10 ms·

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

by 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.
bad_user 10y ago
An app that doesn't do anything in the background won't use any resources, doesn't matter if it is built on webkit/electron. Unless you have a huge volume of email, then Nylas should not be power hungry. I for one am grateful for web apps and for webkit/electron desktop apps. Without these taking off, the Linux desktop would be dead for me.
- gnufied 10y ago
  I admit I do have tons of emails, but It would be hard to find a programmer who doesn't have tons of emails these days. What with bunch of github notifications, mailing lists - I am always sitting at more emails than I can possibly handle. Heck even my company-id has lots and lots of emails. Jenkins integrations notifications, travis, cron job failures and what not. I naturally filter both my person and company accounts - so my Inbox is neat and tidy but I think we have reached a point where programmers/system devs/devops people will have to deal with tons of emails. And yeah - I wish Nylas was better at dealing with this.
  - bad_user 10y ago
    I also got lots of JIRA, Jenkins, Travis, Cron job notifications, until I filtered all of them away, straight to trash. If I'm reading emails it means I'm not working or enjoying myself. And I'm not dev-ops, which means I'm not getting payed to keep the systems up and running at night. I'm also practicing my own extreme version of "inbox zero". Whenever my Inbox reaches 100 emails, I select them all, mark as read, then archive. Information loses value as time passes and I figure that if there was anything important in there that hasn't caught my attention and that I did not answer, then one of my colleagues will surely buzz me about it. Worked fine thus far. And because I'm regularly removing noise, it means I have a higher chance of actually noticing important messages. Writing this message reminded me that I've got 40+ unread emails in my Inbox. Marked as read, archived, now it's a solved problem.
beckler 10y ago
Slack is the worse offender on my 2011 MBP. I have to kill it all the time because of runaway resource usage.
- r3bl 10y ago
  Tried ScudCloud? Open source third-party Slack client (also based on Electron): https://github.com/raelgc/scudcloud https://github.com/raelgc/scudcloud Never really compared their resource usage since I'm only in one Slack team 99% of the time and even the official app isn't that horrendous in that use case.
g105b 10y ago
The trouble isn't electron/webkit, it's the tonne of JavaScript frameworks that are used to emulate what HTTP already does very efficiently (pages, links, requests, responses, etc.). One day someone will build a good Electron app.
- suprfnk 10y ago
  > One day someone will build a good Electron app. Visual Studio Code is very good in my opinion. It can be done.
  - gregman1 10y ago
    It's the best electron app possible but it is still a very bad app.
    - azinman2 10y ago
      Why a bad app?
      - criddell 10y ago
        I think gregman1 means bad from a resource consumption point of view. It takes a lot of memory and CPU compared to similar, non-electron based text editors.
        allover 10y ago
        His lazy comment doesn't need rationalising. VS Code is not 'a very bad app'. If you know of a comparable app that uses fewer resources to a significant degree please let us all know and I'm sure we'll all switch.
        e12e 10y ago
        Vim?
chrissnell 10y ago
I think the answer is Mutt. For me, the editor is what stops me from switching. Does it still require you to shell out to an external editor to send a mail? There was an amazing mail client for (of all things) FidoNet back in the 90s called GoldEd that was amazing. It had threaded message display, a great editor, pleasant colors, etc. It was tailored to that network, however. Would love to find something like this for console-based email that has the built-in editor and isn't Pine.
- antihero 10y ago
  There's also http://supmua.org/ http://supmua.org/ though I haven't used it in forever.
- nextos 10y ago
  I am a very loyal mutt user. Coupled with mbsync (for offline imap) and notmuch (for indexing, threading and address completion) I think it's a great MUA. I obsessively measure wakeups/s in powertop for every application I use, and the above setup is very good. If you want to try other things you can look into the mutt-kz fork (which replaces internal search commands with notmuch). There is also a notmuch curses client, but I find mutt+notmuch superior. Mu is a notmuch alternative worth considering. Their emacs client is excellent. Finally, also if you use emacs, gnus is perhaps the most powerful email client ever. Steep learning curve, though. It's a bit different to everything else, as gnus has been built as a news reader. It treats mail as news, but this has some great advantages I think, as long as you can adapt your mindset. Also Org integration. Gnus is the only thing that might make me switch away from mutt.
  - NoGravitas 10y ago
    Gnus is unbeatable for reading mailing lists -- it basically lets you take the many optimizations and workflows developed in various newsreaders for managing large Usenet newsgroups of which you only want to read a small subset, and apply them to mailing lists. For reading mail other than big mailing lists, it's a little awkward. I used it as my main email client for years, but have drifted away.
chrissnell 10y ago
I think the answer is Mutt. For me, the editor is what stops me from switching. Does it still require you to shell out to an external editor to send a mail? There was an amazing mail client for (of all things) FidoNet back in the 90s called GoldEd that was amazing. It had threaded message display, a great editor, pleasant colors, etc. It was tailored to that network, however. Would love to find something like this for console-based email that has the built-in editor and isn't Pine.
wslh 10y ago
Sylpheed? http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/ http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/ screenshots here: http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/screenshot.html http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/screenshot.html
- biokoda 10y ago
  GTK still looks that bad? That is absolutely horrendous.
  - thedjinn 10y ago
    Those screenshots are ten years old.
  - snerbles 10y ago
    Reminds me of the email suite from Netscape Communicator, which eventually evolved into Thunderbird. http://www.sabah.net.my/manuals/en/nscomm/images/messwin.gif http://www.sabah.net.my/manuals/en/nscomm/images/messwin.gif
  - Narishma 10y ago
    I personally vastly prefer that kind of aesthetic to the "modern", flat, web-inspired UIs that waste too much space.
  - AsyncAwait 10y ago
    No, GTK3 looks like this[1] these days[2], these screenshots use an ancient version. [1] - http://i.imgur.com/0eLhrAM.png http://i.imgur.com/0eLhrAM.png [2] - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chergert/gnome-builder-web/master/screenshots/build-bar.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chergert/gnome-builder-web...
    - biokoda 10y ago
      Thanks
- Ianvdl 10y ago
  I don't know how I ever missed this one when I searched for email clients. That looks like such a breath of fresh air: the download is under 10MB and it even supports GPG. I guess I found a replacement for Thunderbird.
ekianjo 10y ago
How about Geary ? Or ClawsMail ?
olalonde 10y ago
Why not use Gmail as an email client?
- dx034 10y ago
  As much as I like the features, Gmail is horrible when it comes to performance. On my chromebook, GMail is the only page that significantly slows down the whole computer. Don't know how they do that, but no other page is able to slow the system down so much as Gmail. Which is somehow funny, since the whole supply chain is controlled by them (App, Browser, OS).
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Probably because then you have to use Gmail, and store all of your private data with Google.
rakoo 10y ago
Is your usage IMAP-centered ? Then I can only recommend Trojita (http://trojita.flaska.net/ http://trojita.flaska.net/). There are a few quirks here and there, but it's pretty much the one application that is started when my computer starts and closed only when it is shut down. Its smart usage of IMAP makes it extremely efficient (doesn't download all of your emails just to display one, doesn't download the entirety of a single mail just to display its subject, ...). The only downside is that your usage has to be pretty close to IMAP for trojita to work best for you.
baby 10y ago
I use Mail.app, Outlook and Nylas on OSX and Nylas is way faster for me. Problem is that it doesn't have an easy way to encrypt/sign mails with PGP. Well the new MacOS Mail.app neither...

