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I used and loved Nylas Mail (aka N1), so I'm going to be taking a close look at this. For the record, my needs in a mail client are: GUI, very clean UI, prett
by Lazare 9y ago
I used and loved Nylas Mail (aka N1), so I'm going to be taking a close look at this.
For the record, my needs in a mail client are: GUI, very clean UI, pretty themes, good search, works with gmail, ideally supports snoozing emails (a key feature if you like to pursue Inbox Zero), if at all possible should be a desktop app for OS X and Windows, and I wouldn't be adverse to open notifications and such. Also, I'm explicitly fine with their being an extra server in the mix; this is more-or-less required for snoozing emails to work properly[1], and I'm not really concerned about privacy.
If that describes you, you might like Mailspring too. If not (and I suspect that'll be the case for the median HN visitor), then probably not. :)
Edit: Totally forgot, I also have a strong need for supporting multiple email accounts. A merged inbox view that will automatically use the correct email address/signature for replying to an email based on where the original email was sent is critical.
[1]: At least, every implementation of email snoozing I've seen had relied on a third party server. And once I got addicted to it with Dropbox's much-mourned Mailbox app, I've found it very hard to use a mail client without it.
- the_common_man 9y agoCan you tell me what is wrong with gmail? It seems to check all your boxes.
- maxyme 9y agoGmail has limited support for multiple email addresses. For people like me with a lot of inboxes it isn't sufficient. There is also a pretty significant delay on any non main account addresses.
- Lazare 9y agoI prefer desktop clients (even the horrible electron things that pass as such these days), and I'm not thrilled with gmails UI which I find a bit cluttered and frustrating. It also doesn't support email snoozing, which I love. Google Inbox is a better UI, but goes too far the other way towards wasting too much space. It's also missing some key features, and is still not a desktop client. Also, neither one of them supports showing emails from multiple gmail accounts in a single inbox (unless you just blindly forward emails from one to the other, which you can do, but I'd rather avoid). I recognize I'm being very picky here; mostly what I just want is Dropbox's Mailbox app, but they killed that off long ago, much to my eternal disappointment.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- LudoA 9y ago> It's also missing some key features I'm curious, such as what?
- jrimbault 9y agoI think I'm not sure what you mean by "snoozing emails" ? Isn't it just muting for a few minutes the alerts you'd get ? Just to clarify for me.
- KGIII 9y agoSnoozing emails removes them from your inbox for a set amount of time. Imagine you read emails in an unread folder, where read emails disappear. This basically would functionally mark them as read until a preset amount of time passes, then they show up as unread again. It's a bit like that, only in your inbox itself. It's not actually a part of the email specifications, but some people seem to like it.
- jrimbault 9y agoThank you. And why does it seem to require a third party server ?
- shakna 9y ago> - It still has the same great pro features, like snoozing and send later, but doesn't send your email credentials to Mailspring servers. All of these features have been re-implemented to run locally on your computer. It doesn't require a third-party server. Nylas did do it that way, but Mailspring aren't. It's local.
- KGIII 9y agoYeah, it seems easy enough to do client side unless one wants it to be synchronized across devices. Then, I imagine it'd be easy for the email provider to do, though it'd need client support or to be in the browser.
- crispinb 9y ago> I'm explicitly fine with their being an extra server in the mix; this is required for snoozing emails to work properly Out of interest, why would this be so? On the face of it a single client can keep its own snoozing metadata and use a helper process to do the work. I suppose if you want to ensure snoozing works across clients, you'd need a slightly clumsy workaround for the metadata (eg. encoded somewhere in the snoozed mails in a special IMAP folder). But it looks doable from the perspective of a shallow moment's thought. Admittedly, pretty much everything generally does.
- Lazare 9y agoI'm really not sure to be honest. It does seem like you could do something weird with IMAP to make it work, but every implementation I know of uses a server.
- crispinb 9y agoFair enough. It was just an idle thought.
- kwhitefoot 9y agoWhy is it regarded as weird to use IMAP for this? It seems like an obvious use for IMAP.
- crispinb 9y agoI don't know IMAP beyond the very basics, but I presumed that it doesn't include facilities for adding metadata. Correct me if I'm wrong! So if you wanted to store snoozing info, you'd have to encode that oddly somewhere -- in a fake email item name? Or as an added mail header (if it's considered polite for clients to add them)?
- _jal 9y agoUsing a header works fine - making up your own is legal. I've been known to add headers for entertainment purposes.
- RexM 9y agoThis might be good for you. I haven’t been following along very closely but I believe the concept of a Nylas ID is gone. https://github.com/nylas-mail-lives/nylas-mail https://github.com/nylas-mail-lives/nylas-mail
- BCM43 9y agoIt's gone for IMAP. Gmail and other instances still contact the Nylas cloud servers, though there are plans to remove those calls.
- lloydde 9y ago> At least, every implementation of email snoozing I've seen had relied on a third party server. At least on Mac there are some client side only ones: - https://sparkmailapp.com/ https://sparkmailapp.com/ - https://canarymail.canny.io/ https://canarymail.canny.io/ - MailTags for Mail.app has a “tickle” feature that meets all the requirements That is from a few minutes searching.
- sigzero 9y agoI was under the impression that one of the dings on Spark was that it did use their servers for some of their functionality.
- chrismorgan 9y agoAt FastMail we’re hoping to implement snooze next year, as a first-party solution that doesn’t need the support of a client or third-party server. There is no established convention or standard for representing snooze over IMAP. There’s not yet any consensus on how to represent it in JMAP, the emerging standard that we’re backing (and which our web UI will be using fairly soon), either. It’ll be a FastMail-specific JMAP extension at first, but it could well be standardised (though not in the core spec) after that. We’ll see how things go.
- bengotow 9y agoThis sounds great - if you're interested in folks implementing the extension in third party clients, let me know!
- breakingcups 9y agoWhich other parties are currently backing JMAP?
- chrismorgan 9y agoI haven’t been working on the JMAP stuff (I only started working there this year and I’ve been focusing on our new product Topicbox), so I’m not aware of all the details; but JMAP standardisation is going through the IETF, so you can see things that are happening with it at https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/documents/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/documents/ and https://github.com/jmapio/jmap/issues https://github.com/jmapio/jmap/issues.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoThat would be awesome. I'm trying transition off of Google services and this would help me a bunch. I love your product by the way <3