30 ms·

Show HN: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail

403 points by njhaveri 6y ago

pantulis 6y ago
This is great, I'm a heavy G Suite user (I have folders with tens of thousands of messages) and I'm enjoying the beta: it scrolls like butter!!!! (or has teh speedy, as greybeard Mac users would say) I miss some things, like keyboard shortcuts for jumping to a specific label, superstars, search items suggestion (for specific GMail filters like has:attachment), but overall this is really good, and honoring the label colors is an excellent touch. Some more advanced features that come to mind would be multiple tabs, deeper Calendar integration to display inline your schedule when receiving .ics attachment. What will the pricing model be?
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Thanks! I will definitely be adding shortcuts for jumping to a label and search suggestions pretty soon. I plan to eventually add tabs and calendar integration, too. Sadly, superstars aren't yet possible with the Gmail API, but please star this Gmail API issue to express your interested: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/166654165 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/166654165
njhaveri 6y ago
Hi HN! In the past, I spent over 7 years working on Apple Mail, and today I am really excited to share a new email client I'm building: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail. Mimestream is written in Swift, and uses AppKit+SwiftUI for a clean, stock appearance. It's designed to be fast, lightweight, and use a minimal amount of disk space. Mimestream's advantages over using the Gmail web interface includes features like multiple accounts, a unified inbox, system notifications, swipe actions, dark mode, (some) offline support, tracker prevention, multiple keyboard shortcut sets, and more. Mimestream differs from other email clients because it uses the Gmail API rather than IMAP, so it supports more Gmail-specific features like categorized inboxes, Gmail's search operators, first-class labels support (apply multiple via ⌘L, set colors, etc), synced aliases, synced signatures, etc. I'm planning a lot more work in this area, including server-side filter configuration, Google Drive support, G Suite directory autocomplete, and more. The app is a traditional email client that makes direct connections to Gmail and stores your data on your Mac. There are no intermediary servers with access to your account or copies of your messages. Mimestream is free for a limited time during the public beta, but will eventually be a paid app by the time it gets to the Mac App Store. I hope you enjoy trying out the beta, and I look forward to hearing your feedback!
- robenkleene 6y ago
  This is a great point: "There are no intermediary servers with access to your account or copies of your messages." A number of popular email clients use intermediary servers and that's a complete deal breaker for me. I'd argue that should be a deal breaker for almost anyone. I'm not a security expert, but as far as I can tell, for most people the single biggest security vulnerability is an attacker gaining access to their email. Using a mail client with an intermediary mail server essentially doubles the surface area attackers can exploit.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    I never quite understood what the value add was for email-client developers to use intermediary servers. Is it to gather usage telemetry or something else?
    - mappu 6y ago
      Pessimistically for telemetry, but I suspect some of them are Javascript apps in a lightweight shell that have actual technical difficulties making a TCP IMAP connection.
      - njhaveri 6y ago
        Yeah, I think difficulty making an IMAP connection is one reason. I think the biggest reason has been to decorate more features on top of the backing email service, like adding Snooze support to an arbitrary IMAP account (so the server can un-snooze a message at the scheduled time). That being said, there are security/privacy implications to that model, and I wouldn't personally use an app that works this way. That's why Mimestream was built as a traditional client.
      - scintill76 6y ago
        Doing TCP from a "native" JS app should be pretty easy[1] (caveat: I haven't tried.) I'd think the cost of running a proxy server would be enough motivation to figure this out, for any developer whose primary reason is as simple as technical difficulties with JS and TCP. I think it more likely the other responses such as doing heavy indexing that won't work as nicely on the clients. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41674063/is-it-possible-to-create-a-tcp-client-with-electron https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41674063/is-it-possible-...
jkarneges 6y ago
Nice to see a native app and not something Electron-based. I wonder about native app viability these days though. Years ago I used native email apps like Outlook, KMail, and Thunderbird, but lately I just use the websites made by the service providers (Fastmail for personal, Gmail for work). As an open standards person I find my behavior kind of depressing, but the websites just tend to work better.
- sjroot 6y ago
  SwiftUI will make the native application development experience much easier for Apple platforms. It still has a little ways to go, but once it's the "de-facto standard" for new apps, you will certainly see an explosion in innovative native development. Hoping other platforms follow suit. Preferably using SwiftUI...hey, I can dream right?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - monsieurbanana 6y ago
    > Hoping other platforms follow suit. Preferably using SwiftUI...hey, I can dream right? This makes it seems like it's up to those other platforms, but it's really all about Apple's decision, right? (in which case I'll eat my metaphorical hat if this happens)
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    SwiftUI concepts are quite old actually, https://groovy-lang.org/swing.html https://groovy-lang.org/swing.html
- njhaveri 6y ago
  That's a very fair question. Web apps made by providers are definitely several steps ahead feature-wise, because standardized protocols take a lot of time to evolve. My hope with Mimestream is to strike a middle ground here, by using the Gmail API to support more of the Gmail featureset, while retaining the ergonomics of a native client.
- 6y ago
sjroot 6y ago
This looks amazing. I am so glad that you kept it as close to the native Mail experience as possible. My only question relates to payment. This is an app that I would gladly pay a solid price to own (in the ballpark of $50?). I would _much_ prefer that over a subscription model. Because the site mentions eventual payment, but doesn't specify a pricing model, would you be willing to elaborate on your intentions?
- Gys 6y ago
  I am not in the market for this, but would prefer a subscription model. Because a one time fee means the developer has to grow the sales constantly to keep receiving revenues. I think that gives the wrong motivation: adding features might be prefered to solving bugs. Or just stop working on it all together because the growth has stopped.
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Thanks! So, I don't know exactly what the pricing model will be yet, but I definitely hear your feedback on this topic, and I'm looking at pretty much every option :) My intention is to build a sustainable long-term business, and deliver a continuous/regular stream of updates (e.g. see the Release Notes at https://mimestream.com/releases https://mimestream.com/releases), so the pricing model will need to support that goal.
