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Because of Privacy concerns! The thinking is that few people would enter their email and email password on a 3rd-party website, having it as a downloadable soft
by muszc-master 8y ago
Because of Privacy concerns! The thinking is that few people would enter their email and email password on a 3rd-party website, having it as a downloadable software ensures the privacy of users
- crystaln 8y agoThis doesn't make any sense as a motivation, let alone the primary motivation, to build a native app in the age of web apps. There's no real difference in security here and the user perception gain is marginal and ephemeral.
- gerardnll 8y agoAlthough, in reality, that doesn't make it more secure.
- qz3 8y agoOn a desktop app, you can see what kind of request the program makes and which servers it contacts. With a webapp, you'll never know what the app does.
- crystaln 8y agoHow so? It's quite simple to tell what a web app does in my understanding. Chrome has many good monitoring tools.
- dillondoyle 8y agoThe webapp can send your data wherever once it has the data, chrome won't log http requests if they were made server to server etc
- methyl 8y agoIsn't it the case for any app?
- Qwertie 8y agoThe logic is a native app can make a direct IMAP connection to the mail server and you can check it is doing so where as a web app has to send the login details to a server which does IMAP for the client and you can not see this last part.
- gsich 8y agoA native application can do that too.
- alimbada 8y agoYou can do the same in your browser by opening the developer tools and in fact it comes built in to the browser whereas on a desktop you'd have to install another app like Wireshark/Fiddler to see those requests.
- stephenr 8y agoThat only tells you what your browser sends to their server. It doesn't tell you what connections their server makes.
- crystaln 8y agoNothing will. The vulnerability of what happens to your data after it is sent to a third party is the same for any app, web or native. The biggest difference is that it's way easier to see where you're data is being sent in a browser, since it has built in tools. It's very hard to monitor native app traffic that is sent over SSL.
- stephenr 8y agoWhen the app is native there no requirement for a third party server. You, Your mail (provider) server. Vs You, the server hosting the web app, your mail (provider) server.
- pritambaral 8y ago> With a webapp, you'll never know what the app does. Unless you run uMatrix or uBlock Origin (same code in both as far as this feature is concerned), of course.
- progx 8y agoNonsens. Every traffic can be monitored, web app or native app, that is not important.
- Tepix 8y agoThat depends on the user.
- ryan-c 8y agoIt's not possible to make a web-based email client that speaks to the IMAP/SMTP server directly. Only a "native" (electron can do this) client can use those protocols.
- tokenizerrr 8y agoWould love to be able to self host this though and access it through the browser... That'd be awesome.
- muszc-master 8y agoWhy is that preferred for you, may I ask, over running it as a local desktop software?
- tokenizerrr 8y agoRunning it locally is fine, but a hassle if I need to access my mail on someone else's hardware (or my phone). I think this is one of the main reasons Gmail is so popular.
- Qwertie 8y agoIf it's proprietary it makes no difference at all. The app could be sending my password off to a remote server and I would have no way of knowing.
- Thiez 8y agoYou can still see to which servers the software connects, ostensibly the only servers would be those for sending and receiving your emails. If you're feeling particularly paranoid you could enforce this behaviour using a firewall. For web based email anything could happen and you would have no way of knowing, even after the fact.