22 ms·

Nylas Mail is now free

330 points by jalada 10y ago

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
> Does Nylas Basic support all mail providers? > Today’s release supports Gmail/G Suite, Office365 Exchange, Yahoo! Mail, iCloud, and FastMail. Full support for self-hosted Microsoft Exchange servers is coming soon. I am a little curious why this is so limited. All of the above solutions support IMAP, so why is this so specific? I could understand if they're trying to support, say, Gmail-specific features of your inbox, but a provider like FastMail is pretty much entirely standards-compliant, AFAICT.
- grinich 10y ago
  You actually can add any IMAP server. We just haven't tested all of them, so we're only officially supporting a few at launch. Here's how to do it: http://imgur.com/a/WBdXe http://imgur.com/a/WBdXe (I work at Nylas.)
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    There's actually a surprising number of provider settings in here: https://github.com/nylas/N1/blob/master/internal_packages/onboarding/lib/common-provider-settings.json https://github.com/nylas/N1/blob/master/internal_packages/on... Though there's some odd duplication for FastMail from the last update, I am going to file an issue if I can't find an existing one. :D And thanks for working on open source software!
  - Tepix 10y ago
    So it's closed source, by a US company (subject to NSLs, violating foreigners rights etc) and they get a copy of all my mails? At least that's what it sounds like.
    - romanovcode 10y ago
      Also, it's 7$ per month.
      - jacobmischka 10y ago
        No it isn't, that's the main point in the linked post.
      - OJFord 10y ago
        It's free (Basic), or $12pm (Pro).
    - jacobmischka 10y ago
      It's open source, at least most of it https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine
    - parfe 10y ago
      This is an absurd comment venting your personal gripes with US Law onto someone's product. Which supported service is not already running in the USA and subject to NSLs? In what way is Nylas reducing your privacy?
      - kuschku 10y ago
        > Which supported service is not already running in the USA and subject to NSLs? Quoting >> You actually can add any IMAP server Well, my own server?
        ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        And in that case, you can surely run your own Nylas sync engine server alongside it. Which still adds no new security issues with using Nylas.
        e12e 10y ago
        This comment made me smile. Mostly because it threw a new a new light on what I was already thinking; self-host (love how my phone assume I mean "self-hatred", not "self-host", btw) the whole stack, and avoid new security issues that come with forced hosting in hostile jurisdictions. But take a new daemon that talks a cross product of tls/ssl and three(?) protocols, is supposed to parse random emails, expose it to the Internet - and claim "no new security issues"? Oh, how I whish that could possibly be true.
        ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        It's reasonable to point out this, true. But in the scope of the parent discussion, it was about NSLs from hosting in countries with compromised providers. If you are running your own mail server, you have mostly the same security issues you need to zealously guard against, wherever you put it.
      - Fnoord 10y ago
        It is not absurd. A normal e-mail client doesn't suffer from this issue. Only if the user is hosting their e-mail traffic inside the US. You may think that's true for everyone, but that is your own bubble or tunnel vision. Say, you are working at the EP (European Parlement). You use Mozilla Thunderbird for your e-mail. Some of the e-mail you receive is internal from your party. The SMTP and IMAP server is hosted in your European country. Then, one day you switch from Mozilla Thunderbird to Nylas N1. Suddenly, your e-mail is not hosted in the EU anymore, and the US government can use a NSL to read your private data. You may not give a rat about this (and if you're from US I can fully understand), that's your discretion. Others do, and their viewpoint is not 'absurd'. > Which supported service is not already running in the USA and subject to NSLs? Any SMTP and IMAP server not hosted in the USA. You know, you don't have to use Gmail. (Nylas Mail doesn't suffer from this problem. Only a few features still require Nylas servers.)
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      The cloud service is also open source, like the client. And they specifically said in this blog post they've actually reduced the dependence on the sync engine, the client now connects directly to mail providers, and the cloud service is needed only for specific features of Nylas.
- OJFord 10y ago
  > All of the above solutions support IMAP But I gather they're not using it with them: > It’s now powered by a hybrid sync engine that connects directly to your mail provider (Gmail, Exchange, etc.) The Gmail API, [0] for example, is presumably far preferable to using IMAP. [0] - https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/v1/reference https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/v1/reference
ilSignorCarlo 10y ago
I used Nylas for a while and really liked it, until they they forced everyone to pay $7 per month to use it. Here's the original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11553738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11553738
- romanovcode 10y ago
  Yeah. Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to default OS mail clients.
- Fnoord 10y ago
  > I used Nylas for a while and really liked it, until they they forced everyone to pay $7 per month to use it. Sorry, but that isn't a fair way of describing what occurred. Nylas is a startup, trying to figure out a business model which works for them. You're not yet forced to pay. If you had a Nylas ID back when Pro was announced you got a gratis year of subscription. Now, they released a gratis version once more, called Nylas Mail, which is also open source. The backend is also open source. What this means is that they've adopted a freemium model, and you got approx half a year to still enjoy your Pro license. I haven't done a feature comparison between Mozilla Thunderbird (which I know is not everyone's preference but was my previous cross platform e-mail client), Nylas Mail, and Nylas Pro. If anyone knows one, please share. My main concern is the backend being hosted in US by a US corporation. I don't like my data being hosted by US corporations, on US soil, and I recommend non US-citizens/residents to care about this.
  - karim 10y ago
    Hey – I'm an engineer at Nylas. To add to what you said, the newly released Basic edition does all email syncing client-side, and uses our servers for minimal things (i.e: auth).
    - maglavaitss 10y ago
      How about not using your servers for anything?
janlukacs 10y ago
Does all email still go through their servers?
- lnx01 10y ago
  Apparently on the basic version it connects directly to your mail servers without going through Nylas' cloud. But there are a couple of features which still require the cloud to funtion, snooze etc.
  - sachinag 10y ago
    This is exactly right. (I work at Nylas.)
gnufied 10y ago
I really wanted an Email client for Linux which isn't power hungry but unfortunately last I tried Nylas - it was always top app in `powertop`. An always running app has to be low on power consumption IMO, but because so many apps are being built on top of webkit/electron most of them pretty much suck when it comes to battery usage. Another case in point is slack app. On Linux, it is probably the worst app. :(
- e0m 10y ago
  Electron actually gives you quite a bit of free help for power consumption. The Chromium team goes through great lengths to save power and most of those efforts get reflected in Electron. For example, when it the app gets put in the background it will automatically reduce power usage. When no javascript is running the app consumes effectively no power. Now that being said there's nothing to stop developers from running lots of expensive code or being non-performant with rendering. This is true in any environment. However; having access to the type of flame-charts and profiling tools that come with Chrome / Electron go a really long way to addressing some of these issues. I work at Nylas and we've been heavily focused on reducing the amount of power the app consumes. We've still got a lot of work to do, but at the end of the day processing a ton of email quickly is a fairly expensive operation. In the long run it's possible to offload very expensive work to natively compiled modules. A lot of Electron projects do this and can use Node's native bindings to connect to processes that really need to be fast in native code.
  - ComputerGuru 10y ago
    > The Chromium team goes through great lengths to save power and most of those efforts get reflected in Electron. Citation needed. Battery life with Safari on Mac or IE/Edge on Windows is easily twice that of Chrome/Chromium with the same tabs open. Note: I'm not disputing that the Chrome team has put in significant effort, but rather that the results are anything above mediocre at best.