  - antaviana 6y ago
    IMHO, if you are looking for long-term business, you need to go the subscription-only route. Probably $19/year. Don't offer permanent licenses, it will add complexity to purchase and support. You do not want a users with a product of yours with a vulnerability they are not entitled to update. A subscription-only model will allow you to focus on only the last build which everyone will be entitled to download, greatly simplifying your support. You will be able to add features at your pace and will avoid the bloating that results when you compete with yourself as is the case with a permanent license model and (increasingly stupid) upgrades. You will focus on quality not on corner case features to justify upgrades or interface revamps for the sake of it, confusing your existing user base. If you keep your quality high and the product is stable and reliable, your users will stick. We have been selling our desktop product (in our case B2B) as subscription-only for 8 years and we couldn't be happier about the decision.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mronge 6y ago
I've been using the beta for a while and I'm happy to see it land here on HN. The two things I love most about Mimestream are: 1. It's wicked fast (seriously) 2. It has Gmail style shortcuts The only thing I wish it had was a generic IMAP support for some of my other accounts. Either way I've been liking it!
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Thanks! IMAP account support is something I would really like to add (and Mimestream already uses IMAP for some specific operations where it is a better fit), but from past experience I know that it is complicated ;) I'm also really keen on adding support for JMAP and Office 365 I the future.
  - HashanP 6y ago
    Support for both Gmail and Office 365 with their own proprietary APIs would be a knockout feature. Also I really appreciate the fact you don't use any intermediary servers, which has held me back from using some other macOS email clients.
  - colinhb 6y ago
    Excited that you're considering JMAP! Hopefully it solves some of the pain-points of implementing IMAP and makes it easier to deliver a great UX. If e.g. Mimestream can deliver as good a UX with a Fastmail account (or Cyrus IMAP or Dovecot installation) as it does with a Gmail account, I think it will help the independent email ecosystem. (Though there is a big headwind, so I understand focusing on Gmail now.) Edit: downloaded the beta. Will give it a shot with my work G Suite account.
    - njhaveri 6y ago
      I am really excited about adding support for JMAP – I participated in the IETF WG for it, gave some feedback, and think it's a very well-designed protocol that should be really efficient at syncing email. It would probably be one of the most fun features for me to add to the app, but yeah, there's still a lot of work left for the Gmail account experience first.
darklion 6y ago
The application itself looks absolutely amazing, and the authors should be commended for it. That said, the FAQ mentions that the for-profit model is designed to avoid ads in the client and to "take a strong stance on privacy", which is a little bit disingenuous given that the client exclusively relies on an email service provided by the world's largest advertiser and email data miner. Yes, Mimestream itself isn't using my data, but there's a bit of induced cognitive dissonance in taking a strong privacy stance for a Google-specific product.
- vslira 6y ago
  > In order to build a sustainable business that can continue to innovate and improve our products, Mimestream will eventually transition to being a paid app. Come on, they're explicitly saying that they're charging for the service. It's pretty clear that when they're talking about privacy the caveat is that they won't suck your data into another sink (them) _other than google itself_, being the provider of gmail and all. I'm all for privacy and informing the user but they're hardly playing word games here.
  - darklion 6y ago
    > I'm all for privacy and informing the user but they're hardly playing word games here. I'm not saying they're playing word games. I'm saying the strong ethical stance on privacy is diluted by the underlying service they built their product on. If I built a new automobile refueling station that dispensed diesel and gasoline, but used the fact that the pumps themselves ran on solar energy to claim "I strongly believe in 100% renewable energy", well yes, in one way you're living up to your ideals, but in another larger way, you're really not.
- sneak 6y ago
  Google also provides the account contents to the US military intelligence community on demand without a warrant via the PRISM program, so it is impossible to use this program as it exists right now and have private email. Here’s hoping you can use it with an actually private email service in the future.
philips 6y ago
Looks great! Given how bad Gmail is on iPad Safari and how bad the Gmail iPad app is there is probably a market there if you port.
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Thanks! Porting to iOS/iPadOS is something I would really love to do, but I still have a lot of work left on the Mac client. I'm curious to hear more what your pain points are with Gmail on iPadOS – I've been using the Gmail iOS app on my phone lately, and aside from the nonstandard UI, my experience has been fairly positive.
  - pantulis 6y ago
    Easy: no autocomplete on label selection for assigning labels. This drives me nuts on the iOS app.
  - philips 6y ago
    The GMail app has no keyboard shortcuts- pretty important for iPad users.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      > keyboard shortcuts- pretty important for iPad users I admit I cannot see the logic of this statement. Explain?
      - InvaderFizz 6y ago
        A lot of iPad users use the iPad like the Surface these days. Touch + Keyboard.
    - ymolodtsov 6y ago
      Haven't they added some of them? I think should be enabled in settings.
timwis 6y ago
Cool! I use MailPlane but would be happy to try this out. I'd need two things though: gmail-style keyboard shortcuts (or at least sufficient alternatives) and a way to link myself to an email (so I can put a link to an email into my task manager). Any chance those will be possible?
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Gmail shortcuts (and Apple Mail shortcuts) are available as an option in Preferences > General. Linking to a specific email in the app is something that's on the roadmap, and I've gotten several requests for it (all mostly for your use case of putting emails into a task manager app).
narenkeshav 6y ago
To the author : There are times where I would like my mail to be delivered at specific periods of time in the day rather than disturbing with any new email. Or perhaps a snooze button for specific period of time. Do you have any intention of such features? Besides, the application is great. Good work.
