Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nylas Mail is now free

blog.nylas.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 334 posts

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#211

Post by ryanSrich »

wodenokoto wrote: post #198
ryanSrich wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a medium blog. They don't allow you to add external links anywhere outside of a post. I suppose you could create a new post, add links in that post, and then add that link to the nav of the blog.

Yes they do. There is a link to the download/purchase page in the header of the blog. And even if this was impossible, they could make their name in the body of the blog post a link to their website.

Right. I think it's limited to one external link (could be wrong). Makes sense they'd include the download link over the homepage link no?

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#212

Post by bpizzi »

blub wrote: post #205
rspeer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gtk is not very cross-platform. It looks non-native on Windows, and it's so non-native on macOS that you have to run an X server just to see it. wxWidgets seems to be abandoned (their bindings don't even have a Python 3 release, which would happen right away if anyone cared). Most of these provide dated UI elements that people don't want to work with. Qt perhaps is holding up the best, but I can see why people prefer…

What do people expect nowadays from their toolkit? It can't be performance, because Electron is slow. It's not conservative power usage, because browsers are power hungry. It's not disk space or memory usage either. Nor is it a native-looking UI. Nor security. Nor privacy. Nor accessibility. The only thing I can think of is that it's free and allows the typical web developer to avoid learning anything new.

You missed the ecosystem ;)

NPM, even if it has plenty of do-not-use-that-packages crap, is still far more furnished that Qt will ever be, for example.

> The only thing I can think of is that it's free and allows the typical web developer to avoid learning anything new.

One could say the same for the typical Qt developer that refuse to get serious in learning the web platform.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#213

Post by innocentoldguy »

grinich wrote: post #125
innocentoldguy wrote: post #74

I used Nylas back when it was free, and it is a good email client, but it just wasn't worth $7 a month to me, and certainly not $12, especially when I consider that Office 365 Business Premium is only $12.50 a month, and includes Outlook, Word, Excel, etc. I would never use Office 365 personally, but when I consider the value offered by Office 365 Premium vs. Nylas, for about the same price, it makes Nylas Email look…

> It seems to me that Nylas could make a lot more money by charging $1 a month, since there are likely many, many more people willing to pay $1 vs. $12. Probably more than the 12 to 1 ratio required to break even. Do you have any data on this? Would love to see it to help inform the research we already did when pricing the Pro edition of Nylas Mail.

Not for Nylas, since spending the time to do that research wouldn't benefit me. I'm happy to do it for a salary though.

Having said that, I can offer you this isolated anecdote (as worthless as that is): The last company I worked for used to use Nylas, before the pricing was set to $7 a month. When your company started charging for Nylas, we all stopped using it, both personally and professionally, and the general consensus during the transition away from your product was basically, "I'd continue to use it if it were around a buck." We understood the need for your company to make money, but $7 a month seemed too steep to us, so we went elsewhere.

I think it is great if you're able to succeed at $12 a month. I certainly won't begrudge your success. It just seems to me that at the $12-price-point, your competitors are offering much, much more. There are also free options, like Boxer, that work satisfactorily and are still free.

I'm not knocking your product. I liked it when I was using it, and I think you're trying to succeed in a difficult market, so kudos for making the attempt. I just don't personally value Nylas Mail at $7 (or $12) a month, and reading through this thread, it seems there are others who feel the same way; which I would think you'd want to consider as you fine-tune your business model.

Anyway, best of luck to you. I wish you all the success you deserve.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#214

Post by jamesgeck0 »

lxfontes wrote: post #145
yoasif_ wrote: post #39

Is there a build available which doesn't require users to sign up for a Nylas ID? The support page states that "If you’re using N1 against our open source sync engine, you’ll still need to create a Nylas ID." Given the privacy policy says that Nylas shares information with third parties and that they can "make a copy of the entire contents of the applicable email inbox, calendar, and contact book", it doesn't feel li…

Nylas privacy policy ( https://nylas.com/privacy-policy/ ) is the single reason why I don't use it. (puts Stallman's hat on) This is not free as in freedom.

The privacy policy looks like it should mostly apply to Nylas N1, not the newer Nylas Mail? The policy hasn't been updated since May of last year.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#215

Post by ascom »

timdorr wrote: post #119
maglavaitss wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we need a cloud service for "read receipts"? Interesting.

Since those are accomplished via a tracking pixel in the email and you need to serve that image from a public server, then yes, you'll need a cloud service to run that. As stated before, you can choose to run that server yourself if you don't trust Nylas with that kind of data.

I haven't been able to find the tracking pixel server on GitHub.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#216

Post by hota_mazi »

timdorr wrote: post #119
maglavaitss wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we need a cloud service for "read receipts"? Interesting.

Since those are accomplished via a tracking pixel in the email and you need to serve that image from a public server, then yes, you'll need a cloud service to run that. As stated before, you can choose to run that server yourself if you don't trust Nylas with that kind of data.

