Nylas is a beautiful app and, by design, easily extensible. As a result, I think that it has a better chance than other open source mail clients of providing an

Nylas is a beautiful app and, by design, easily extensible. As a result, I think that it has a better chance than other open source mail clients of providing an experience that's as polished and complete as Gmail. Doing that requires a bunch of affordances like calendar integration, Youtube previews, warning if you forgot to add an attachment, 10-second "undo send", and so on. Letting the community write those as add-ons seems smart. To really make Nylas compelling over Gmail, and also to replace Thunderbird, here's what I think needs to happen: 1. Bundle Sync Engine and N1 into a single program. 2. Implement local search. Faster than IMAP search and doesn't rely on a network connection. (As it stands, Nylas requires an internet connection to work. As long as that's the case it's no Thunderbird replacement at all, and will have a v hard time winning over Gmail users.) The good news is that both Sync Engine and N1 are GPLv3, so it's totally possible. The bad news is complexity: * Sync Engine is written in Python and uses MySQL for persistence * N1 is built with Coffeescript + React + Electron, and uses SQLite for persistence So we need to simplify. We can't just bundle all that into an app, it would be a monstrosity. Here's how I think we could do it instead: * Use Sync Engine as the basis for a Node library for IMAP sync * Use the SQLite full-text feature (fts4) for search That way you'd have a single Electron app with all persistence in SQLite. I'm prototyping this now. Thoughts? Let me know if you have ideas or want to help!