- ivanr 6y ago
  I would love to be able to send an email tomorrow. I like to respond to some emails to get them out of the way, but the more email I send, the more I get. I would therefore love to be able to slow down the exchanges. Gmail has only a limited-time undo, with delay that's too short and almost entirely useless. I'd be quite happy with a default, say, 5-minute delay and undo. Similarly, it would be awesome to hide inbound email until I want to see it (while I am still able to use my mailbox to send email and respond to already-received messages.) EDIT: Ah, it turns out Gmail can schedule email sending. Thanks @llarsson!
  - llarsson 6y ago
    No, Gmail has scheduled send, too. Hit the downward arrow in the right part of the Send button and you can schedule sending the message.
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Thanks! I've heard this request before in a few different forms, and I have it on the backlog. In the meantime, one option is to just quit the application, and you'll stop receiving any new mail notifications.
  - narenkeshav 6y ago
    Thank you for your response. An addition to what I said is to have a access/noaccess list of domains within which you can accept emails. There are loads of email clients but something that would not be distraction for an end user is a market on it's own. Do you intend to have a subscription based plan or one-time fee purchase?
caillou 6y ago
I have been using the gmail web app exclusively for one reason: I use the following Chrome Plugin to convert Markdown to HTML emails: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-here/?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-here/?hl=... Did you ever consider adding a Markdown to HTML email option? This is especially helpful when sending formatted code around!
- tta 6y ago
  This is doable via a shell script (+ pandoc): # 1. Put markdown on clipboard # 2. Convert to hex out=$(pbpaste | pandoc -f markdown -t html -s | hexdump -ve '1/1 "%.2x"') # 3. Convert to an applescript data class osascript -e "set the clipboard to «data HTML${out}»" # 4. Paste rich HTML You can use something like Alfred or Keyboard Maestro to trigger that script with a keyboard shortcut.
  - njhaveri 6y ago
    Very clever! Thanks for sharing! As a programmer, having native markdown support in the app is something I wish for almost every day (especially for code blocks). It's something I plan to add.
    - rhodysurf 6y ago
      That would for sure get me to pay for it tbh never even thought of that as a feature
comex 6y ago
Nice! More than once I’ve gotten my hopes up after seeing screenshots of a spiffy new macOS email client, only to learn that it was Electron-based. At the time, I was using the Gmail web app but searching for a native alternative. Since then, I’ve settled on Apple Mail for the time being, but better Gmail integration is an enticing feature and I’ll definitely be trying Mimestream out.
samat 6y ago
I'd kill for it were I using gmail, but I am with fastmail and mail.app now ;) Still, great job!
endlessvoid94 6y ago
Loving this so far. I've always hated how Mail.app uses a gargantuan amount of disk space for my gmail account. Thanks!
garblegarble 6y ago
This looks really nice! Does it support e-mails with winmail.dat? That's been my biggest annoyance with Airmail, I end up having to go to the gmail web interface to view any e-mails with winmail.dat
wkirby 6y ago
Looks great. Missing 4 Gmail features that I dearly miss from the web UI: - Snooze - Scheduled Send - Undo send - Missing attachment warnings ("you said see attached but have no attachments, did you mean to attach something?")
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Undo Send is definitely planned! The missing attachment warning is a great idea, I just added this to the backlog. Unfortunately, Gmail API support is lacking for Snooze: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/109952618 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/109952618, but I will eventually add the ability to do a Mimestream-local snooze (which makes more sense once there is an iOS companion app) Same for Scheduled Send, see https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/140922183 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/140922183 :(
  - wkirby 6y ago
    Thanks for the prompt reply. Will Mimestream-local snooze necessitate introducing an intermediate server to track across platforms, or will you use something like iCloud sync to keep track?
    - njhaveri 6y ago
      Definitely no intermediary server with access to your account. This idea would be to use iCloud to sync a set of snoozed server IDs, and only "hide" those messages from within the app, leaving those messages actually in the inbox on the server. No message data going into iCloud, either.
      - jasongill 6y ago
        The way that other platforms have done it is by using custom labels - so the messages just get labeled as "snoozed until tomorrow", and at 9am the client simply grabs all those and moves them back to inbox and deletes the label. That's how Mailbox did it, for example. Once Snooze is added, I'll happily buy this app for $20+ - I've been waiting for something like this since Inbox and Mailbox were killed off.
vimy 6y ago
Looks great. I'm currently using Canary mail because the Apple mail data loss bug still isn't fixed after almost a year! Canary mail doesn't feel as polished as Apple mail so I'm happy to see a potential replacement. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-10-15/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...
agambrahma 6y ago
Sweet! I would switch to this right away, if I hadn't already discovered MailMate.
ValentineC 6y ago
Thanks for releasing this. I've been looking for a Mailplane alternative for a while, ever since Gmail started becoming a resource hog when they forced everyone onto their new interface. Is there a chance you could recompile this to support 10.14? I'll most likely not be upgrading from Mojave for the foreseeable future, until my 2013 MacBook Pro stops working and I'm forced to get something new.
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Sadly, no. Mimestream already uses SwiftUI for parts of the UI, and SwiftUI requires Catalina. I plan to release an iOS/iPadOS version in the future, so Mimestream will be investing even more heavily into SwiftUI. At some point later this year, Big Sur will become a requirement, too. I sympathize with those that remain on Mojave, especially those who need to run 32-bit apps, but as a 1-man project, it seemed like a necessary tradeoff to make.
  - donatj 6y ago
    Oh this hurts my heart. The App looks beautiful but I am tied to a number of 32-bit applications.
  - MilaM 6y ago
    This looks really promising and could be a good replacement for Mailplane. One thing I don't like though is the Big Sur requirement as early as this year. I'm also still on Mojave and will probably upgrade to Catalina in the coming weeks.
summitsummit 6y ago
this looks amazing! pretty excited to try it. signed up for the newsletter and downloaded it. however... > Read, compose, send, and permanently delete all your email from Gmail anything you can say to make me feel better for allowing this level of power for a beta app from a random person on the web? i'd really like to try it out.
cridenour 6y ago
This looks really nice and runs great. Does the GMail API let you tap in to the "Important" tag?
