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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

#581

Post by crystaln »

muszc-master wrote: post #11
geekuillaume wrote: post #8

What is the reason to build it as a native software instead of a webapp? Seems like a lot of email clients are now webapps and I can see the arguments why.

Because of Privacy concerns! The thinking is that few people would enter their email and email password on a 3rd-party website, having it as a downloadable software ensures the privacy of users

This doesn't make any sense as a motivation, let alone the primary motivation, to build a native app in the age of web apps. There's no real difference in security here and the user perception gain is marginal and ephemeral.

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

#582

Post by stephenr »

crystaln wrote: post #580
stephenr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only tells you what your browser sends to their server. It doesn't tell you what connections their server makes.

Nothing will. The vulnerability of what happens to your data after it is sent to a third party is the same for any app, web or native. The biggest difference is that it's way easier to see where you're data is being sent in a browser, since it has built in tools. It's very hard to monitor native app traffic that is sent over SSL.

When the app is native there no requirement for a third party server.

You, Your mail (provider) server.

Vs

You, the server hosting the web app, your mail (provider) server.

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

#583

Post by cerberusss »

theyinwhy wrote: post #529
jacquesm wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile Imap clients are a thing. And gmail isn't your mail, it's Google's mail. A mailserver that you host yourself is your mail.

This is often heard but I don't think there is legal justification for it. It is pretty clear that it is your data, hosted on someone else's server that you pay by looking at ads and allowing them to read your mail. It is your mail nevertheless. Additionally, if we are really picky, only mail written by you is your mail. All mail received is normally copyrighted by someone else and belongs to the sender or/and his/he…

> All mail received is normally copyrighted by someone else and belongs to the sender or/and his/her company

Source please? Shouldn't there be a creative aspect about it? Which is probably not the case for lots of emails.

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

#584

Post by DrScump »

lisper wrote: post #452
untog wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what am I endorsing? I haven't tried the product myself yet. It's not unethical, but it's also simply not something I'm prepared to do - I will not recommend something to anyone without having been able to evaluate it myself first.

This. In a world where publishing is essentially free, reputation is an extremely valuable commodity. The ask here is not trivial.

  reputation is an extremely valuable commodity
But how does pre-use endorsement have any actual value toward a positive reputation? Did the definition of "reputation" change when I wasn't watching?

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

#585

Post by newscracker »

zimpenfish wrote: post #79
newscracker wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, an additional concern is being tied to this client after using it. Every offline mail client has its own storage formats (mbox, maildir, SQLite, another database or a mix of these), and so moving across clients is not an easy exercise unless the clients support multiple formats for import. I would also like to see how the client behaves when one single mailbox is more than 20GB in size, with at least one of t…

> Claims that searches happen in milliseconds need to state the size of the mailbox I'd honestly outsource the indexing and searching to something like mairix which is designed purely for this purpose. (On my 4.5GB Maildir, 57 folders, 111k emails, mairix takes 205s to index from scratch. Incremental updates are <5s. Worst search I've yet done took 0.5s to return 13k hits for 'bank'.)

I had a very quick look at the mairix repo on GitHub, and I'm not sure what to make of at least one pull request (about large mailboxes) that has no comments on it for a few years. Though it's an old project, I just wanted to confirm that it's still good enough to use without too many issues and also check if you're using the main one [1] or any of the other forks. [2]

[1]: https://github.com/rc0/mairix/

[2]: https://github.com/rc0/mairix/network

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

#586

Post by ekianjo »

RussianCow wrote: post #542
majewsky wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://qt.io

Qt also isn't truly native (it renders its own UI components) and shares many of Electron's drawbacks, so it's only marginally better (and means you have to learn an entirely new platform if you're already familiar with web dev).

> marginally better

Not in terms of resources (CPU/RAM). It's way better than Electron.

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

#588

Post by wsy »

stephenr wrote: post #478
wsy wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is not correct. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application , Web applications are applications running in a Web browser. The term was introduced to distinguish Web _apps_ from Web _pages_, not to distinguish _Web_ apps from _native_ apps.

> Web applications are applications running in a Web browser And Electron embeds an instance of Chromium, to provide a webview for the 'application' interface. How is that not a web app? It's written in HTML, CSS and JS, it runs inside a browser. Just because the user can't choose the browser doesn't mean shit. Users couldn't choose the browser to run a lot of Microsoft-stack Web Apps in the early 2000's either, beca…

It's not a Web browser because you can't browse the Web with it.

In my view, Electron does not embed a browser, it does embed a HTML/CSS/JS renderer.

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

#589

Post by zimpenfish »

newscracker wrote: post #585
zimpenfish wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claims that searches happen in milliseconds need to state the size of the mailbox I'd honestly outsource the indexing and searching to something like mairix which is designed purely for this purpose. (On my 4.5GB Maildir, 57 folders, 111k emails, mairix takes 205s to index from scratch. Incremental updates are <5s. Worst search I've yet done took 0.5s to return 13k hits for 'bank'.)

I had a very quick look at the mairix repo on GitHub, and I'm not sure what to make of at least one pull request (about large mailboxes) that has no comments on it for a few years. Though it's an old project, I just wanted to confirm that it's still good enough to use without too many issues and also check if you're using the main one [1] or any of the other forks. [2] [1]: https://github.com/rc0/mairix/ [2]: https:/…

Couldn't tell you offhand, sorry - I'm using the Arch Linux community package which doesn't explicitly state where it's coming from. Currently v0.24-1 if that helps figure it out.

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

#590

Post by lisper »

DrScump wrote: post #584
lisper wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. In a world where publishing is essentially free, reputation is an extremely valuable commodity. The ask here is not trivial.

reputation is an extremely valuable commodity But how does pre-use endorsement have any actual value toward a positive reputation ? Did the definition of "reputation" change when I wasn't watching?

Whenever anyone makes a recommendation you have to ask yourself: is this person making this recommendation because they have actually investigated the thing they are recommending and found it to have merit, or are they doing it simply because they are getting some personal benefit from making the recommendation. I hope I don't have to explain why a recommendation has much more value in the former case than the latter.

This may not matter much if the thing you're recommending is an email client. But it matters a lot if the thing you're recommending is, say, an investment in a startup company. It also matters a lot if you're, say, Amazon or Yelp or TripAdvisor and a big part of your stock in trade is an enormous volume of product recommendations.

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