Live data from Hacker News

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

ivelope.com

501–510 of 608 posts

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

#501
post #481
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail search is without doubt the worst search I've ever come across. It doesn't even return all the results. Why do you think it is good? There is nothing that says that you can't have both web and native mail clients.

It works for almost everything I try to find. It might take a few tries, but I can usually find the mail I was looking for. Usually when I change jobs I have had another non Gmail account but I have never found the search as good. I have an outlook web client at work and that doesn't find things. Maybe its me being dumb and remembering different phrases from what is actually stored, but I almost always manage to find…

Well, it can't even find all instances of a single exact ID.

It's what you'd expect of a cloud service though, they really don't want to go through all of that data.

Any native client though will just go at it and return proper results.

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

#502
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half of Hackernews is discussion about six figure tech salaries, the other half is complaints about 300mb (aka ~$2) ram being to expensive for an app. https://www.anandtech.com/show/9864/price-of-ddr4-memory-dro...

and what about people who use electron apps that aren't silicon valley programmers?

They can't properly voice their complaints because they don't know why their software is terrible; just that it is terrible.

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

#503
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. In a world where publishing is essentially free, reputation is an extremely valuable commodity. The ask here is not trivial.

Yes, it is trivial. You have a warped perspective of importance if you think giving the nod to a new mail app is some holy thing. I tell my friends about new apps, startups, and projects all the time. None of them think I'm staking my reputation when I shitpost about some new thing in Slack.

We are different. If I recommend a piece of software to someone these days, it means it's truly exceptional and they should really check it out.

Apart from that, the e-mail form doesn't let me control what I'm sending.

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

#504
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. In a world where publishing is essentially free, reputation is an extremely valuable commodity. The ask here is not trivial.

Yes, it is trivial. You have a warped perspective of importance if you think giving the nod to a new mail app is some holy thing. I tell my friends about new apps, startups, and projects all the time. None of them think I'm staking my reputation when I shitpost about some new thing in Slack.

Recommending a product you haven't reviewed is a form of lying. Some of us value our integrity.

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

#505

I put my name on the waitlist, but instantly lost interest and confidence by: “Jump forward 5 steps in the line for every person you invite and get beta access sooner.” Why? If the product is that good I’ll evangelize it. This is a desktop application, so I don’t see a big boost from a network effect. All this does makes me wonder if the product is more about building hype than value

You are not alone in this attitude, so don't take this personally, but I'm going to reply to you because you're the top comment. This is an incredibly destructive point of view. Promotion is essential to any software project, even open source, and in the vast majority of cases, word of mouth is not enough. This is an ethical, up-front, straightforward ask that costs you and anyone you might contact very little and is…

I agree with the premise, but please, do it after I tried it, not before. Otherwise it might as well be a smart e-mail harvesting thing. How do you know these days?

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

#506

I find it crazy that everyone is harping on Electron instead of the cool features that this clearly has that most clients do not. Demo looked pretty polished dude. Don't let the typical HN crowd rain on your parade. The fact that you posted an actual product out to the public is more than most can say. Also: If you can't spare Max 300MB ram and you are complaining on HN wtf computer do you use?

I see where you are coming from. My main work laptop has 24GB (recently refreshed; the previous one had 16GB), so I can trivially spare 300MB, if I want. That said ... I work on open source Linux virtualization (KVM-based), and I fiercely guard my laptop's memory. Why? Allow me to tell my "corner case" scenario.

I have a couple of development virtual machines (VMs), and build containers running on my laptop. They help me with a range of tasks (some are memory intensive). Further, I configure nested virtualization, which lets me setup two level-1 guests (A and B), and inturn run a level-2 guest (C) in either of them. Now I can test live migration of VM C between A and B. So I really try my best to stay away from memory-hogging applications.

That's one of the reasons why 4-ish years ago I ditched Thunderbird, which was hogging memory, and switched to the venerable mutt e-mail client. (Also ditched HexChat for irssi.) FWIW, switching to mutt was one of the best decisions I made for my productivity -- I spend a lot of time wrangling high-volume technical mailing lists; it's unalloyed joy to use mutt on a daily basis (especially if you deal with e-mail based patch workflow).

Granted, it might be a niche scenario. I just wanted to call out that there are damn good reasons to conserve memory.

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

#507

I find it crazy that everyone is harping on Electron instead of the cool features that this clearly has that most clients do not. Demo looked pretty polished dude. Don't let the typical HN crowd rain on your parade. The fact that you posted an actual product out to the public is more than most can say. Also: If you can't spare Max 300MB ram and you are complaining on HN wtf computer do you use?

For this, for Slack, for VS Code, for half a dozen other Electron apps because devs simply are not willing to take the time and effort to learn other languages.

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

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My compute resources are not an all-you-can-eat buffet. I'm sick of inconsiderate developers writing software in wasteful frameworks that waste my electricity and time. You can make pretty x-platform apps in JavaFX, QT Quick, GTK, hell even Lazarus, and they don't eat CPU and memory like Electron does. It is a shame that nearly every app released in the latter half of this decade is just wasteful Electron garbage. Do…

I'm not grandparent but I tend to agree that it's NoBigDeal(TM). I'm no electron apologist but I don't understand why using electron is considered "inconsiderate". It seems like the developer(s) used the platform that they felt was best for this app. If the platform's issues overshadow the product's value, then that's a poor choice and the market will react by not using it. Is it inconsiderate for Ford to make a larg…

I don't feel the developer used what they felt was best for this app. I feel they used what was best for them.

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

#509
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. In a world where publishing is essentially free, reputation is an extremely valuable commodity. The ask here is not trivial.

Yes, it is trivial. You have a warped perspective of importance if you think giving the nod to a new mail app is some holy thing. I tell my friends about new apps, startups, and projects all the time. None of them think I'm staking my reputation when I shitpost about some new thing in Slack.

I don't think the parent is claiming its a holy thing. But I certainly feel the same way.

My reputation is worth more to me, than trying to get higher up in a queue to a product i haven't tried. I don't share things with people lightly, and there are clearly a bunch of us out there.

Any certainly, nobody is advocating that our view of the world is the correct one, just that we hold that view.

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

#510
post #65
post #38

God bless you for working in a space—native email clients—which seems utterly neglected nowadays.

I can kind of see why. There is a lot of convenience in being able to log into any computer and access your mail. Plus Gmail search beats the search in native clients most of the time.

Using a native email client 99% of the time doesn't prevent you from signing in to a web version when you're away from your machine...
Post reply on HN