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Yes, it does! Flagging messages as important/unimportant is already supported in the code, but the feature is currently disabled in the UI. I plan to enable it once I add sections support to the Inbox to match up to Gmail's Priority Inbox feature.
  - bonestamp2 6y ago
    On this note, the notifications are popping off about every 10 minutes for me. It would nice if I could set notifications to only show for "important" emails. PS - Thanks for the app, it's already an improvement in some ways over the gmail interface... looking forward to even more!
Zaheer 6y ago
The simplicity reminds me of Sparrow for Mac [1]. One of the best email apps ever made! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_(email_client) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_(email_client)
- leokennis 6y ago
  When I was still on Gmail in 2012 or so (?) I really really loved that app! Actually, I’d easily pay $25 or even more for a similar app, for Fastmail.
  - Amfy 6y ago
    this. I will pay $50 for such an App for Fastmail (or really, just IMAP speaking please)
    - ricardobeat 6y ago
      Have you tried Spark? It's the spiritual successor to Sparrow, I use it on phone and laptop and really like it. The only downside is that it's on a freemium model... [1] https://sparkmailapp.com/ https://sparkmailapp.com/
      - koltzu 6y ago
        I'd avoid Spark due to privacy concerns. You can't turn off their 'collaboration features' so that they don't collect any data [0]https://sparkmailapp.com/privacy#privacy_2 https://sparkmailapp.com/privacy#privacy_2
  - jpwgarrison 6y ago
    Mailmate at https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/ is fantastic. My only gripe is that it is Mac-only, so I can't use it on my work desktop. (linux)
    - jdhawk 6y ago
      what do you use on linux?
blweiner 6y ago
Just downloaded it and it looks very nice. One of my favorite features of Gmail is multiples inboxes which I use for a GTD-like set up with "To Do"/"To Read"/"Waiting For" etc. Any plans to add support for that?
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Yes, this is definitely a planned feature!
njkleiner 6y ago
Does it support sending from a custom domain connected to Gmail, like the web interface?
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Yes, Gmail aliases are supported and automatically synced (e.g. I have my old ISP email address set up as an alias). G Suite accounts on custom domains are also supported.
thomaspaulmann 6y ago
It’s wonderful to see more native macOS apps popping up recently. Having a great Gmail client is certainly one of the nicest I’ve seen lately! What’s your stand on the latest changes announced at this year’s WWDC for Mac development?
- njhaveri 6y ago
  I'm very excited about the continued evolution of SwiftUI, as well as Apple Silicon! I think these are both great moves for the Mac, and while there are some aspects of the Big Sur UI I'm not totally sold on, I think these will be refined over the coming years. I'm hoping for way more new Mac apps with SwiftUI and Catalyst making it easier for iOS developers to write Mac apps!
kristofferR 6y ago
Great app, looks really neat. One criticism though, the swiping is incredibly annoying right now. You have to swipe an almost painful amount to archive emails without a click, it should require less than half the swipe-distance of what it does now. Look at how little swiping Chrome needs to go back to the previous page, and emulate that.
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Yeah, I've heard this a few times now. This is the standard AppKit NSTableView swipe action, but I agree it's not tuned very well – I'll look into improving this this. One tip: by default, the Delete key is mapped to Archive (though you can change that in Preferences to be Trash if you prefer that). A little faster than swiping.
brentis 6y ago
+1 for outlook 365
smoyer 6y ago
I was really hoping this was a very quiet video streaming service ... I'm not a MacOS user so I can't take it for a test-drive but I'd like to say congratulations on launching!
wasd 6y ago
I use Superhuman. I can see myself switching over to Mimestream. One of my recent complaints is the lack of deep integration with GSuite. If you can match the speed & shortcuts AND integrate deeply with GSuite, I think you have something really compelling. > The app is a traditional email client that makes direct connections to Gmail and stores your data on your Mac. There are no intermediary servers with access to your account or copies of your messages. Mimestream is free for a limited time during the public beta, but will eventually be a paid app by the time it gets to the Mac App Store. I appreciate the thought behind this. However, it means you can't implement some other features (pixel tracking, scheduled send, snooze) unless GSuite opens up an API for them. Consider having a subscription which uses a 3rd party server. I would be happy to pay for it.
- arvindch 6y ago
  Reading the posted website, the app positions itself as privacy-first and blocks 50+ pixel trackers.
jooize 6y ago
Makes me wish I use Gmail. I want a natively designed email app for IMAP. There's one feature I desire: group by sender. Unibox does it, but the apps jump around when loading email contents and aren't that fancy other than that feature. The app I use must not use an intermediate server.
howmayiannoyyou 6y ago
I rely a several add-ons for Gmail. As such, can't use this.
- samatman 6y ago
  The author is on the thread, and has been very responsive to input. This comment isn't useful to me, or him, without specifics.
gleb 6y ago
Could you compare to Superhuman?
jarym 6y ago
Downloaded and installed. First impressions, very positive. I like clean UIs and the GMail web interface has become cluttered over time. Excellent work guys. I hope pricing is reasonable and perhaps there's a family package or something.
flarex 6y ago
"Advanced Protection prevented your Google Account from signing in. This security feature stops most non-Google apps and services from accessing your data to keep your account protected."
aborsy 6y ago
A similarly named technology offered by many email clients is S/MIME. Does it support end to end encryption with PGP or smime?
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Mimestream doesn't support S/MIME or PGP yet, but this is something I'd love to add someday!