  - gnufied 10y ago
    I have done some benchmarking of Qt/C++ vs Eletron/node performance while I was working on rbkit-client (https://github.com/code-mancers/rbkit-client https://github.com/code-mancers/rbkit-client) and frankly performance gap is huge for stuff like parsing, processing and anything which is CPU bound. So if Nylas is parsing imap messages then both parsing and rendering difference between a native and eletron app will be big. Fortunately browsers workaround some of this problem by consuming json and stuff - formats browsers can natively parse.
colinramsay 10y ago
I use Nylas but I recently had to move from a 2013 MBP to a 2008 MBP and it shows how unresponsive the UI is. I'd like to use something such as mutt but I find it very unfriendly.
- aylmao 10y ago
  Spark and Polymail are two other options. I'm personally a fan of how easily it's to setup your own keyboard shortcuts in Spark.
  - OJFord 10y ago
    Nylas has a keymaps.json (as well as the UI of course) which is a +1 in my book. Unfortunately other things missing from textual config, such as mail rules (filters).
  - otalp 10y ago
    There are serious privacy concerns[1] with spark though. One alternative to Polymail which is not often discussed is Canary Mail[2], which I've always found to be reliable and good looking. [1]- https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/5grsan/do_not_use_the_spark_email_client_by_readdle/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/5grsan/do_not_use_... [2]- https://canarymail.io https://canarymail.io
    - davidcollantes 10y ago
      Canary isn't fully reliable... yet. I believe Dejalu[0] is more reliable and stable (from one of Sparrow's creator). [0] https://dejalu.me/ https://dejalu.me/
- grinich 10y ago
  Yeah we haven't done much testing on 9 year old laptops. It seems fast enough on machines from the last 3-4 years.
  - toyg 10y ago
lnx01 10y ago
What happened to Linux support? I'm sure I installed it a while back using a deb package downloaded from their site?
- grinich 10y ago
  Coming soon! We just didn't have enough time to QA it. Should be ready in a couple of weeks. (Windows too)
  - jyrkesh 10y ago
    I was a bit bummed to not see Windows support either...especially when there's a screenshot showing how to install on Windows on the download page. I registered for an account thinking that an auto-download had already started, so I was extra disappointed by a "Coming soon" prompt. Just felt a little bait-and-switch-y.
    - shardo 10y ago
      Same, felt dishonest and a bait to get me to signup.
- ac29 10y ago
  I installed it from here: https://github.com/nylas/N1/releases https://github.com/nylas/N1/releases Seems to work just fine with a "basic" account.
carsongross 10y ago
I have a lot of sympathy for companies trying to make decent email apps. The economics are just awful.
- sachinag 10y ago
  Thanks! Thankfully we have both the Nylas Pro offering and the Nylas Cloud APIs as revenue streams. (Seriously, if you're integrating with email, check out the Nylas Cloud APIs: https://nylas.com/cloud https://nylas.com/cloud) (I work at Nylas.)
grinich 10y ago
Hey HN-- I'm the author of this post. Feel free to post questions! We are a very small team building this app. Hopefully you can focus on what's new/good and not what is left to do! :) If you find bugs, please post them here: https://github.com/nylas/n1/issues/ https://github.com/nylas/n1/issues/
- torgoguys 10y ago
  It looks nice. I don't have a mac so I can't test until you finish your release for the other platforms, but my question is about your marketing copy. I almost hate to badger you about this since the product looks nice, but I've got to ask about this line, "...the most powerful email client ever built"? That's a pretty bold claim and it makes my baloney detector go off. My suspicion is that it almost certainly isn't true, expect perhaps in specific areas, but not in the general. (If the suspicion is born out after testing, that makes me trust you less rather than more since it was a broad claim). Do you care to back up that claim in the general sense it seems to be offered? Or, if not, maybe change the copy?
  - PublicEnemy111 10y ago
    Buddy? Is that you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUPDRnUWeBA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUPDRnUWeBA
    - torgoguys 10y ago
      I had forgotten about that part. Thanks for the clip; it's awesome! Call me old-fashioned, but I still think words matter. IANAL so I don't know whether any laws are broken or not by such claims as "worlds greatest coffee", but there are truth in advertising laws on the books in the U.S. https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/advertising-faqs-guide-small-business https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/adv... Even if there weren't, it erodes your integrity if you're not being truthful and the faces of the staff in the video clip are a nice balance between disbelief over Buddy's credulity and shame (particularly on the guy in the foreground). But I may be reading too much into this... (Repeating here that I'm not claiming that Nylas' claim is false; I don't know if it is or isn't).
romanovcode 10y ago
Wait, so Nylas was free, then it was paid and now it's free again? Did I understand correctly?
- OJFord 10y ago
  There's still a paid version (in fact I think this is a price bump?) - but there's now a free tier too.
  - romanovcode 10y ago
    Yeah, maybe if author would charge 7 bucks in total instead of 7 bucks per month he would not have this problem.
    - g105b 10y ago
      $12 per month is steep for an email client.
      - dublinben 10y ago
        Especially one that is getting access to all your data. I would expect it to be one or the other. If I'm paying you, I should have absolute privacy.
        degenerate 10y ago
        Agree.
        termhn 10y ago
        In this day and age, open source tools are usually more private than their closed source counterparts. Usually. But, they also usually require you to do extra configuration or setup to get the privacy benefits
      - OJFord 10y ago
        I agree. I do really like Nylas, it's mostly a pleasure to use. But I'm using it with Gmail which costs me like $2pm for 100GB storage; the core (with I think 20GB?) is free (at the point of use, blah-blah advertising). Is Nylas, the thing through which I access my free/almost-free email really adding $12pm value? I'm not so sure.
pmcl 10y ago
20xfaster than what?
- OJFord 10y ago
  Before.
- apetresc 10y ago
  Than the previous version.
- g105b 10y ago
  0.05 of the speed.
- criddell 10y ago
  An unladen swallow.
  - OJFord 10y ago
    African or European?
AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
After signing up for Nylas Mail, I started getting daily "marketing email" (spam) from them. It really added insult to the injury already caused by the Linux app being horribly slow, buggy, and power-hungry.
- artursapek 10y ago
  Since switching from Mac to Ubuntu I've never yearned for anything more than Thunderbird. It's a perfectly useful client.
- OJFord 10y ago
  You can turn it off in preferences. (Although I guess if you got rid of the app, you'd have to install it again to do that! No unsubscribe link?)
  - creshal 10y ago
    I sent them a scathing email about Nylas violating EU privacy laws years ago, and they only responded to them after I spoke up against the product here on HN. They still haven't told me what data they collected about me, which they are required to by law. It's nice to see that Nylas has learned nothing at all and keeps violating their users' rights. Maybe I should finally sue them.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      I suggest calling your local EU Data Privacy Official, they’ll be able to investigate the issue, and sue Nylas – without you having to get active, and netting the same result (your privacy rights being respected).
yoasif_ 10y ago
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 like a traditional email client to me. https://support.nylas.com/hc/en-us/articles/220974588-How-is-a-Nylas-ID-different-from-my-email-address- https://support.nylas.com/hc/en-us/articles/220974588-How-is...
- SparkyMcUnicorn 10y ago
  It looks like you need to run your own sync engine. https://github.com/nylas/N1/blob/master/CONFIGURATION.md https://github.com/nylas/N1/blob/master/CONFIGURATION.md https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine Edit: Not sure what the latest update changes yet (much of the sync engine is local now?), but this thread looks like it has the latest info so far. https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/3166 https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/3166
- shreve 10y ago
  That's an integral part of how it works. Their sync servers download your email, then sync with your local client. You need that ID to log into their server and access your individual email accounts.
  - OJFord 10y ago