by gnufied 10y ago

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.

bad_user 10y ago

An app that doesn't do anything in the background won't use any resources, doesn't matter if it is built on webkit/electron. Unless you have a huge volume of email, then Nylas should not be power hungry. I for one am grateful for web apps and for webkit/electron desktop apps. Without these taking off, the Linux desktop would be dead for me.

gnufied 10y ago
I admit I do have tons of emails, but It would be hard to find a programmer who doesn't have tons of emails these days. What with bunch of github notifications, mailing lists - I am always sitting at more emails than I can possibly handle. Heck even my company-id has lots and lots of emails. Jenkins integrations notifications, travis, cron job failures and what not. I naturally filter both my person and company accounts - so my Inbox is neat and tidy but I think we have reached a point where programmers/system devs/devops people will have to deal with tons of emails. And yeah - I wish Nylas was better at dealing with this.
- bad_user 10y ago
  I also got lots of JIRA, Jenkins, Travis, Cron job notifications, until I filtered all of them away, straight to trash. If I'm reading emails it means I'm not working or enjoying myself. And I'm not dev-ops, which means I'm not getting payed to keep the systems up and running at night. I'm also practicing my own extreme version of "inbox zero". Whenever my Inbox reaches 100 emails, I select them all, mark as read, then archive. Information loses value as time passes and I figure that if there was anything important in there that hasn't caught my attention and that I did not answer, then one of my colleagues will surely buzz me about it. Worked fine thus far. And because I'm regularly removing noise, it means I have a higher chance of actually noticing important messages. Writing this message reminded me that I've got 40+ unread emails in my Inbox. Marked as read, archived, now it's a solved problem.

beckler 10y ago

Slack is the worse offender on my 2011 MBP. I have to kill it all the time because of runaway resource usage.

r3bl 10y ago
Tried ScudCloud? Open source third-party Slack client (also based on Electron): https://github.com/raelgc/scudcloud https://github.com/raelgc/scudcloud Never really compared their resource usage since I'm only in one Slack team 99% of the time and even the official app isn't that horrendous in that use case.

g105b 10y ago

The trouble isn't electron/webkit, it's the tonne of JavaScript frameworks that are used to emulate what HTTP already does very efficiently (pages, links, requests, responses, etc.). One day someone will build a good Electron app.