- fossa_team 6y ago
  Fossa Guard web extension supplements Gmail with S/MIME support on Web and Android platforms https://fossaguard.blogspot.com/2020/06/fossa-guard-pro-10-released.html https://fossaguard.blogspot.com/2020/06/fossa-guard-pro-10-r...
lucasnortj 6y ago
Another app so another company can surveil the user as well as google?
dtarik 6y ago
I've been looking for an initiative like this for so many years! Not even a month ago, I spent an afternoon looking all over the internet for somebody trying to build a native mail client for MacOs. Since DéjàVu from the lead dev of Sparrow, nobody it seems nobody has tried to do this. I haven't yet tested Mimestream but I already praise you for trying to do it! I will definitely give it a try and pay for it!
c1yd3i 6y ago
Uh, where's the source code? If I'm trusting you with my mail, you should be trusting me with the source code.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  This looks macOS-only, which is largely closed-source. Are you sure you're complaint is directed the right way?
dugmartin 6y ago
Interesting to see the Gmail API being used for a general purpose email client when Google has a very visible note on the overview page that says: > Note: The Gmail API should not be used to replace IMAP for full-fledged email client access. Instead, see IMAP and SMTP. I'd be a little worried they will disable API access for the client due to this. https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/guides https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/guides
- judge2020 6y ago
  They did perform the audit in collaboration with the author[0], so chances are it's fine, but you never know when a new manager might come in and flip the script for what's acceptable use of the api. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24426342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24426342
  - njhaveri 6y ago
    This is something I asked about a few years ago when it was first introduced, and the vague answer I got is that the warning exists because the Gmail API is not as optimized as IMAP for some common email client tasks. (Indeed, for better performance, I would like to switch a few tasks to use IMAP instead of the Gmail API someday). Google did vet Mimestream as a general-purpose email client before approving API access, and on the paperwork for that process "general purpose email client" was the app category that I selected, so I'm hoping all will be OK, or else I will be really scrambling to implement new protocols :P
- ymolodtsov 6y ago
  There are more than enough email clients that only support Gmail. It's OK.
  - nailer 6y ago
    Sure but Google could do a Google and pull support, say 'I told you so' and you'd have wasted years of effort.
qaq 6y ago
Any chance sorting can be supported?
loosemonkey 6y ago
pls make linux version
devin 6y ago
No shade being thrown as I recognize this is a beta, but I seem to be crashing with regularity. I submitted reports, but was wondering if I'm alone.
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Mind sending the crash reports to bugs@mimestream.com? If you aren't sure where they are, just run /Applications/Mimestream.app/Contents/Resources/collectDiagnostics.sh in Terminal and that should zip them up into a file on your Desktop. Thanks!
- somishere 6y ago
  Ditto. Now opening for ~3s before crashing. Possibly coincidence but began after marking all messages in an inbox category as read (there were tens of thousands). [edit] logs forwarded
jedberg 6y ago
Trying this now, but I'm stuck on authentication. My default browser is Firefox, but I have Firefox specifically configured to block access to Gmail. It would be great if I could choose the browser to use for login, or at least be able to copy the URL so I can put into Chrome. In the meantime I'll change my default browser for a moment and see how it goes. Edit: It worked switching default browsers.
Lightbody 6y ago
This is really great. Way to go. I've always been a big fan of Mail.app, but it's Google integration always felt clunky and sometimes even buggy. Within a few minutes I can see how much snappier and more "native" this feels. Kudos!
statictype 6y ago
Looks like exactly what I’ve been looking for. I tried a bunch of these - AirMail was good but buggy. Superhuman is good but expensive. The only snag here is that I haven’t updated to Catalina. Will be trying this out when I finally upgrade (possibly directly To Big Sur).
acherion 6y ago
Great work! I look forward to using this. Not sure if this has been mentioned in the comments yet (I came across this post 100+ comments later), but one thing I miss terribly after leaving AirMail was the ability to write markdown in email. I absolutely loved the split-pane window when writing an email, and see it update in real-time as I write my markdown'ed email. I am on the web-client for Gmail for now, and although there are browser plugins for MD, they feel quite clunky to use. It would be great if you could consider MD support in composing emails!
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Markdown support has been a major theme from the feedback I've gotten today by email and here. In addition, I find myself personally wanting it all the time, at least so I can insert code blocks. I definitely plan to add this in the not-too-distant future!
  - SpelingBeeChamp 6y ago
    Keep in mind your audience here. I don't want to discourage you from adding markdown support, but I suspect that the overwhelming majority of your users won't know what markdown is, let alone actively want it.
- kochthesecond 6y ago
  Why did you stop using Airmail?
  - acherion 6y ago
    It got very buggy over the past 12 months or so. I needed something more reliable, so I switched to the Gmail web-client (my workplace is using Gmail for business)
mahgnous 6y ago
I think the UI looks really boring and bland, kinda like every other native mac app.
dwrodri 6y ago
I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but I'm looking to tech myself iOS app development, and I'm wondering what y'all think of SwiftUI. Generally, I am quite the fan of iOS's visual defaults and I have prior experience doing backend work, but I'm quite unfamiliar with UI design. After watching WWDC2020 this spring, I'm pretty convinced that Apple has set itself up with what looks like one of the cleanest IDEs for building user-facing ML applications and I'd like to give it a try.
- allenu 6y ago
  I'm have about ten years experience with macOS and iOS development. I have not yet taken the plunge to do SwiftUI development exclusively, but from what I've seen, it's the future of UI development on iOS and macOS. If you're interested in iOS development, definitely learn it. It uses a declarative language to describe the UI, so I think it should be much easier to learn than the previous imperative paradigm. For the most part, you can get away with the standard "visual defaults" as you call them on the platform. You can easily create a complete app without having to customize any UI, although it obviously adds to the look and feel if you do.
anibalin 6y ago
Fantastic job. Works great.
nguyenkien 6y ago
@njhaveri: It's seem the sign up button on top not working
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Try again? I've been having serious trouble with my email list service (Mailjet).