    Not any more, per the post, the performance boost comes from using Gmail's, Exchange's, et al. APIs directly rather than remote IMAP sync + provide REST API for the client. Cloud now used for "much much much much less" [0] - just tracking and stuff. Sync-engine also (?) runs locally now, I'm not totally clear on how this works but there's apparently some currently closed source stuff to become open 'soon', so it should become clearer exactly what's going on. There's also apparently some details to follow on their engineering blog [1]. [0] - https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/3166 https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/3166 [1] - https://nylas.com/blog https://nylas.com/blog
vittore 10y ago
I am not sure how much faster it is right now, but last time I tried N1 just hanged when i plugged in my gmail account ( it just have like 8-10gigs of emails for last god knows how many years). But that is what happen to pretty much any mail client I tried on mac. I end up using only inbox in the browser/android.
- grinich 10y ago
  It is much much much much much faster now. :)
ausjke 10y ago
still using thunderbird that is really, totally free, I recall it is EOL, looking for alternatives.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  Thunderbird is not EOL. Disclaimer: I am a Thunderbird developer.
  - Nadya 10y ago
    It's been over 1 year since a blog post on the Thunderbird blog [0]. Is there any possibility for an update? Maybe something like "All the cool things we worked on in 2016?" (E: I realize 'developer' does not necessarily mean 'part of the Mozilla team developing it/in charge of the blog' but you may have better contact with someone who can get this done than I have. :] ) It was to my understanding that development, outside of security fixes, was more or less halted. Although looking at commits this doesn't seem to be the case [1]. While I use and enjoy Thunderbird, I was also under the impression is was more or less frozen/dead in the water/EOL. [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/ https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/ [1] http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central
    - criddell 10y ago
      Are there new features that you would like to see? For me, I would be super happy if the feature set of Thunderbird were frozen and future updates only fixed bugs and improved performance.
      - hendersoon 10y ago
        Yes, absolutely. Multiline thread lists in particular. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945 This bug has been open for ~14 YEARS. Thunderbird not being actively developed is not exactly a recent development. Reading through this thread I see tons of great MacOS mail clients, but very few Linux and essentially zero Windows. That's why I still use Thunderbird myself-- nothing better has ever come out.
ilSignorCarlo 10y ago
What motivated the decision to give again the option to use Nylas for free? I remember reading that your target were kinds of "email power users", for whom you would offer the ability to create advanced workflow. Did this change?
- sachinag 10y ago
  Free trial versus freemium. If you have a larger base (free tier), even if a small percentage upgrade to paid, then you may make more money. It's what Dropbox and Slack do. (I work at Nylas.)
  - ilSignorCarlo 10y ago
    But Dropbox has always offered the free option. Nylas used to have a free plan, but at some point took it away entirely -which actually meant cutting away a part of their base. I feel like they might change their mind again and remove the free plan.
    - grinich 10y ago
      I previously wrote about why we switched to a paid model last year. https://nylas.com/blog/nylas-pro https://nylas.com/blog/nylas-pro > We already sync several hundred terabytes of data for our users and are adding tens of thousands of new users each month. It’s costing us real dollars. This is now changed with the new architecture in Nylas Mail.
- 0x6c6f6c 10y ago
  Honestly this move is something that might bring me back into it. It opens up an already existing codebase for basic functionality to users who wouldn't be paying otherwise- and perhaps with dependence on this service or interest in more that it offers, they may turn into a subscription user. The same happens for me with ProtonMail. I used the basic service but found that the convenience of a paid plan was enough for me to pay. I was sort of put off by the look of Nylas though, in regards to the lack of a "native" feel. It was convenient, but I was forced into a paywall before I could really get acquainted as someone who isn't a power email user.
water42 10y ago
The emojis in every other line really distracts from the content
rapsey 10y ago
They were charging money for an electron based app?
- wkoszek 10y ago
  Engineers to build software using Electron cost money.
Wintamute 10y ago
And ... their Google auth gateway is down.
- grinich 10y ago
  hm, try again?
ghosttie 10y ago
People need to start saying what their product does on their website
innocentoldguy 10y ago
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 grossly overpriced. 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. I like Nylas, and think it is a good email client, but their pricing suggests they haven't done the market research and competitor analysis required to price themselves strategically and to be successful.
- grinich 10y ago
  > 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.
  - innocentoldguy 10y ago
    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.
artursapek 10y ago
I open the page and have no idea what Nylas is. I click on the logo and I'm taken to the blog home page, where 60% of the screen is the Nylas logo with no subheader telling me what it is. I click on it again and it just refreshes the blog index. No link to nylas.com. How do so many people make the same mistake?
- cwyers 10y ago
  Yeah. You'd think that Nylas would want an announcement like this to reach new users; why not throw a paragraph up front explaining what they are?
  - artursapek 10y ago
    And then they A/B test button colors and wonder why their user base isn't growing fast enough, lol.
- macinjosh 10y ago
  I had the exact same experience. I see this sort of issue commonly. Surprising companies don't just link you back to their homepage when they promote their product with a blog. Seems like an obvious thing to do.
  - dorian-graph 10y ago
    It's incredibly common to not have a link to their homepage—I have no idea why.
    - geekamongus 10y ago
      Some SEO probably decided it was better not to have a blog link back to the home page, and that it was OK for user experience to be sacrificed.
      - schnable 10y ago
        I think it's usually due to limitations/default settings of blog software, which is usually not tightly integrated with the corporate site.
febed 10y ago
The download page is blank for those of us who disable javascript.
BugsJustFindMe 10y ago
I love Nylas, and I've recommended it to people in the past. But what new funding model has enabled this change?
- spang 10y ago
  No new funding model, just better tech! In the new version, we don't sync and store all of your email on our servers, which dramatically drops the cost of running the service.
jbmorgado 10y ago
I do understand the need for a better modern open source email client (not trying to start any kind of client war here), but I really want something that doesn't rely on an external server. 1 - any suggestions for an open source alternative that provides email snoozing on linux (that's a big part of my email processing)? 2 - any good guide on how to self host the Nylas server on my home server (I know they have the project on GitHub but the instructions are a bit too complicated for me, although that's perhaps my sysadmin skills are quite low)?
- ikenator 10y ago
  hey
maglavaitss 10y ago
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!
- timdorr 10y ago
  Well, there are standards for that (RFC 3798 as pointed out above), but this is entirely something in your control so that you can know if an email was read or not. You choose to turn on tracking (on a per-email basis with a default of your choosing) and then get notified whenever that tracking pixel is hit. And the thought that using Electron and being the best email client are incompatible concepts is misguided. There are many quality products built on top of frustratingly bad technology stacks. But if you think about it, Gmail is a web app too. Different wrapper (your browser), same tech stack. And Gmail is pretty good.
- dang 10y ago
  Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13418654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13418654 and marked it off-topic.
skierscott 10y ago
I debated switching but the lack of IMAP support in the free version turned me away. That's the only feature I want Nylas Pro and it's not worth $12/mo.
- karim 10y ago
  Nylas Basic supports generic IMAP accounts. We don't show them in the list of supported providers for QA reasons but you can still add such an account like this: https://imgur.com/a/WBdXe https://imgur.com/a/WBdXe (By the way, feel free to open a Github issue if you're encountering problems syncing your IMAP account: https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/ https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/)
  - newsat13 10y ago
    "QA reasons"? What is that supposed mean?
    - grinich 10y ago
      It means we didn't have enough time to make sure the app is great without bugs for this feature.
