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One of the simplest things to do in software land is cloning an existing application, all the design work has pretty much been done for you and there is legal p
by _wmd 9y ago
One of the simplest things to do in software land is cloning an existing application, all the design work has pretty much been done for you and there is legal precedent even supporting direct rips of the look and feel of a UI (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Borland_International,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Bor.... ).
While it would be quite straightforward to clone an almost pixel-perfect version of Gmail, there is something in hacker culture that makes this kind of project unattractive. I don't really understand why.
Instead what we end up with when someone starts a new mail app is some half-cocked design that makes sense for that particular user, who is always an engineer, and the result is suboptimal for pretty much anyone else.
So the project fizzles and dies before it even gets started. This happens over and over again even for larger and more visible projects like Mailpile
- zakki 9y agoCorrect link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Borland_International,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._B.... I think you deleted the last "."
- _wmd 9y agoCurious, looks like an HN bug. Try this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Borland_International,_Inc%2e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Bor...
- colechristensen 9y agoYou can clone the UI, but that's not where the work or the value of gmail is. Gmail is _fast_. The browser doesn't reload when you navigate around and when you click on something it gets loaded very quickly. You can't just put a shiny UI in front of an IMAP server and get this sort of functionality, you have to write your own mail server with a rather intense database backing it. I have 70,000 emails spanning a decade (mostly useless) and searching is a breeze. Everything works fine and quick with a huge volume of data. When I send messages they're actually sent in a second or two, when I click next message the next message appears in a fraction of a second. The UI is the frosting on the cake. It's critical that it's very fast, but the underlying mechanics have to be very fast too, and that's not just a manner of copying pixels.
- abrowne 9y ago> You can't just put a shiny UI in front of an IMAP server and get this sort of functionality, Have you tried FastMail? They use Cyrus... > you have to write your own mail server ... but I concede they (FastMail) do sponsor most of Cyrus's development.
- brongondwana 9y agoWe patched Cyrus extensively to provide the cross-folder searching stuff and other non-standard stuff we needed to make our interface fast. It's all in the upstream project now (and in the 3.0 release), so anyone can use it. No standard IMAP client will speak it of course, and we strongly discourage it. We'd prefer people use JMAP, which is documented and working towards becoming a standard. It's also in 3.0 :)
- _wmd 9y agoMailpile went the custom server route, it's not exactly a turing complete problem
- zhte415 9y agoGmail is not fast. It is fast when a huge amount of JS gets loaded and latency times are low. But with high latency? A horrible experience and if it even works I'm grateful. It is pitifully slow when on a limited connection. And the contortionist-like procedures needed to log in from an unfamiliar IP don't make it slow, just largely non responsive.
- andris9 9y agoThis is exactly one of the reasons why I created my own IMAP server that uses MongoDb for mail store - to be able to access the emails fast without IMAP in between https://github.com/wildduck-email/wildduck https://github.com/wildduck-email/wildduck