  - nguyenkien 6y ago
    The bottom button still work
dylanz 6y ago
I'm a Mailplane user as well and once (if) I move to Catalina I'd love to check it out. What would you say are the benefits to Mimestream over Mailplane?
- CGamesPlay 6y ago
  I'm a second Mailplane user who would be interested in a native app, but I'm on High Sierra and can't use this one. Benefits: this app likely doesn't use 1 GB of RAM. That's pretty much my only complaint about Mailplane (not blaming them; there's not much they could do about that). The native UI is likely nice, but not going to be the main factor causing me to switch.
- ymolodtsov 6y ago
  I used Mailplane in the past and like the team, but honestly, it just didn't operate as well as pure Gmail in the browser and I had to switch back. This app is native and fricking fast.
meehow 6y ago
What are the advantages (for users) of using Gmail API over IMAP/JMAP? It sounds like huge disadvantage when email client works with just one provider.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Since Gmail is monopoly-scale though, they have plenty of users to serve. Gmail has a lot of proprietary features that don't work through IMAP. Most of them could work with JMAP (like labels) but Gmail doesn't support that (yet, at least).
  - philipwhiuk 6y ago
    Except labels does work via IMAP: https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap/imap-extensions#access_to_gmail_labels_x-gm-labels https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap/imap-extensions#acc...
    - ymolodtsov 6y ago
      That support is limited, Gmail API allows you to do much more with labels.
ricardobeat 6y ago
> Instead of using the IMAP protocol, Mimestream utilizes the Gmail API That's sadly a step in the wrong direction. JMAP (https://jmap.io/ https://jmap.io/) has been around for a while and it is a shame google refuses to adopt it.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  To be fair, very few companies have rolled out JMAP support, AFAIK. It's unsurprising Google would hesitate to replace their proprietary API/advantage with an open standard while it's not well-used. Presumably if enough other mail services use it, Google will eventually follow suit.
- ymolodtsov 6y ago
  So Gmail doesn't support it and yet it wrong for this developer to go this route? Being snobby about protocols isn't useful and comments like that should be sent to Google instead.
  - ricardobeat 6y ago
    Wasn't supposed to come across like that. The sad part is that Google has enough grip on e-mail to halt adoption of any standard; GMail has been around for 16 years, you'd expect some kind of standard to come out of it to support modern e-mail features. Developers not having a choice doesn't make it less wrong. JMAP has been around for 5+ years, and specs published last year by the IETF: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8620 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8620 and https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8621 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8621
amree 6y ago
Can we have a link based on the email, e.g: "View Pull Request" if it's PR email? This has been implemented in Canary Mail. You can expand it further for JIRA, GitLab and others. Just a suggestion to create unique selling spoint for Mimestream
saagarjha 6y ago
Looks great! This question is entirely unrelated, but the picture of you that you have on your site looks uncannily like the ones that they do for badges, with the white background and all. Is it one of those?
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Haha... It's definitely in that style, but no, it's not my former badge photo :)
mapgrep 6y ago
Why would you devote such energy to help people lose their privacy? Do you want to work at Google or something? Disappointed someone would help that company make more money exploiting people rather than making the world a better place (for example, by building a real email client, that works with email servers rather than just google servers).
Brajeshwar 6y ago
Will check this out. I had tried multiple email clients and settled on the default macOS Mail. I try to stay with the default Apps that comes with the OS, even if that meant learning the shortcuts and spending a little more time understanding their nuances, and making use of all available features or ignoring some. As another comment pointed out, can we have the ability to do like Priority Inbox or allow us to just show Unread + Flag (like Mail)? After using emails for 20+ years, I'm pretty immune to all the jazz that comes with emails, and can survive pretty well. The only thing that I need now it the ability to see "Unread + Flagged". Please refer to my screenshot for how my Mail typically looks like -- https://public.oinam.com/photos-oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos-mail-2019nov.png https://public.oinam.com/photos-oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos...
TenJack 6y ago
Does this have the Snooze feature?
- aikinai 6y ago
  In a different comment the developer mentioned that the Gmail API doesn't support snooze, so he'll have to implement it manually later.
jonny383 6y ago
Looks fantastic. I strongly urge you to reconsider building out an application that serves only Google though!
- SpelingBeeChamp 6y ago
  "Serves only Google" when talking about email is not as limiting as your language suggests. As of October 2018, Gmail had 1.5 billion users.
  - jonny383 6y ago
    I think you're missing the point I was trying to make. When Gmail decides to ship their own native client on MacOS, this platform will become abandonware.
    - bonestamp2 6y ago
      Unless it's better or google disables the api. I say this because I use the paid Apollo app for reading reddit and it's far superior to Reddit's own free app. But I do agree that it's probably a niche user base compared to the OEM app promoted by the service itself.
avgcodemonkey 6y ago
Loving the app so far - I love how speedy it is. I'm glad to see some resurgence of Mac-assed Mac apps [1]. [1]: A term coined by Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire, (in my opinion) the best Mac-assed RSS reader. https://inessential.com/2020/03/19/proxyman https://inessential.com/2020/03/19/proxyman
heipei 6y ago
What is the advantage of this over using the Gmail web ui? The Gmail web ui works great for me, has keyboard shortcuts, push notifications, works on all operating systems, supports multiple accounts with the /u/1/ subpath, etc. What does this offer that I'd be willing to pay for it and lock myself in to Mac OS exclusively?
- presentation 6y ago
  On my machine it feels 1000x faster since it's a native app.
- tienshiao 6y ago
  It uses way less memory for me with a handful of accounts. Five tabs of Gmail probably used a couple gigs of memory when left open for weeks. It's only been a day but 5 accounts in Mimestream is only using 350 megs of memory versus 1 tab of Gmail using 1.4 gigs of memory.