      - newsat13 10y ago
        Thanks. How is that done selectively based on the pricing?
  - __david__ 10y ago
    I'm stuck at the "Connect an Email Account" screen. The "Add Custom IMAP Account…" menu item does nothing when I select it.
ryanSrich 10y ago
I'm really enjoying spark (https://sparkmailapp.com https://sparkmailapp.com). I would try Nylas, but snooze is an absolute deal breaker for me. I'd highly recommend making that a free feature.
- davidcollantes 10y ago
  Spark has similar shortcomings: it isn't an email client, it is an email `service.` It relies on a third party service (other than your email provider).
rhaps0dy 10y ago
What are the feature differences between this and Apple's Mail.app? They look the same, on the surface.
- aorth 10y ago
  First of all Apple's Mail.app is a native macOS application. Nylas is based on Electron, the Chromium/NodeJS platform originally designed by GitHub when they were building the Atom text editor. http://electron.atom.io/ http://electron.atom.io/
nkkollaw 10y ago
How is this different than Mail and every other email client in existence? Don't get me wrong, it looks extremely good. However, I visited the site and immediately clicked on the back button. I've been using Google Inbox for a few months, and it radically changed how I handle my many mailboxes. It's not rare now that I actually achieve inbox zero. I would love to see the same amount of innovation that was put into Google Inbox (I think they might have acquired it, though?) in another email client, as I'm always looking to try things out. In Nylas, I see the same things that make dealing with email a pain: folders, the trash and spam being given the same importance as the inbox, etc. It's set up to make it a job to keep your emails organized, while you shouldn't keep them organized, because it's just doesn't matter: just reply and mark as done, snooze until you can reply and mark as done, or discard/mark multiple emails at the same time and go on with your life.
- e0m 10y ago
  Nylas Mail Basic and Nylas Pro are all built on an open source, highly extensible, modern platform. This lets us deliver a very familiar clean experience out of the box while supporting the ability to add an enormous number of very powerful features very quickly. Everyone uses email slightly differently. The plugins allow us to build Salesforce integration, tracking, templates, and mail merge for sales people, while offering an entirely different targeted set for other users. We intentionally "don't move the cheese to far" from existing clients to ease transition. There are a lot of grand ideas for radically different email experiences that fall flat due to their deviation from the core experiences most people expect and need. We instead believe that a handful of targeted features to a targeted group gradually develop into a very different way to interact with email for a very specific use case. (I'm an engineer at Nylas)
  - nkkollaw 10y ago
    Your goals seem to be different than mine (and there's nothing wrong with that). I'd rather lose Salesforce integration, tracking, templates etc. and get the basics right: going through the dozens of emails we get every day. When we reply to emails we feel like we're being productive, but we're just taking time away from our actual job. If there's no easy way to easily differentiate between low priority and important emails—which Google Inbox does automatically by grouping them and letting you dismiss them all at once—you're not helping me. Again, the product looks awesome, this is just my point of view I thought I'd share.
mike-cardwell 10y ago
Anyone got this set up and would be willing to test it against https://www.emailprivacytester.com https://www.emailprivacytester.com and report back?
- aoner 10y ago
  http://imgur.com/a/igrA4 http://imgur.com/a/igrA4
- sachinag 10y ago
  https://www.dropbox.com/s/1hie94302jtxcmx/Screenshot%202017-01-17%2009.35.44.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/1hie94302jtxcmx/Screenshot%202017-... (I work at Nylas.)
  - mike-cardwell 10y ago
    Is this image from before or after selecting "Load Remote Images", assuming Nylas has such a feature? Also, what is the default configuration? To load remote content, or to not?
    - sachinag 10y ago
      Nylas Mail defaults to loading remote images.
      - mike-cardwell 10y ago
        If you configure it to not load remote images, how does it fare against the email privacy tester?
whyohwhai 10y ago
Why is this on hn???
sethhochberg 10y ago
I've tried it, I wanted to love it, but man was the self-hosted sync engine a pain in the ass. Seemed like this was a totally second-class offering from Nylas, there were several known bugs where the client had problems syncing with self-hosted engines and the response was seemingly "we know this is a problem with self-hosted sync engines, we'll try to fix it eventually". A fair enough response to me as a nonpaying user who didn't want their cloud offering, but certainly enough to get me to stop using their open source offerings as my email client.
boduh 10y ago
One bug I found is that open tracking does not seem to be working. Maybe a way to submit feedback right from the app would be useful.
dalanmiller 10y ago
How secure is it if I run the open source parts myself? Are my emails stored unencrypted on the server itself? Also if I access my email largely from my phone, would I have any significant advantages?
tjsix 10y ago
I used Nylas for a while after it was first released and really liked it. Then one day out of the blue I started getting sync errors and it basically stopped working (I've talked to multiple people that this happened to). After spending a couple hours, removing, reconnecting, re-installing, all with no success I gave up and stopped using it (actually attempted using again a month or two later with the same results). Would've been great to have local sync from the beginning as I actually might've paid to use it if I wouldn't of encountered so many issues and lost time trying to fix them. Now it looks like everything that I used to use and like about the app is only included in the paid version, and there's no way I'm going to pay just to see if they fixed the issues.
surdaft 10y ago
I enjoyed Nylas but was unsure about the features being worth enough for a subscription. So I am glad a free version is now available.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
berry_sortoro 10y ago
Better make yourself a Protonmail account and use their website/app. They already start with demanding name and email just for the download. Fuck off! (yeah I know fakes may work but no)
esamy 10y ago
I actually really like it. It's funny how many Electron apps I have been using lately: - Visual Studio Code - Hyper Terminal - Nylas Mail - Slack - Whatsapp Desktop - ...
fritzw 10y ago
Ok I will try it again. I have to say when I used it during the trial, I liked it a lot. Love the inverse theme and the customization that is allowed. My only bad experience was, I ran the OS update that killed their app. It stopped updating with their server, then a week later started taunting me to pay money. It's not their fault the app stopped working. It was just bad timing that left a bitter taste in my mouth. I really do like the app and looking forward to reinstalling and configuring right now.
baby 10y ago
This is amazing. I was using this client all the time until they were not free enough. The price was way too high imo so I stopped using it until today.
petrvojacek 10y ago
Why is it free for Mac and paid for Windows and Linux? I think Mac users are most likely to pay for it.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
samk117 10y ago
...for mac users
NikolaeVarius 10y ago
I've been using Mailbird recently and liked it enough to actually buy it. Does Nylas have anything that might convince me to use it? I guess Open Source is a pretty big one, but I'm talking featureset wise.
locusm 10y ago
Anyone compared this product to say Postbox or any of the other newish clients out there?
ldev 10y ago
Ugh, Emojis are thing for very informal conversations - your friends. Seeing them splattered in somewhat official statement looks so out of place and unprofessional.
cabbeer 10y ago
It seems like they changed their sync model. The client syncs with the email provider directly now instead of using their server. This is great.
fuzzygroup 10y ago
I looked at this app in depth and used it for about 2 days. Overall it is fairly usable and I liked it but the memory usage is killer. On a MacBook Air with 8 gigs, it uses 979 megs out of the gate and bloats up an additional 100 megs by the next morning. More details here: http://fuzzyblog.io/blog/email/2017/01/18/nylas-mail-review.html http://fuzzyblog.io/blog/email/2017/01/18/nylas-mail-review....
- grinich 10y ago
  Hey Scott-- how much of that usage was active memory vs cached/swapped? Do you also run apps like Slack or Google Chrome? How does their memory usage compare? Was this during initial sync (very resource intensive) or at a steady state? (Thanks for the blog post btw!)
painted 10y ago
what is the reason of all this energy usage? It uses more resources than Chrome: https://i.imgur.com/uTjinwO.png https://i.imgur.com/uTjinwO.png

