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Probably the biggest thing is that it translates a traditional document-based data structure (mailboxes via IMAP) into a stateless, streaming transactional data

by grinich 11y ago

Probably the biggest thing is that it translates a traditional document-based data structure (mailboxes via IMAP) into a stateless, streaming transactional data structure. This allows N1 to be way more efficient and faster, and only load about 2% of the total data in your mailbox. The sync engine is essentially an abstraction layer for IMAP/SMTP/MIME/etc. This architecture has become pretty common in the past few years: Mailbox, Outlook Mobile (Acompli), Spark, Cloud Magic, Gmailify, and many more run similar systems. Although as far as I know, we're the only one who has open sourced our backend.:https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine We actually released the API layer before N1, and lots of developers use it for their own apps and pay us to run the infrastructure. If you're curious, the full docs here: nylas.com/docs/platform You can pretty easily set up the sync engine and run it yourself, either locally or on a VPC, and connect N1 to that instance. We do this ourselves when developing, and it's the best way to have 100% control over the entire stack. More info here: https://github.com/nylas/N1/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#running-against-open-source-sync-engine https://github.com/nylas/N1/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#runn... There's a bunch of community developers than hang out in our chat room and can also give you some tips for getting started. You can join that here: http://slack-invite.nylas.com/ http://slack-invite.nylas.com/

ultramancool 11y ago
> Probably the biggest thing is that it translates a traditional document-based data structure (mailboxes via IMAP) into a stateless, streaming transactional data structure. So why can't this be done on the client side? Are you telling me that to avoid storing more data on the clients, they should give up their privacy to whoever operates the server? Not like Outlook or Thunderbird take a substantial amount of time to do most operations. Is this a good tradeoff for them? I understand, yes, technically adept users can run the server, but there's still many who won't, who will use your server or someone else's server and be required to make this tradeoff. Of the products you mention - yes, yours is the only one I'd consider and for this very reason, I can run the middle server myself. I just have to think about those people who won't do it though.
- niccaluim 11y ago
  Haven't such users already "given up" their privacy by having their email hosted by a third party?
  - ultramancool 11y ago
    For some, it's adding another party, for others it's introducing a 3rd party at all. Still a problem either way.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >I understand, yes, technically adept users can run the server, but there's still many who won't, who will use your server or someone else's server and be required to make this tradeoff. So? How's that different (if anything it's much better) than using Gmail or Outlook on the cloud? Besides, nobody is "required" to do anything. You can always run some Thunderbird or any other desktop client without a cloud component.

by grinich 11y ago

ultramancool 11y ago

> Probably the biggest thing is that it translates a traditional document-based data structure (mailboxes via IMAP) into a stateless, streaming transactional data structure. So why can't this be done on the client side? Are you telling me that to avoid storing more data on the clients, they should give up their privacy to whoever operates the server? Not like Outlook or Thunderbird take a substantial amount of time to do most operations. Is this a good tradeoff for them? I understand, yes, technically adept users can run the server, but there's still many who won't, who will use your server or someone else's server and be required to make this tradeoff. Of the products you mention - yes, yours is the only one I'd consider and for this very reason, I can run the middle server myself. I just have to think about those people who won't do it though.

niccaluim 11y ago
Haven't such users already "given up" their privacy by having their email hosted by a third party?
- ultramancool 11y ago
  For some, it's adding another party, for others it's introducing a 3rd party at all. Still a problem either way.
coldtea 11y ago
>I understand, yes, technically adept users can run the server, but there's still many who won't, who will use your server or someone else's server and be required to make this tradeoff. So? How's that different (if anything it's much better) than using Gmail or Outlook on the cloud? Besides, nobody is "required" to do anything. You can always run some Thunderbird or any other desktop client without a cloud component.