- bfgmartin 6y ago
  Way faster and uses less memory. Unified inbox. And the killer feature for me is Command-Tab - being able to keyboard switch from my email to the browser.
genghizkhan 6y ago
How does this compare to using twobird[0], which was launched recently by the guys behind Notability? Anyone who's got experience with both clients? [0]: https://www.twobird.com/ https://www.twobird.com/
ymolodtsov 6y ago
It looks really interesting, immediately downloaded and would be glad to pay a subscription if it works for me. I have two asks: 1. Glad you're supporting Gmail shortcuts, but sad to say they aren't working in a second keyboard locale which I have (as basically any non-Anglo-American user would). Gmail provides two columns for keyboard shortcuts in settings so I went and manually adapted all keys. Or maybe Mimestream could support that automatically, for instance Superhuman has no issues with the language I'm using. Currently I just can't use any keyboard shortcuts unless I switch my input to English. 2. I specifically dislike unified inbox, could there be a setting to revert the side bar, so instead of the top level Inbox with folders for my accounts it would be top-level accounts with folders for each? Thank you for working on this!
- njhaveri 6y ago
  #1 - oops, I filed a bug to fix this up. Thanks for pointing it out. #2 is something I'm hearing more about... I'll plan on offering this in the future.
HeadHonchoSP 6y ago
The only thing I want to ask, at least from a marketing perspective, why Mimestream. The name doesn't really tell what the app is, and if it wasn't mentioned in the title I would assume it is something that has to do with streaming. Just a minor gripe, otherwise looks great, keep it up.
leggenda47 6y ago
Hello! I downloaded and opened the app and it looks great! I saw I had 5k+ social and promotion messages so I right clicked and marked all as read. That however crashed the app and even if I open it again it crashes again.
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Oh no! A few people reported this crash today, I'll be fixing it hopefully tomorrow! You can reset your cache by running these this in Terminal: rm ~/Library/Containers/com.mimestream.Mimestream/Data/Library/Application\ Support/Mimestream/Mimestream* rm -rf ~/Library/Containers/com.mimestream.Mimestream/Data/Library/Application\ Support/Mimestream/Attachments
deagle50 6y ago
Is the local cache encrypted on disk? Really nice app.
radiospiel 6y ago
This looks fantastic - any chance of an OSX 10.14 version though?
- sgt 6y ago
  I commented on the same problem. I am very eager to upgrade to Big Sur but I absolutely do not intend to run Catalina yet, so I'll stick to Mojave (10.14) for now.
lalo2302 6y ago
Hey it looks amazing. I'll try it out. Did you do your landing page by yourself? Or are you using a template/service?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sixhobbits 6y ago
This looks great! Just a note that I signed up from my phone but couldn't go through with the direct download. When I tried again from my laptop I got an error[0]. Would have been useful to be able to reuse my email address from desktop but using a different email seemed to work fine. [0] https://static.ritza.co/uploads/mimestreamerror2.png https://static.ritza.co/uploads/mimestreamerror2.png
sgt 6y ago
Very excited to try this, I've registered. I cannot run it at the moment as it requires 10.15 or later. I am running Mojave and not planning to upgrade before Big Sur.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nbap 6y ago
I love the simplicity; form follows function. Is there a way to get rid of the badge counter on the dock icon? I somewhat feel anxious/FOMO when the counter is there.
- dhritzkiv 6y ago
  The way I get rid of the badge is by reading all my email and deleting the unimportant ones. (Not being snarky, just funny)
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Thanks! You can disable this in System Preferences > Notifications > Mimestream > Badge app icon
rado 6y ago
Awesome. More native apps, please. Don't pretend you can't notice the difference. Thanks.
housemeisterb 6y ago
Any plans to add a menu bar toggle/counter?
- njhaveri 6y ago
  I've heard this requested a lot in the last 24h, will add this.
mshick 6y ago
Thanks for this fantastic app. I love the native Gmail features with this level of polish, speed and OS integration. I would love to see — and would definitely pay for — a similar approach to Google Calendar. Unfortunately CalDAV-based clients only offer a fraction of the web client functionality.
- bfgmartin 6y ago
  +100
gauravphoenix 6y ago
When the app starts, it makes a HTTPS call to the ip address "104.248.78.24" which is owned by DigitalOcean. @njhaveri can you please clarify?
- njhaveri 6y ago
  This is an HTTPS GET of https://mimestream.com/appcast.xml https://mimestream.com/appcast.xml in order to check for the availability of beta software updates, using the Sparkle framework that is popular amongst Mac apps.
  - gauravphoenix 6y ago
    Thank you!
BrilliantThings 6y ago
Will Mimestream support Gmail Templates? They're essential for my workflow.
ak255 6y ago
For the love of god please don't make it subscription based, add the 'Important' category and you have yourself a customer.
- ak255 6y ago
  Also if you need any design feedback don't hesitate to ask :)
prashaantt 6y ago
I held off from updating to Catalina last year and hope to go directly to Big Sur this year, so I can’t try this out yet but I just gave my email to your website, hoping I’d receive updates on the progress. While we’re on this topic, do you have any plans to add custom integrations with 3rd party services like Todoist and Bear? That’s one reason I’ve switched to Spark and I’d be extremely happy to pay you for it.
ethanliu 6y ago
Would you please add the "Quote Select Text" on reply? It used to be a great Gmail Lab add-on. Another feature request is to support the vertical split layout, it's more comfortable for tall screens.
riobard 6y ago
Is there a plain text composing mode? Or is it by default plain text if I don't turn on the rich text toolbar?