330 points by jalada 10y ago

> Does Nylas Basic support all mail providers? > Today’s release supports Gmail/G Suite, Office365 Exchange, Yahoo! Mail, iCloud, and FastMail. Full support for self-hosted Microsoft Exchange servers is coming soon. I am a little curious why this is so limited. All of the above solutions support IMAP, so why is this so specific? I could understand if they're trying to support, say, Gmail-specific features of your inbox, but a provider like FastMail is pretty much entirely standards-compliant, AFAICT.

grinich 10y ago
You actually can add any IMAP server. We just haven't tested all of them, so we're only officially supporting a few at launch. Here's how to do it: http://imgur.com/a/WBdXe http://imgur.com/a/WBdXe (I work at Nylas.)
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  There's actually a surprising number of provider settings in here: https://github.com/nylas/N1/blob/master/internal_packages/onboarding/lib/common-provider-settings.json https://github.com/nylas/N1/blob/master/internal_packages/on... Though there's some odd duplication for FastMail from the last update, I am going to file an issue if I can't find an existing one. :D And thanks for working on open source software!
- Tepix 10y ago
  So it's closed source, by a US company (subject to NSLs, violating foreigners rights etc) and they get a copy of all my mails? At least that's what it sounds like.
  - romanovcode 10y ago
    Also, it's 7$ per month.
    - jacobmischka 10y ago
      No it isn't, that's the main point in the linked post.
    - OJFord 10y ago
      It's free (Basic), or $12pm (Pro).
  - jacobmischka 10y ago
    It's open source, at least most of it https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine
  - parfe 10y ago
    This is an absurd comment venting your personal gripes with US Law onto someone's product. Which supported service is not already running in the USA and subject to NSLs? In what way is Nylas reducing your privacy?
    - kuschku 10y ago
      > Which supported service is not already running in the USA and subject to NSLs? Quoting >> You actually can add any IMAP server Well, my own server?
      - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        And in that case, you can surely run your own Nylas sync engine server alongside it. Which still adds no new security issues with using Nylas.
        e12e 10y ago
        This comment made me smile. Mostly because it threw a new a new light on what I was already thinking; self-host (love how my phone assume I mean "self-hatred", not "self-host", btw) the whole stack, and avoid new security issues that come with forced hosting in hostile jurisdictions. But take a new daemon that talks a cross product of tls/ssl and three(?) protocols, is supposed to parse random emails, expose it to the Internet - and claim "no new security issues"? Oh, how I whish that could possibly be true.
        ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        It's reasonable to point out this, true. But in the scope of the parent discussion, it was about NSLs from hosting in countries with compromised providers. If you are running your own mail server, you have mostly the same security issues you need to zealously guard against, wherever you put it.
    - Fnoord 10y ago
      It is not absurd. A normal e-mail client doesn't suffer from this issue. Only if the user is hosting their e-mail traffic inside the US. You may think that's true for everyone, but that is your own bubble or tunnel vision. Say, you are working at the EP (European Parlement). You use Mozilla Thunderbird for your e-mail. Some of the e-mail you receive is internal from your party. The SMTP and IMAP server is hosted in your European country. Then, one day you switch from Mozilla Thunderbird to Nylas N1. Suddenly, your e-mail is not hosted in the EU anymore, and the US government can use a NSL to read your private data. You may not give a rat about this (and if you're from US I can fully understand), that's your discretion. Others do, and their viewpoint is not 'absurd'. > Which supported service is not already running in the USA and subject to NSLs? Any SMTP and IMAP server not hosted in the USA. You know, you don't have to use Gmail. (Nylas Mail doesn't suffer from this problem. Only a few features still require Nylas servers.)
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    The cloud service is also open source, like the client. And they specifically said in this blog post they've actually reduced the dependence on the sync engine, the client now connects directly to mail providers, and the cloud service is needed only for specific features of Nylas.
OJFord 10y ago
> All of the above solutions support IMAP But I gather they're not using it with them: > It’s now powered by a hybrid sync engine that connects directly to your mail provider (Gmail, Exchange, etc.) The Gmail API, [0] for example, is presumably far preferable to using IMAP. [0] - https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/v1/reference https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/v1/reference

ilSignorCarlo 10y ago

I used Nylas for a while and really liked it, until they they forced everyone to pay $7 per month to use it. Here's the original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11553738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11553738

romanovcode 10y ago
Yeah. Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to default OS mail clients.
Fnoord 10y ago
> I used Nylas for a while and really liked it, until they they forced everyone to pay $7 per month to use it. Sorry, but that isn't a fair way of describing what occurred. Nylas is a startup, trying to figure out a business model which works for them. You're not yet forced to pay. If you had a Nylas ID back when Pro was announced you got a gratis year of subscription. Now, they released a gratis version once more, called Nylas Mail, which is also open source. The backend is also open source. What this means is that they've adopted a freemium model, and you got approx half a year to still enjoy your Pro license. I haven't done a feature comparison between Mozilla Thunderbird (which I know is not everyone's preference but was my previous cross platform e-mail client), Nylas Mail, and Nylas Pro. If anyone knows one, please share. My main concern is the backend being hosted in US by a US corporation. I don't like my data being hosted by US corporations, on US soil, and I recommend non US-citizens/residents to care about this.
- karim 10y ago
  Hey – I'm an engineer at Nylas. To add to what you said, the newly released Basic edition does all email syncing client-side, and uses our servers for minimal things (i.e: auth).
  - maglavaitss 10y ago
    How about not using your servers for anything?

janlukacs 10y ago

Does all email still go through their servers?

lnx01 10y ago
Apparently on the basic version it connects directly to your mail servers without going through Nylas' cloud. But there are a couple of features which still require the cloud to funtion, snooze etc.
- sachinag 10y ago
  This is exactly right. (I work at Nylas.)

gnufied 10y ago

I really wanted an Email client for Linux which isn't power hungry but unfortunately last I tried Nylas - it was always top app in `powertop`. An always running app has to be low on power consumption IMO, but because so many apps are being built on top of webkit/electron most of them pretty much suck when it comes to battery usage. Another case in point is slack app. On Linux, it is probably the worst app. :(

e0m 10y ago
Electron actually gives you quite a bit of free help for power consumption. The Chromium team goes through great lengths to save power and most of those efforts get reflected in Electron. For example, when it the app gets put in the background it will automatically reduce power usage. When no javascript is running the app consumes effectively no power. Now that being said there's nothing to stop developers from running lots of expensive code or being non-performant with rendering. This is true in any environment. However; having access to the type of flame-charts and profiling tools that come with Chrome / Electron go a really long way to addressing some of these issues. I work at Nylas and we've been heavily focused on reducing the amount of power the app consumes. We've still got a lot of work to do, but at the end of the day processing a ton of email quickly is a fairly expensive operation. In the long run it's possible to offload very expensive work to natively compiled modules. A lot of Electron projects do this and can use Node's native bindings to connect to processes that really need to be fast in native code.
- ComputerGuru 10y ago
  > The Chromium team goes through great lengths to save power and most of those efforts get reflected in Electron. Citation needed. Battery life with Safari on Mac or IE/Edge on Windows is easily twice that of Chrome/Chromium with the same tabs open. Note: I'm not disputing that the Chrome team has put in significant effort, but rather that the results are anything above mediocre at best.
- gnufied 10y ago
  I have done some benchmarking of Qt/C++ vs Eletron/node performance while I was working on rbkit-client (https://github.com/code-mancers/rbkit-client https://github.com/code-mancers/rbkit-client) and frankly performance gap is huge for stuff like parsing, processing and anything which is CPU bound. So if Nylas is parsing imap messages then both parsing and rendering difference between a native and eletron app will be big. Fortunately browsers workaround some of this problem by consuming json and stuff - formats browsers can natively parse.

