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Show HN: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail

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Re: Show HN: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail

#151

Post by jsjohnst »

jonathanberger wrote: post #86
njhaveri wrote: post #2

Hi HN! In the past, I spent over 7 years working on Apple Mail, and today I am really excited to share a new email client I'm building: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail. Mimestream is written in Swift, and uses AppKit+SwiftUI for a clean, stock appearance. It's designed to be fast, lightweight, and use a minimal amount of disk space. Mimestream's advantages over using the Gmail web interface includes…

Congrats on an amazing launch! You might though consider a new name before going to the App Store? Telling someone who doesn't read HN about your app would be very difficult because "mime" and "stream" aren't words people would expect next to each other. "Mime" is also a pretty uncommon word. Getting the early adopter crowd now who understand the name is important but this app has exciting potential I think for an au…

Because “Amazon” is a name that in 1997 implied online bookstore? Or “Twitter” implied microblogging platform in 2008? I feel you’re over thinking it because you do know what MIME means in this case, for the average person that doesn’t, they very likely won’t think twice about it.

Re: Show HN: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail

#152

Post by paxys »

dvtrn wrote: post #63
robenkleene wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point: "There are no intermediary servers with access to your account or copies of your messages." A number of popular email clients use intermediary servers and that's a complete deal breaker for me. I'd argue that should be a deal breaker for almost anyone. I'm not a security expert, but as far as I can tell, for most people the single biggest security vulnerability is an attacker gaining access to…

I never quite understood what the value add was for email-client developers to use intermediary servers. Is it to gather usage telemetry or something else?

Usage telemetry can be gathered pretty easily from the client itself. Having an intermediate service is usually for stuff like push notifications, search, autocomplete, recommendations and really any other feature that goes beyond the email spec and would be difficult or cpu intensive to implement on all the clients.

Re: Show HN: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail

#153

Post by ocdtrekkie »

meehow wrote: post #147

What are the advantages (for users) of using Gmail API over IMAP/JMAP? It sounds like huge disadvantage when email client works with just one provider.

Since Gmail is monopoly-scale though, they have plenty of users to serve. Gmail has a lot of proprietary features that don't work through IMAP. Most of them could work with JMAP (like labels) but Gmail doesn't support that (yet, at least).

Re: Show HN: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail

#155

Post by ocdtrekkie »

ricardobeat wrote: post #154

> Instead of using the IMAP protocol, Mimestream utilizes the Gmail API That's sadly a step in the wrong direction. JMAP ( https://jmap.io/ ) has been around for a while and it is a shame google refuses to adopt it.

To be fair, very few companies have rolled out JMAP support, AFAIK. It's unsurprising Google would hesitate to replace their proprietary API/advantage with an open standard while it's not well-used. Presumably if enough other mail services use it, Google will eventually follow suit.

Re: Show HN: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail

#156

Post by ricardobeat »

Amfy wrote: post #118
leokennis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was still on Gmail in 2012 or so (?) I really really loved that app! Actually, I’d easily pay $25 or even more for a similar app, for Fastmail.

this. I will pay $50 for such an App for Fastmail (or really, just IMAP speaking please)

Have you tried Spark? It's the spiritual successor to Sparrow, I use it on phone and laptop and really like it. The only downside is that it's on a freemium model...

[1] https://sparkmailapp.com/

Re: Show HN: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail

#158

Post by philipwhiuk »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #153
meehow wrote: post #147

What are the advantages (for users) of using Gmail API over IMAP/JMAP? It sounds like huge disadvantage when email client works with just one provider.

Since Gmail is monopoly-scale though, they have plenty of users to serve. Gmail has a lot of proprietary features that don't work through IMAP. Most of them could work with JMAP (like labels) but Gmail doesn't support that (yet, at least).

Except labels does work via IMAP: https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap/imap-extensions#acc...

Re: Show HN: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail

#159

Post by pvg »

njhaveri wrote: post #76
dmix wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was your experience working with the GMail API?

It's nice to have a RESTful API, and nice to access to more Gmail features, but there are several aspects where it is not as efficient as it could be, and multiple round trips are required with the server to perform some basic tasks that IMAP can execute in 1 round trip. It also has pretty aggressive request throttling, which is fine for a very thin client like Mimestream, but would not be a good fit for a client tha…

Can you say a little more about the thinness and what the offline capabilities are? I noticed the search looks like it happens serverside which is great when you're online since you get actual gmail search. What happens when the client is offline?
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