I like your idea. While installing the app, I suddenly had an idea for the logo: what do you think about using a tilted old photo of a child as the app icon?
Thanks!
Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
21–30 of 71 posts
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#22If I have to look at yet another website with this same fucking AI-generated theme I'm gonna have to kill somebody.
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
My question is why not use IMAP?
That's what they used to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708270 The OP had posted a detailed reply here as well, that they since deleted - I think because they didn't want to deal with all the pushback here.
No, I'm not afraid of pushback at all. I'm actually really glad I used IMAP.
Building on top of it let me solve a few major protocol headaches directly in the client:
The app filters out signature junk (like tiny social media and logo icons), pulls down just the raw attachments instead of downloading entire 20-year-old message threads, and handles thousands of images while gracefully managing Google's rate limits (to avoid connection drops).
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#24> 100% local, no cloud, no subscriptions, no AI. The world needs more of this
Thanks, that means a lot.
I rebuilt the app because I was feeling that same fatigue. It felt like every cool new tool I looked at wanted to upload personal data to a remote server, hook it up to a third-party AI API, or charge a recurring fee.
The original version of the app actually was a cloud-based SaaS. But I figured people would feel significantly more comfortable having a sensitive tool like this run entirely on their own hardware instead of in the cloud like everything else. Making it local-first also makes it easier for people to download and try it out.
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#25“I found photos of my niece I thought were lost forever. Thank you so much!”
Emily D.
Be honest, is "Emily D" a real person you got organic feedback from? Small thing that makes the vibed site off-putting.
It says "Storage: 1.3 GB saved", but then says it is Read-only.
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#26For $30 you should sign your binary so you don't have a UAC popup. Also is it not doable with Google takeout ( with Gmail )?
[dead]
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#27If I have to look at yet another website with this same fucking AI-generated theme I'm gonna have to kill somebody.
Nah, don't do that.
Totally fair, though. In my defense, 98% of my time went into wrestling with IMAP parsing architectures, optimizing memory, and code-signing certificates instead of designing custom CSS layouts from scratch. I'll finesse the design in the future.
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#28idk if other tools do it for free, but cool idea, hope that it gains the deserved visibility
[flagged]
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#29If I have to look at yet another website with this same fucking AI-generated theme I'm gonna have to kill somebody.
Nah, don't do that. Totally fair, though. In my defense, 98% of my time went into wrestling with IMAP parsing architectures, optimizing memory, and code-signing certificates instead of designing custom CSS layouts from scratch. I'll finesse the design in the future.
> 98% of my time went into wrestling with IMAP parsing architectures, optimizing memory, and code-signing certificates instead of designing custom CSS layouts from scratch
You're just using imapflow and their Gmail search method. Why are you making things up? https://imapflow.com/docs/guides/fetching-messages#gmail-spe...
You call that function with this query over and over again:
filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png OR gif OR webp OR heic OR tif) after:${year}/01/01 before:${year + 1}/01/01
And then you call their download method: https://imapflow.com/docs/guides/fetching-messages#downloadi...
All you did was throw together a frontend, package it into Electron, paywall it, and try to obfuscate the code.
What part of that is "wrestling IMAP parsing architectures"?
Re: Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail
#30“I found photos of my niece I thought were lost forever. Thank you so much!” Emily D. Be honest, is "Emily D" a real person you got organic feedback from? Small thing that makes the vibed site off-putting. It says "Storage: 1.3 GB saved", but then says it is Read-only.
[flagged]