So this won't work with emails coming from Gmail (and probably other providers) since these services cache these images on their server as soon as they receive them (and not when recipients open them) precisely to defeat this kind of tracking.

And of course, a lot of email clients only open such images on demand anyway.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#217

Post by dang »

maglavaitss wrote: post #132

How about not tracking anything? How about not using a shitty Electron app and calling it "the best email client ever"? Edit: Oh, and for the downvoting/Electron-loving folks out there, Electron is the best and All hail Elon Musk!

Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13418654 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#218

Post by NoGravitas »

nextos wrote: post #139
chrissnell wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the answer is Mutt. For me, the editor is what stops me from switching. Does it still require you to shell out to an external editor to send a mail? There was an amazing mail client for (of all things) FidoNet back in the 90s called GoldEd that was amazing. It had threaded message display, a great editor, pleasant colors, etc. It was tailored to that network, however. Would love to find something like this fo…

I am a very loyal mutt user. Coupled with mbsync (for offline imap) and notmuch (for indexing, threading and address completion) I think it's a great MUA. I obsessively measure wakeups/s in powertop for every application I use, and the above setup is very good. If you want to try other things you can look into the mutt-kz fork (which replaces internal search commands with notmuch). There is also a notmuch curses clie…

Gnus is unbeatable for reading mailing lists -- it basically lets you take the many optimizations and workflows developed in various newsreaders for managing large Usenet newsgroups of which you only want to read a small subset, and apply them to mailing lists. For reading mail other than big mailing lists, it's a little awkward. I used it as my main email client for years, but have drifted away.

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#219

Post by yoasif_ »

e0m wrote: post #106
yoasif_ wrote: post #39

Is there a build available which doesn't require users to sign up for a Nylas ID? The support page states that "If you’re using N1 against our open source sync engine, you’ll still need to create a Nylas ID." Given the privacy policy says that Nylas shares information with third parties and that they can "make a copy of the entire contents of the applicable email inbox, calendar, and contact book", it doesn't feel li…

Nylas Mail Basic does NOT store your mail data in the cloud. It still uses a cloud service for some features (like read receipts), but all the data is local on your disk and auth credentials stored in your native OS keychain. Nylas Pro currently syncs in the cloud to enable some of the pro features not currently offered in Nylas Mail Basic and to provide a much easier to use modern API wrapper around mail data. The c…

I understand the desire to have a seamless flow from free to paid, but you can easily move this flow later in the app (a la progressive disclosure). You can even build this into the existing flow where users currently go to upgrade, by prompting the user to create a Nylas ID at that point (if they haven't already).

There's a reason that e-commerce sites allow buyers to add items to a cart without sign up, and to "checkout as guest" instead of forcing users to sign up for a Staples (or whatever) login -- you get more conversions.

Even if you prefer the approach of trying to get the information up front, adding a "skip" option that allows users to use the app without cloud sync, etc., then allowing a user to "go pro" later on at least allows people to try the app without a commitment. It's not possible to convert someone who isn't a user because they got scared away by the registration requirement -- better imo, to have a non-registered user, than no user at all.

The only reason I could think of for not wanting to allow this is related to the third party data sharing -- perhaps you plan to sell (obfuscated) user data to data brokers. If that's not in the cards, and you do not plan to monetize your free tier (aside from up-selling to pro), I see no downside to allowing users to use the app without cloud sync in the free tier, with upgrades available within the app.

Updating the privacy policy to be explicit about what data is used for ("basic usage and performance statistics") would do a lot to allay the idea that this data is being sold to data brokers (and not simply to make the app better).

Re: Nylas Mail is now free

#220

Post by kitsunesoba »

bpizzi wrote: post #212
blub wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do people expect nowadays from their toolkit? It can't be performance, because Electron is slow. It's not conservative power usage, because browsers are power hungry. It's not disk space or memory usage either. Nor is it a native-looking UI. Nor security. Nor privacy. Nor accessibility. The only thing I can think of is that it's free and allows the typical web developer to avoid learning anything new.

You missed the ecosystem ;) NPM, even if it has plenty of do-not-use-that-packages crap, is still far more furnished that Qt will ever be, for example. > The only thing I can think of is that it's free and allows the typical web developer to avoid learning anything new. One could say the same for the typical Qt developer that refuse to get serious in learning the web platform.

It's all anecdotes, but in my experience native devs are by far more willing to step outside of their area of expertise and use the right tool for the job when building for the web. Yeah they'll groan, but at the end of the day they realize that HTML+CSS+JS is how web front end works and so they write that. Very few bother compiling their favored language to JS or asm.js or whatever because it adds an unnecessary step/level of indirection and feels like trying to use a hammer as a handsaw.

By comparison web front end devs tend to cling much more tightly to their favored language+toolchain, taking it with them to every platform they decide to develop for.

Post reply on HN