colinramsay 10y ago

I use Nylas but I recently had to move from a 2013 MBP to a 2008 MBP and it shows how unresponsive the UI is. I'd like to use something such as mutt but I find it very unfriendly.

aylmao 10y ago
Spark and Polymail are two other options. I'm personally a fan of how easily it's to setup your own keyboard shortcuts in Spark.
- OJFord 10y ago
  Nylas has a keymaps.json (as well as the UI of course) which is a +1 in my book. Unfortunately other things missing from textual config, such as mail rules (filters).
- otalp 10y ago
  There are serious privacy concerns[1] with spark though. One alternative to Polymail which is not often discussed is Canary Mail[2], which I've always found to be reliable and good looking. [1]- https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/5grsan/do_not_use_the_spark_email_client_by_readdle/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/5grsan/do_not_use_... [2]- https://canarymail.io https://canarymail.io
  - davidcollantes 10y ago
    Canary isn't fully reliable... yet. I believe Dejalu[0] is more reliable and stable (from one of Sparrow's creator). [0] https://dejalu.me/ https://dejalu.me/
grinich 10y ago
Yeah we haven't done much testing on 9 year old laptops. It seems fast enough on machines from the last 3-4 years.
- toyg 10y ago

lnx01 10y ago

What happened to Linux support? I'm sure I installed it a while back using a deb package downloaded from their site?

grinich 10y ago
Coming soon! We just didn't have enough time to QA it. Should be ready in a couple of weeks. (Windows too)
- jyrkesh 10y ago
  I was a bit bummed to not see Windows support either...especially when there's a screenshot showing how to install on Windows on the download page. I registered for an account thinking that an auto-download had already started, so I was extra disappointed by a "Coming soon" prompt. Just felt a little bait-and-switch-y.
  - shardo 10y ago
    Same, felt dishonest and a bait to get me to signup.
ac29 10y ago
I installed it from here: https://github.com/nylas/N1/releases https://github.com/nylas/N1/releases Seems to work just fine with a "basic" account.

carsongross 10y ago

I have a lot of sympathy for companies trying to make decent email apps. The economics are just awful.

sachinag 10y ago
Thanks! Thankfully we have both the Nylas Pro offering and the Nylas Cloud APIs as revenue streams. (Seriously, if you're integrating with email, check out the Nylas Cloud APIs: https://nylas.com/cloud https://nylas.com/cloud) (I work at Nylas.)

grinich 10y ago

Hey HN-- I'm the author of this post. Feel free to post questions! We are a very small team building this app. Hopefully you can focus on what's new/good and not what is left to do! :) If you find bugs, please post them here: https://github.com/nylas/n1/issues/ https://github.com/nylas/n1/issues/

torgoguys 10y ago
It looks nice. I don't have a mac so I can't test until you finish your release for the other platforms, but my question is about your marketing copy. I almost hate to badger you about this since the product looks nice, but I've got to ask about this line, "...the most powerful email client ever built"? That's a pretty bold claim and it makes my baloney detector go off. My suspicion is that it almost certainly isn't true, expect perhaps in specific areas, but not in the general. (If the suspicion is born out after testing, that makes me trust you less rather than more since it was a broad claim). Do you care to back up that claim in the general sense it seems to be offered? Or, if not, maybe change the copy?
- PublicEnemy111 10y ago
  Buddy? Is that you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUPDRnUWeBA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUPDRnUWeBA
  - torgoguys 10y ago
    I had forgotten about that part. Thanks for the clip; it's awesome! Call me old-fashioned, but I still think words matter. IANAL so I don't know whether any laws are broken or not by such claims as "worlds greatest coffee", but there are truth in advertising laws on the books in the U.S. https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/advertising-faqs-guide-small-business https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/adv... Even if there weren't, it erodes your integrity if you're not being truthful and the faces of the staff in the video clip are a nice balance between disbelief over Buddy's credulity and shame (particularly on the guy in the foreground). But I may be reading too much into this... (Repeating here that I'm not claiming that Nylas' claim is false; I don't know if it is or isn't).

romanovcode 10y ago

Wait, so Nylas was free, then it was paid and now it's free again? Did I understand correctly?

OJFord 10y ago
There's still a paid version (in fact I think this is a price bump?) - but there's now a free tier too.
- romanovcode 10y ago
  Yeah, maybe if author would charge 7 bucks in total instead of 7 bucks per month he would not have this problem.
  - g105b 10y ago
    $12 per month is steep for an email client.
    - dublinben 10y ago
      Especially one that is getting access to all your data. I would expect it to be one or the other. If I'm paying you, I should have absolute privacy.
      - degenerate 10y ago
        Agree.
      - termhn 10y ago
        In this day and age, open source tools are usually more private than their closed source counterparts. Usually. But, they also usually require you to do extra configuration or setup to get the privacy benefits
    - OJFord 10y ago
      I agree. I do really like Nylas, it's mostly a pleasure to use. But I'm using it with Gmail which costs me like $2pm for 100GB storage; the core (with I think 20GB?) is free (at the point of use, blah-blah advertising). Is Nylas, the thing through which I access my free/almost-free email really adding $12pm value? I'm not so sure.

pmcl 10y ago

20xfaster than what?

OJFord 10y ago
Before.
apetresc 10y ago
Than the previous version.
g105b 10y ago
0.05 of the speed.
criddell 10y ago
An unladen swallow.
- OJFord 10y ago
  African or European?

AndrewUnmuted 10y ago

After signing up for Nylas Mail, I started getting daily "marketing email" (spam) from them. It really added insult to the injury already caused by the Linux app being horribly slow, buggy, and power-hungry.

artursapek 10y ago
Since switching from Mac to Ubuntu I've never yearned for anything more than Thunderbird. It's a perfectly useful client.
OJFord 10y ago
You can turn it off in preferences. (Although I guess if you got rid of the app, you'd have to install it again to do that! No unsubscribe link?)
- creshal 10y ago
  I sent them a scathing email about Nylas violating EU privacy laws years ago, and they only responded to them after I spoke up against the product here on HN. They still haven't told me what data they collected about me, which they are required to by law. It's nice to see that Nylas has learned nothing at all and keeps violating their users' rights. Maybe I should finally sue them.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    I suggest calling your local EU Data Privacy Official, they’ll be able to investigate the issue, and sue Nylas – without you having to get active, and netting the same result (your privacy rights being respected).

yoasif_ 10y ago

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 like a traditional email client to me. https://support.nylas.com/hc/en-us/articles/220974588-How-is-a-Nylas-ID-different-from-my-email-address- https://support.nylas.com/hc/en-us/articles/220974588-How-is...

