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

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

#161

Post by jonathanstrange »

dogma1138 wrote: post #131
jonathanstrange wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few webmail "clients" are open source and many native clients like e.g. Outlook are also not open source, yet these are very popular. Unless you use a highly trustworthy email provider, considerations about client programs are kind of moot anyway. I'd personally be more picky about my mail provider and not use any offerings by Google or Microsoft, for instance, because they are stock market companies with interests t…

Outlook is trustworthy for the most part at least as far as security goes MSFT isn’t fooling around and it’s an enterprise product. And yes choose your email provider based on your threat model but there is nothing wrong with Google or even MSFT for most people security wise privacy is a different concern but these are different threat models. An email client won’t prevent my email provider from snooping on me (E2E m…

You're already trusting hundreds of individual developers by running their software on your computer.

There is nothing wrong with running an email client made by an individual developer unless you have a particular reason to distrust that person.

>as far as security goes MSFT isn’t fooling around

They have a proven track-record of security bugs for the past 20 years and longer.

> there is nothing wrong with Google or even MSFT for most people security wise

I wouldn't use them as my main email provider security-wise and trust my current email provider way more than those companies. (Not because I think they are less secure, but because I think they are attacked more often.) But of course your mileage may differ, nothing to object to that.

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

#162

Post by wsy »

stephenr wrote: post #61
dri_ft wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe 'native' is the wrong word, but I meant non-web-app.

Electron apps are web apps though.

Not sure if there is a common agreement about terminology, but my distinction is

- web app: loads from a server and connects to a backend to perform its activities. Business logic is on the server. If at all, very limited offline capabilities

- desktop app: is installed on the local machine, doesn't need any connection to a backend to work, works offline.

I don't mind at all which technology the dev used to implement. Even nerdy metrics like memory and CPU consumption cannot be predicted from the used technology. So why should I care?

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

#163

Post by purerandomness »

brandonwamboldt wrote: post #119
Kliment wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just the base cost of using electron (along with the associated CPU usage). It's terrifying but you get that much usage even if you're not storing anything in memory.

Well that's just not accurate. With our Electron app, the main process consumes 40mb of RAM, with each window using 30mb of RAM, so if you have a windowed app, thats a minimum of under 70mb of RAM (results will differ, our app is quite large).

How are you measuring the RAM usage?

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

#164

Post by api »

SyneRyder wrote: post #34

This looks pretty cool, I'm really pleased to see people writing new email clients, and you've clearly worked very hard on this! I have a bunch of questions that I couldn't find out from the website (but are obscure enough that I shouldn't expect to): * Is this a purely native app, or an Electron / Javascript app? Personally I'm only interested in native apps & Electron would be a deal breaker - but I'm weird, most p…

Every recent new app I can remember installing in the last year is Electron. Native UI is dead. It's more work and all it really buys you is the privilege of being tied forever to one platform or having to code your UI multiple times. The effort of writing your UI three times to use three different proprietary UIs would be better spent optimizing Electron for less resource use.

In the long term web will totally replace desktop UI. This could have been avoided if Apple, MS, and Linux would have agreed on a common desktop UI API 5-10 years ago but the ship sailed.

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

#165

Post by stephenr »

wsy wrote: post #162
stephenr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron apps are web apps though.

Not sure if there is a common agreement about terminology, but my distinction is - web app: loads from a server and connects to a backend to perform its activities. Business logic is on the server. If at all, very limited offline capabilities - desktop app: is installed on the local machine, doesn't need any connection to a backend to work, works offline. I don't mind at all which technology the dev used to implement…

“Web app: renders the entire interface in a browser engine” is a pretty simple definition.

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

#166

Post by LeoNatan25 »

coldtea wrote: post #155
brandonwamboldt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 VS Code over native alternatives. That's because, as the parent said, there are no good (e.g. equivalent) native alternatives. If there was a native editor with feature parity with VS Code (including the number of plugins and dedicated MS resources speeding up its development, and free), nobody would be using it.

BBEdit is excellent. So is Notepad++.

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

#167

Post by letsgetphysITal »

Lio wrote: post #133
yani wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#168

Post by sametmax »

yani wrote: post #74
muszc-master wrote: post #59

Earlier 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?

Thunderbird takes 425mo of my ram right now.

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

#169

Post by ryandrake »

cronin101 wrote: post #107
porker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've downvoted you for your sheer negativity. This is a person who's worked 2 years on a project, in a neglected space where companies don't go because they can't make money. He deserves praise for taking the time, creating something that's different, and thinking through the idea. Well done!

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.

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

#170

Post by lallysingh »

chrismorgan wrote: post #142
Lio wrote: post #133

Earlier 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…

That's it? My Gmail tabs used to take 2GB (the last time I checked, years ago).
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