suprfnk 10y ago
> One day someone will build a good Electron app. Visual Studio Code is very good in my opinion. It can be done.
- gregman1 10y ago
  It's the best electron app possible but it is still a very bad app.
  - azinman2 10y ago
    Why a bad app?
    - criddell 10y ago
      I think gregman1 means bad from a resource consumption point of view. It takes a lot of memory and CPU compared to similar, non-electron based text editors.
      - allover 10y ago
        His lazy comment doesn't need rationalising. VS Code is not 'a very bad app'. If you know of a comparable app that uses fewer resources to a significant degree please let us all know and I'm sure we'll all switch.
        e12e 10y ago
        Vim?

chrissnell 10y ago

I think the answer is Mutt. For me, the editor is what stops me from switching. Does it still require you to shell out to an external editor to send a mail? There was an amazing mail client for (of all things) FidoNet back in the 90s called GoldEd that was amazing. It had threaded message display, a great editor, pleasant colors, etc. It was tailored to that network, however. Would love to find something like this for console-based email that has the built-in editor and isn't Pine.

antihero 10y ago
There's also http://supmua.org/ http://supmua.org/ though I haven't used it in forever.
nextos 10y ago
I am a very loyal mutt user. Coupled with mbsync (for offline imap) and notmuch (for indexing, threading and address completion) I think it's a great MUA. I obsessively measure wakeups/s in powertop for every application I use, and the above setup is very good. If you want to try other things you can look into the mutt-kz fork (which replaces internal search commands with notmuch). There is also a notmuch curses client, but I find mutt+notmuch superior. Mu is a notmuch alternative worth considering. Their emacs client is excellent. Finally, also if you use emacs, gnus is perhaps the most powerful email client ever. Steep learning curve, though. It's a bit different to everything else, as gnus has been built as a news reader. It treats mail as news, but this has some great advantages I think, as long as you can adapt your mindset. Also Org integration. Gnus is the only thing that might make me switch away from mutt.
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  Gnus is unbeatable for reading mailing lists -- it basically lets you take the many optimizations and workflows developed in various newsreaders for managing large Usenet newsgroups of which you only want to read a small subset, and apply them to mailing lists. For reading mail other than big mailing lists, it's a little awkward. I used it as my main email client for years, but have drifted away.

chrissnell 10y ago

wslh 10y ago

Sylpheed? http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/ http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/ screenshots here: http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/screenshot.html http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/screenshot.html

biokoda 10y ago
GTK still looks that bad? That is absolutely horrendous.
- thedjinn 10y ago
  Those screenshots are ten years old.
- snerbles 10y ago
  Reminds me of the email suite from Netscape Communicator, which eventually evolved into Thunderbird. http://www.sabah.net.my/manuals/en/nscomm/images/messwin.gif http://www.sabah.net.my/manuals/en/nscomm/images/messwin.gif
- Narishma 10y ago
  I personally vastly prefer that kind of aesthetic to the "modern", flat, web-inspired UIs that waste too much space.
- AsyncAwait 10y ago
  No, GTK3 looks like this[1] these days[2], these screenshots use an ancient version. [1] - http://i.imgur.com/0eLhrAM.png http://i.imgur.com/0eLhrAM.png [2] - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chergert/gnome-builder-web/master/screenshots/build-bar.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chergert/gnome-builder-web...
  - biokoda 10y ago
    Thanks
Ianvdl 10y ago
I don't know how I ever missed this one when I searched for email clients. That looks like such a breath of fresh air: the download is under 10MB and it even supports GPG. I guess I found a replacement for Thunderbird.

ekianjo 10y ago

How about Geary ? Or ClawsMail ?

olalonde 10y ago

Why not use Gmail as an email client?

dx034 10y ago
As much as I like the features, Gmail is horrible when it comes to performance. On my chromebook, GMail is the only page that significantly slows down the whole computer. Don't know how they do that, but no other page is able to slow the system down so much as Gmail. Which is somehow funny, since the whole supply chain is controlled by them (App, Browser, OS).
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
Probably because then you have to use Gmail, and store all of your private data with Google.

rakoo 10y ago

Is your usage IMAP-centered ? Then I can only recommend Trojita (http://trojita.flaska.net/ http://trojita.flaska.net/). There are a few quirks here and there, but it's pretty much the one application that is started when my computer starts and closed only when it is shut down. Its smart usage of IMAP makes it extremely efficient (doesn't download all of your emails just to display one, doesn't download the entirety of a single mail just to display its subject, ...). The only downside is that your usage has to be pretty close to IMAP for trojita to work best for you.

baby 10y ago

I use Mail.app, Outlook and Nylas on OSX and Nylas is way faster for me. Problem is that it doesn't have an easy way to encrypt/sign mails with PGP. Well the new MacOS Mail.app neither...