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Mailspring: A fork of Nylas Mail by one of the original authors

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Re: Mailspring: A fork of Nylas Mail by one of the original authors

#52

Hey folks! Mailspring maintainer here — glad to see this on Hacker News. For anyone just catching up, here's the tldr on Mailspring: - It's a fork of Nylas Mail with the entire mailsync codebase (~40k lines of JavaScript) replaced with a new C++ core based on Mailcore2. It uses roughly half the RAM and CPU of Nylas Mail and idles with almost zero "CPU Wakes" thanks to new C++11 features, which translates to great bat…

Really like it so far, but there is one nitpick that is bugging the hell out of me.

I can't "snap" or maximise the window on Windows (Win7). Because I have a decent sized screen I often just maximise to half screen for most applications, but not having the standard resize tools is frustrating. Edit: This only happens if I have the Reading Pane enabled.

Running version 1.0.1-ba1d6734.

Is this something being worked on? Or just a bug hitting me? Or just not something other people have asked about?

Re: Mailspring: A fork of Nylas Mail by one of the original authors

#53
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. And why does it seem to require a third party server ?

> - It still has the same great pro features, like snoozing and send later, but doesn't send your email credentials to Mailspring servers. All of these features have been re-implemented to run locally on your computer. It doesn't require a third-party server. Nylas did do it that way, but Mailspring aren't. It's local.

Yeah, it seems easy enough to do client side unless one wants it to be synchronized across devices. Then, I imagine it'd be easy for the email provider to do, though it'd need client support or to be in the browser.

Re: Mailspring: A fork of Nylas Mail by one of the original authors

#54
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snoozing emails removes them from your inbox for a set amount of time. Imagine you read emails in an unread folder, where read emails disappear. This basically would functionally mark them as read until a preset amount of time passes, then they show up as unread again. It's a bit like that, only in your inbox itself. It's not actually a part of the email specifications, but some people seem to like it.

Thank you. And why does it seem to require a third party server ?

Obvious implementation: use IMAP to create a folder, snooze-$timestamp. Move messages there. Every so often, check the snooze-$timestamp folders and present every one where the timestampt has expired as part of the unread group. Delete empty folders.

Re: Mailspring: A fork of Nylas Mail by one of the original authors

#56
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know IMAP beyond the very basics, but I presumed that it doesn't include facilities for adding metadata. Correct me if I'm wrong! So if you wanted to store snoozing info, you'd have to encode that oddly somewhere -- in a fake email item name? Or as an added mail header (if it's considered polite for clients to add them)?

As I remember IMAP allows to add freeform flags to every message.

IIRC that's how gmail implements its labels.

Re: Mailspring: A fork of Nylas Mail by one of the original authors

#57
post #14
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm explicitly fine with their being an extra server in the mix; this is required for snoozing emails to work properly Out of interest, why would this be so? On the face of it a single client can keep its own snoozing metadata and use a helper process to do the work. I suppose if you want to ensure snoozing works across clients, you'd need a slightly clumsy workaround for the metadata (eg. encoded somewhere in the…

I'm really not sure to be honest. It does seem like you could do something weird with IMAP to make it work, but every implementation I know of uses a server.

If your client(s) handle the snoozing, copy "snoozed" messages to the "Snooze" folder (like "Draft", "Sent") - and check the date/time before copying it back to the "Inbox" as unread? If there's no meta-data readily availabile over IMAP (last modified...), maybe use "Snooze/deliver-at-1205-10102017" - a subfolder for each time slot?

Re: Mailspring: A fork of Nylas Mail by one of the original authors

#58
post #2

Can this so plaintext and operate without contacting a third party? There are a few "features" in this that worry me. One being the Open Tracking. The client looks great and I'd like to use it but I frankly don't know what I'm getting. With Thunderbird other solutions you know what it's doing and how. Some of the features of this are a little strange for someone like me.

Hey! Mailspring maintainer here—the app doesn't support plaintext emails (at least not out of the box), but it's likely we'll add support in the future. A lot of the features in the app, like read receipts and link tracking, are targeted at sales and business folks that send a lot of email and care about it being read. You can use the app without using them though! Unlike Nylas Mail, Mailspring implements all mail sy…

> the app doesn't support plaintext emails (at least not out of the box)

What does that mean - only support gpg/smime encrypted email, or only support the html-part of a multipart message, with no option to edit/send or view the plain/text part? (ie: you can't communicate with any sane mailinglist using this)?

[ed: and does it work with text/plain at all - or does it effect not support email, sending empty text/plain parts?]

Re: Mailspring: A fork of Nylas Mail by one of the original authors

#59
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I remember IMAP allows to add freeform flags to every message.

IIRC that's how gmail implements its labels.

I don't think so, since gmail had labels before they added IMAP support. Also, when accessing gmail via IMAP, you see the labels as IMAP folders, which leads me to believe that they just bolted the IMAP interface on top of whatever backend they use to store messages internally.

Re: Mailspring: A fork of Nylas Mail by one of the original authors

#60

Hey folks! Mailspring maintainer here — glad to see this on Hacker News. For anyone just catching up, here's the tldr on Mailspring: - It's a fork of Nylas Mail with the entire mailsync codebase (~40k lines of JavaScript) replaced with a new C++ core based on Mailcore2. It uses roughly half the RAM and CPU of Nylas Mail and idles with almost zero "CPU Wakes" thanks to new C++11 features, which translates to great bat…

Why the fork/split - or rather what happened to the rest of the team?

I see the code is gpl3 - but am I correct that you can't really run it without access to a closed third-party server?

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