but...". Had they, I wouldn't have commented.
Re: I've spent the last two years building a new email client
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi! I really like the initiative of JMAP, however I haven't been able to look into it properly - I can give you a better answer once I've done that, my email is in my profile
One of the things we’re really hoping with JMAP is that, by drastically lowering the barrier of entry (because doing IMAP/POP3/SMTP well is hard ), people will be able to experiment much more, making things like Ivelope, because they can start making UI almost immediately rather than shaving IMAP yaks first. I have a talk planned entitled “building a fair dinkum email client in half an hour with JMAP”—because you gen…
I'm not convinced that JMAP existing will make it easier for people to develop things like Ivelope. I don't know in this particular case, but if I were writing Ivelope I wouldn't first write an IMAP library of my own. I'd use an existing one. And all commonly used languages have pre-existing IMAP libraries anyway.
I doubt the ability to do "var client = new JMAP()" instead of "var client = new IMAP()" will lead to a flood of new clients.