FastMail app for iOS and Android now available

I had hoped for no bias in my comment - just to increase awareness.

The changes in related laws in Australia are unprecedented [1] and are passing as we speak [2][3]

The comments on their own privacy page is about to become outdated or misleading -

Australia has strong privacy laws in relation to email, specified in the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. [4]

As an EU citizen you are offered more protection then many other regions of the world, at least from a regulatory perspective -

Under EU law, personal data can only be gathered legally under strict conditions, for a legitimate purpose. Furthermore, persons or organisations which collect and manage your personal information must protect it from misuse and must respect certain rights of the data owners which are guaranteed by EU law. [5]

Please watch the youtube like referenced below to get a feeling of the insanity -

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srk9c4rOgZ4

[2] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-news/australias-...

[3] http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/antiterror-laws-rob...

[4] https://www.fastmail.com/help/legal/privacy.html

[5] http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/

Regarding heliotrope: wmorgan has left the field a long time ago to our great despair. He did start heliotrope, which I hacked a bit because it looked cool. I even started a heliotrope-to-imap bridge [0]. After a while the community decided to create a common repository to host them, at which time I abandoned heliotrope because its client was still too buggy and sup was already working very well, and I needed a working MUA.

So the current state is: heliotrope kind of works, the client a little less, we are now fully working on sup. If you want to hack on heliotrope though, feel free to ask -- but there will most likely be no code from me.

Sup, on the other hand, works like a charm ! Visit us at supmua.org !

[0] https://github.com/rakoo/imaptrope

> That's odd. I remember the K9 email client working on a phone with CyanogenMod and without Google Play or the other Google services and I was getting notifications on new emails.

On Android platform notifications and push notifications are different things. Any app can drop a notification into the notification area, and that's what most mail clients do in response to IMAP traffic.

A push notification is a small chunk of data sent by a server to Google's push channel with a target device/app identifier, which Google then sends on to the device. The target application wakes up and receives the data, and can do whatever it likes in response (or nothing at all). The FastMail app responds to pushes by calling back to the FastMail servers to find out what changed and update the platform notification accordingly).

Without the push channel, there's nothing that can trigger this, so you don't get notifications. We could wake up and poll regularly, but that's going to be pretty horrible for your battery.

There are other push channels around (eg Amazon have one) but they have different interfaces and its not at all clear there's enough demand to make it worth the time and effort to develop, test and maintain.

Until then, the app without notification support is almost identical to the regular web app in Firefox or Chrome, so you might as well just use it that way.

> And as a suggestion, given that this is just a packaged web interface, it would be awesome to see it published for Firefox Mobile / Firefox OS.

I did look into it briefly, mostly to make sure we weren't making any architectural choices that would prevent it in the future. Right now though there's basically no demand for Firefox OS. If it becomes worth the time and effort to do it, we'll reconsider it.

I am not a parent, but from UX perspective I think you just got a feedback which says the action is either too hidden or not useful enough. :) (it's a single complaint, though)

Hm, we're too deep it seems. So replying to myself.

> You must be aware that notmuch is only the search backend, and for a full MUA you need frontends.

Absolutely. I tried to imply that with my wry parenthesis; but it's absolutely worth pointing out clearly to unwary readers. In no way is it fair to either notmuch or sup to compare the two as equals.

I'd probably lean towards mutt-kz[mk] for an out-of-box "notmuch" mua (but... mutt. Meh ;-) There's also "alot"[a].

> Another contender in the space (label- and search-centric) is mu and its ui, mu4e [1]. Something else to have in mind.

Right. See also:

http://dev.gentoo.org/~tomka/mail.html

Recently discussed on hn:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8519643

> Now if you want something that works on desktop and mobile, something worth a look would be using SQLite and its built-in full-text search... see how far you can go with that. SQLite is available pretty much everywhere, Android even allows full-text search. Now what you have to do is synchronize SQLite dbs. It "shouldn't" be too hard to remove old emails from the db so you can keep X MB worth of it. You can even shoehorn it into couchbase-lite [3][4] so that sync is automagically taken care of.

I've considered sqlite for some of these reasons. But couchbase-lite != sqlite, right? (Or does it use sqlite in a meaningful way; ie: can/should one use sql to interface with the stored data?). Btw, looks like you're off-by-one, in your references ;-)

If using sqlite, there are a couple of schemas one might use for inspiration, such as dbmail:

http://dbmail.org/dokuwiki/lib/exe/fetch.php/dbmail-er-model...

Or archiveopteryx:

http://archiveopteryx.org/db/schema

The main sticking point, is do we really want(need) to re-index everything everywhere, how do we transparently do search local-first, while supporting hits from the server along with fetching hits/mails that are missing locally (what k9 calls "cloud search") - how do we consolidate/sync data (the two hard things in computer science is caching and naming things...).

I'm not entirely convinced sqlite+built-in full text search is the best approach (I envision a useful search across some gbs of mailing list threads -- not convinced about the ranking -- but I could very well be the victim of premature optimization. And I'm a little wary of abandoning maildir for storage (on the server) -- but that might be useful anyway.

> JMAP looks cool (definitely more interesting to implement than IMAP) but it seems to be more a query API than a sync API, although there are facilities to "get changes since last time" (a HUGE improvement from IMAP as deployed everywhere).

Yes, that's pretty much what I gathered from the heliotrope story, that syncing was a bit of a mess.

> OTOH if you can shoehorn it into couchbase-lite, you can use a generic sync protocol that can be used for other things too (caldav/carddav).

Exactly. All the hard work done! For free! But seriously, couchdb was born from the ashes of lotus notes, and at least in spirit it was made for this kind of stuff... so couchdb sync, and some kind of half-assed search might be the way to go (on the server, elastic-search would probably work fine... not sure about on something like Android).

> Heck, you've piqued my curiosity, I see something doable here. I'd love to hear more. I might even hack something just for fun.

Great :-) If you do, please feel free to drop me an email (see profile).

[mk] https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz [a] https://github.com/pazz/alot