SparkyMcUnicorn 10y ago
It looks like you need to run your own sync engine. https://github.com/nylas/N1/blob/master/CONFIGURATION.md https://github.com/nylas/N1/blob/master/CONFIGURATION.md https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine Edit: Not sure what the latest update changes yet (much of the sync engine is local now?), but this thread looks like it has the latest info so far. https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/3166 https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/3166
shreve 10y ago
That's an integral part of how it works. Their sync servers download your email, then sync with your local client. You need that ID to log into their server and access your individual email accounts.
- OJFord 10y ago
  Not any more, per the post, the performance boost comes from using Gmail's, Exchange's, et al. APIs directly rather than remote IMAP sync + provide REST API for the client. Cloud now used for "much much much much less" [0] - just tracking and stuff. Sync-engine also (?) runs locally now, I'm not totally clear on how this works but there's apparently some currently closed source stuff to become open 'soon', so it should become clearer exactly what's going on. There's also apparently some details to follow on their engineering blog [1]. [0] - https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/3166 https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/3166 [1] - https://nylas.com/blog https://nylas.com/blog

vittore 10y ago

I am not sure how much faster it is right now, but last time I tried N1 just hanged when i plugged in my gmail account ( it just have like 8-10gigs of emails for last god knows how many years). But that is what happen to pretty much any mail client I tried on mac. I end up using only inbox in the browser/android.

grinich 10y ago
It is much much much much much faster now. :)

ausjke 10y ago

still using thunderbird that is really, totally free, I recall it is EOL, looking for alternatives.

jcranmer 10y ago
Thunderbird is not EOL. Disclaimer: I am a Thunderbird developer.
- Nadya 10y ago
  It's been over 1 year since a blog post on the Thunderbird blog [0]. Is there any possibility for an update? Maybe something like "All the cool things we worked on in 2016?" (E: I realize 'developer' does not necessarily mean 'part of the Mozilla team developing it/in charge of the blog' but you may have better contact with someone who can get this done than I have. :] ) It was to my understanding that development, outside of security fixes, was more or less halted. Although looking at commits this doesn't seem to be the case [1]. While I use and enjoy Thunderbird, I was also under the impression is was more or less frozen/dead in the water/EOL. [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/ https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/ [1] http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central
  - criddell 10y ago
    Are there new features that you would like to see? For me, I would be super happy if the feature set of Thunderbird were frozen and future updates only fixed bugs and improved performance.
    - hendersoon 10y ago
      Yes, absolutely. Multiline thread lists in particular. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945 This bug has been open for ~14 YEARS. Thunderbird not being actively developed is not exactly a recent development. Reading through this thread I see tons of great MacOS mail clients, but very few Linux and essentially zero Windows. That's why I still use Thunderbird myself-- nothing better has ever come out.

ilSignorCarlo 10y ago

What motivated the decision to give again the option to use Nylas for free? I remember reading that your target were kinds of "email power users", for whom you would offer the ability to create advanced workflow. Did this change?

sachinag 10y ago
Free trial versus freemium. If you have a larger base (free tier), even if a small percentage upgrade to paid, then you may make more money. It's what Dropbox and Slack do. (I work at Nylas.)
- ilSignorCarlo 10y ago
  But Dropbox has always offered the free option. Nylas used to have a free plan, but at some point took it away entirely -which actually meant cutting away a part of their base. I feel like they might change their mind again and remove the free plan.
  - grinich 10y ago
    I previously wrote about why we switched to a paid model last year. https://nylas.com/blog/nylas-pro https://nylas.com/blog/nylas-pro > We already sync several hundred terabytes of data for our users and are adding tens of thousands of new users each month. It’s costing us real dollars. This is now changed with the new architecture in Nylas Mail.
0x6c6f6c 10y ago
Honestly this move is something that might bring me back into it. It opens up an already existing codebase for basic functionality to users who wouldn't be paying otherwise- and perhaps with dependence on this service or interest in more that it offers, they may turn into a subscription user. The same happens for me with ProtonMail. I used the basic service but found that the convenience of a paid plan was enough for me to pay. I was sort of put off by the look of Nylas though, in regards to the lack of a "native" feel. It was convenient, but I was forced into a paywall before I could really get acquainted as someone who isn't a power email user.

water42 10y ago

The emojis in every other line really distracts from the content

rapsey 10y ago

They were charging money for an electron based app?

wkoszek 10y ago
Engineers to build software using Electron cost money.

Wintamute 10y ago

And ... their Google auth gateway is down.

grinich 10y ago
hm, try again?

ghosttie 10y ago

People need to start saying what their product does on their website

innocentoldguy 10y ago

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 grossly overpriced. 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. I like Nylas, and think it is a good email client, but their pricing suggests they haven't done the market research and competitor analysis required to price themselves strategically and to be successful.

grinich 10y ago
> 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.
- innocentoldguy 10y ago
  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.

artursapek 10y ago

I open the page and have no idea what Nylas is. I click on the logo and I'm taken to the blog home page, where 60% of the screen is the Nylas logo with no subheader telling me what it is. I click on it again and it just refreshes the blog index. No link to nylas.com. How do so many people make the same mistake?

cwyers 10y ago
Yeah. You'd think that Nylas would want an announcement like this to reach new users; why not throw a paragraph up front explaining what they are?
- artursapek 10y ago
  And then they A/B test button colors and wonder why their user base isn't growing fast enough, lol.
macinjosh 10y ago
I had the exact same experience. I see this sort of issue commonly. Surprising companies don't just link you back to their homepage when they promote their product with a blog. Seems like an obvious thing to do.
- dorian-graph 10y ago
  It's incredibly common to not have a link to their homepage—I have no idea why.
  - geekamongus 10y ago
    Some SEO probably decided it was better not to have a blog link back to the home page, and that it was OK for user experience to be sacrificed.
    - schnable 10y ago
      I think it's usually due to limitations/default settings of blog software, which is usually not tightly integrated with the corporate site.

febed 10y ago

The download page is blank for those of us who disable javascript.

BugsJustFindMe 10y ago

I love Nylas, and I've recommended it to people in the past. But what new funding model has enabled this change?

spang 10y ago
No new funding model, just better tech! In the new version, we don't sync and store all of your email on our servers, which dramatically drops the cost of running the service.

jbmorgado 10y ago

I do understand the need for a better modern open source email client (not trying to start any kind of client war here), but I really want something that doesn't rely on an external server. 1 - any suggestions for an open source alternative that provides email snoozing on linux (that's a big part of my email processing)? 2 - any good guide on how to self host the Nylas server on my home server (I know they have the project on GitHub but the instructions are a bit too complicated for me, although that's perhaps my sysadmin skills are quite low)?

ikenator 10y ago
hey

maglavaitss 10y ago

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!

timdorr 10y ago
Well, there are standards for that (RFC 3798 as pointed out above), but this is entirely something in your control so that you can know if an email was read or not. You choose to turn on tracking (on a per-email basis with a default of your choosing) and then get notified whenever that tracking pixel is hit. And the thought that using Electron and being the best email client are incompatible concepts is misguided. There are many quality products built on top of frustratingly bad technology stacks. But if you think about it, Gmail is a web app too. Different wrapper (your browser), same tech stack. And Gmail is pretty good.
dang 10y ago
Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13418654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13418654 and marked it off-topic.

skierscott 10y ago

I debated switching but the lack of IMAP support in the free version turned me away. That's the only feature I want Nylas Pro and it's not worth $12/mo.

karim 10y ago
Nylas Basic supports generic IMAP accounts. We don't show them in the list of supported providers for QA reasons but you can still add such an account like this: https://imgur.com/a/WBdXe https://imgur.com/a/WBdXe (By the way, feel free to open a Github issue if you're encountering problems syncing your IMAP account: https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/ https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/)
- newsat13 10y ago
  "QA reasons"? What is that supposed mean?
  - grinich 10y ago
    It means we didn't have enough time to make sure the app is great without bugs for this feature.
    - newsat13 10y ago
      Thanks. How is that done selectively based on the pricing?
- __david__ 10y ago
  I'm stuck at the "Connect an Email Account" screen. The "Add Custom IMAP Account…" menu item does nothing when I select it.

ryanSrich 10y ago

I'm really enjoying spark (https://sparkmailapp.com https://sparkmailapp.com). I would try Nylas, but snooze is an absolute deal breaker for me. I'd highly recommend making that a free feature.

davidcollantes 10y ago
Spark has similar shortcomings: it isn't an email client, it is an email `service.` It relies on a third party service (other than your email provider).

rhaps0dy 10y ago

What are the feature differences between this and Apple's Mail.app? They look the same, on the surface.

aorth 10y ago
First of all Apple's Mail.app is a native macOS application. Nylas is based on Electron, the Chromium/NodeJS platform originally designed by GitHub when they were building the Atom text editor. http://electron.atom.io/ http://electron.atom.io/

nkkollaw 10y ago

How is this different than Mail and every other email client in existence? Don't get me wrong, it looks extremely good. However, I visited the site and immediately clicked on the back button. I've been using Google Inbox for a few months, and it radically changed how I handle my many mailboxes. It's not rare now that I actually achieve inbox zero. I would love to see the same amount of innovation that was put into Google Inbox (I think they might have acquired it, though?) in another email client, as I'm always looking to try things out. In Nylas, I see the same things that make dealing with email a pain: folders, the trash and spam being given the same importance as the inbox, etc. It's set up to make it a job to keep your emails organized, while you shouldn't keep them organized, because it's just doesn't matter: just reply and mark as done, snooze until you can reply and mark as done, or discard/mark multiple emails at the same time and go on with your life.

e0m 10y ago
Nylas Mail Basic and Nylas Pro are all built on an open source, highly extensible, modern platform. This lets us deliver a very familiar clean experience out of the box while supporting the ability to add an enormous number of very powerful features very quickly. Everyone uses email slightly differently. The plugins allow us to build Salesforce integration, tracking, templates, and mail merge for sales people, while offering an entirely different targeted set for other users. We intentionally "don't move the cheese to far" from existing clients to ease transition. There are a lot of grand ideas for radically different email experiences that fall flat due to their deviation from the core experiences most people expect and need. We instead believe that a handful of targeted features to a targeted group gradually develop into a very different way to interact with email for a very specific use case. (I'm an engineer at Nylas)
- nkkollaw 10y ago
  Your goals seem to be different than mine (and there's nothing wrong with that). I'd rather lose Salesforce integration, tracking, templates etc. and get the basics right: going through the dozens of emails we get every day. When we reply to emails we feel like we're being productive, but we're just taking time away from our actual job. If there's no easy way to easily differentiate between low priority and important emails—which Google Inbox does automatically by grouping them and letting you dismiss them all at once—you're not helping me. Again, the product looks awesome, this is just my point of view I thought I'd share.

mike-cardwell 10y ago

Anyone got this set up and would be willing to test it against https://www.emailprivacytester.com https://www.emailprivacytester.com and report back?

aoner 10y ago
http://imgur.com/a/igrA4 http://imgur.com/a/igrA4
sachinag 10y ago
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1hie94302jtxcmx/Screenshot%202017-01-17%2009.35.44.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/1hie94302jtxcmx/Screenshot%202017-... (I work at Nylas.)
- mike-cardwell 10y ago
  Is this image from before or after selecting "Load Remote Images", assuming Nylas has such a feature? Also, what is the default configuration? To load remote content, or to not?
  - sachinag 10y ago
    Nylas Mail defaults to loading remote images.
    - mike-cardwell 10y ago
      If you configure it to not load remote images, how does it fare against the email privacy tester?

whyohwhai 10y ago

Why is this on hn???

sethhochberg 10y ago

I've tried it, I wanted to love it, but man was the self-hosted sync engine a pain in the ass. Seemed like this was a totally second-class offering from Nylas, there were several known bugs where the client had problems syncing with self-hosted engines and the response was seemingly "we know this is a problem with self-hosted sync engines, we'll try to fix it eventually". A fair enough response to me as a nonpaying user who didn't want their cloud offering, but certainly enough to get me to stop using their open source offerings as my email client.

boduh 10y ago

One bug I found is that open tracking does not seem to be working. Maybe a way to submit feedback right from the app would be useful.

dalanmiller 10y ago

How secure is it if I run the open source parts myself? Are my emails stored unencrypted on the server itself? Also if I access my email largely from my phone, would I have any significant advantages?

tjsix 10y ago

I used Nylas for a while after it was first released and really liked it. Then one day out of the blue I started getting sync errors and it basically stopped working (I've talked to multiple people that this happened to). After spending a couple hours, removing, reconnecting, re-installing, all with no success I gave up and stopped using it (actually attempted using again a month or two later with the same results). Would've been great to have local sync from the beginning as I actually might've paid to use it if I wouldn't of encountered so many issues and lost time trying to fix them. Now it looks like everything that I used to use and like about the app is only included in the paid version, and there's no way I'm going to pay just to see if they fixed the issues.

surdaft 10y ago

I enjoyed Nylas but was unsure about the features being worth enough for a subscription. So I am glad a free version is now available.

deleted 10y ago

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berry_sortoro 10y ago

Better make yourself a Protonmail account and use their website/app. They already start with demanding name and email just for the download. Fuck off! (yeah I know fakes may work but no)

esamy 10y ago

I actually really like it. It's funny how many Electron apps I have been using lately: - Visual Studio Code - Hyper Terminal - Nylas Mail - Slack - Whatsapp Desktop - ...

fritzw 10y ago

Ok I will try it again. I have to say when I used it during the trial, I liked it a lot. Love the inverse theme and the customization that is allowed. My only bad experience was, I ran the OS update that killed their app. It stopped updating with their server, then a week later started taunting me to pay money. It's not their fault the app stopped working. It was just bad timing that left a bitter taste in my mouth. I really do like the app and looking forward to reinstalling and configuring right now.

baby 10y ago

This is amazing. I was using this client all the time until they were not free enough. The price was way too high imo so I stopped using it until today.

petrvojacek 10y ago

Why is it free for Mac and paid for Windows and Linux? I think Mac users are most likely to pay for it.

deleted 10y ago

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samk117 10y ago

...for mac users

NikolaeVarius 10y ago

I've been using Mailbird recently and liked it enough to actually buy it. Does Nylas have anything that might convince me to use it? I guess Open Source is a pretty big one, but I'm talking featureset wise.

locusm 10y ago

Anyone compared this product to say Postbox or any of the other newish clients out there?

ldev 10y ago

Ugh, Emojis are thing for very informal conversations - your friends. Seeing them splattered in somewhat official statement looks so out of place and unprofessional.

cabbeer 10y ago

It seems like they changed their sync model. The client syncs with the email provider directly now instead of using their server. This is great.

fuzzygroup 10y ago

I looked at this app in depth and used it for about 2 days. Overall it is fairly usable and I liked it but the memory usage is killer. On a MacBook Air with 8 gigs, it uses 979 megs out of the gate and bloats up an additional 100 megs by the next morning. More details here: http://fuzzyblog.io/blog/email/2017/01/18/nylas-mail-review.html http://fuzzyblog.io/blog/email/2017/01/18/nylas-mail-review....

grinich 10y ago
Hey Scott-- how much of that usage was active memory vs cached/swapped? Do you also run apps like Slack or Google Chrome? How does their memory usage compare? Was this during initial sync (very resource intensive) or at a steady state? (Thanks for the blog post btw!)

painted 10y ago

what is the reason of all this energy usage? It uses more resources than Chrome: https://i.imgur.com/uTjinwO.png https://i.imgur.com/uTjinwO.png