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Right now, it's WYSIWYG HTML composing only. Got a ton of requests for plain text (and markdown) composing support, and I definitely plan on adding it, though it might take a few months at this point.
mathiswrong 6y ago
really really amazing. Super snappy and minimalist. +1 for snooze and send later features.
bonestamp2 6y ago
First of all, this app is awesome. I started to make some serious progress on clearing up my email backlog. One suggestion: I really love the iOS gmail app feature to quickly switch between all mail and show unread mail only. I'd love a button or an option under the "go" menu to jump to unread mail. I know I can type "label:unread" in the search, but a one/two click method would be awesome!
duyluong 6y ago
Thanks for making this app! I'm super excited to use it as it's much faster than Spark. One thing I feel missing is ability to snooze the email and batch mark as read. Do you have plan to add it?
leptonstanja 6y ago
I’d easily pay $100+ for a native macOS client for GMail that is not a poor IMAP substitute like Mail, Thunderbird, or Outlook. But I’ll wait for v1 before I download anything outside of the app store ;)

403 points by njhaveri 6y ago

This is great, I'm a heavy G Suite user (I have folders with tens of thousands of messages) and I'm enjoying the beta: it scrolls like butter!!!! (or has teh speedy, as greybeard Mac users would say) I miss some things, like keyboard shortcuts for jumping to a specific label, superstars, search items suggestion (for specific GMail filters like has:attachment), but overall this is really good, and honoring the label colors is an excellent touch. Some more advanced features that come to mind would be multiple tabs, deeper Calendar integration to display inline your schedule when receiving .ics attachment. What will the pricing model be?

njhaveri 6y ago
Thanks! I will definitely be adding shortcuts for jumping to a label and search suggestions pretty soon. I plan to eventually add tabs and calendar integration, too. Sadly, superstars aren't yet possible with the Gmail API, but please star this Gmail API issue to express your interested: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/166654165 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/166654165

njhaveri 6y ago

Hi HN! In the past, I spent over 7 years working on Apple Mail, and today I am really excited to share a new email client I'm building: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail. Mimestream is written in Swift, and uses AppKit+SwiftUI for a clean, stock appearance. It's designed to be fast, lightweight, and use a minimal amount of disk space. Mimestream's advantages over using the Gmail web interface includes features like multiple accounts, a unified inbox, system notifications, swipe actions, dark mode, (some) offline support, tracker prevention, multiple keyboard shortcut sets, and more. Mimestream differs from other email clients because it uses the Gmail API rather than IMAP, so it supports more Gmail-specific features like categorized inboxes, Gmail's search operators, first-class labels support (apply multiple via ⌘L, set colors, etc), synced aliases, synced signatures, etc. I'm planning a lot more work in this area, including server-side filter configuration, Google Drive support, G Suite directory autocomplete, and more. The app is a traditional email client that makes direct connections to Gmail and stores your data on your Mac. There are no intermediary servers with access to your account or copies of your messages. Mimestream is free for a limited time during the public beta, but will eventually be a paid app by the time it gets to the Mac App Store. I hope you enjoy trying out the beta, and I look forward to hearing your feedback!

robenkleene 6y ago
This is a great point: "There are no intermediary servers with access to your account or copies of your messages." A number of popular email clients use intermediary servers and that's a complete deal breaker for me. I'd argue that should be a deal breaker for almost anyone. I'm not a security expert, but as far as I can tell, for most people the single biggest security vulnerability is an attacker gaining access to their email. Using a mail client with an intermediary mail server essentially doubles the surface area attackers can exploit.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dvtrn 6y ago
  I never quite understood what the value add was for email-client developers to use intermediary servers. Is it to gather usage telemetry or something else?
  - mappu 6y ago
    Pessimistically for telemetry, but I suspect some of them are Javascript apps in a lightweight shell that have actual technical difficulties making a TCP IMAP connection.
    - njhaveri 6y ago
      Yeah, I think difficulty making an IMAP connection is one reason. I think the biggest reason has been to decorate more features on top of the backing email service, like adding Snooze support to an arbitrary IMAP account (so the server can un-snooze a message at the scheduled time). That being said, there are security/privacy implications to that model, and I wouldn't personally use an app that works this way. That's why Mimestream was built as a traditional client.
    - scintill76 6y ago
      Doing TCP from a "native" JS app should be pretty easy[1] (caveat: I haven't tried.) I'd think the cost of running a proxy server would be enough motivation to figure this out, for any developer whose primary reason is as simple as technical difficulties with JS and TCP. I think it more likely the other responses such as doing heavy indexing that won't work as nicely on the clients. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41674063/is-it-possible-to-create-a-tcp-client-with-electron https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41674063/is-it-possible-...

jkarneges 6y ago

Nice to see a native app and not something Electron-based. I wonder about native app viability these days though. Years ago I used native email apps like Outlook, KMail, and Thunderbird, but lately I just use the websites made by the service providers (Fastmail for personal, Gmail for work). As an open standards person I find my behavior kind of depressing, but the websites just tend to work better.

sjroot 6y ago
SwiftUI will make the native application development experience much easier for Apple platforms. It still has a little ways to go, but once it's the "de-facto standard" for new apps, you will certainly see an explosion in innovative native development. Hoping other platforms follow suit. Preferably using SwiftUI...hey, I can dream right?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- monsieurbanana 6y ago
  > Hoping other platforms follow suit. Preferably using SwiftUI...hey, I can dream right? This makes it seems like it's up to those other platforms, but it's really all about Apple's decision, right? (in which case I'll eat my metaphorical hat if this happens)
- pjmlp 6y ago
  SwiftUI concepts are quite old actually, https://groovy-lang.org/swing.html https://groovy-lang.org/swing.html
njhaveri 6y ago
That's a very fair question. Web apps made by providers are definitely several steps ahead feature-wise, because standardized protocols take a lot of time to evolve. My hope with Mimestream is to strike a middle ground here, by using the Gmail API to support more of the Gmail featureset, while retaining the ergonomics of a native client.
6y ago

sjroot 6y ago

This looks amazing. I am so glad that you kept it as close to the native Mail experience as possible. My only question relates to payment. This is an app that I would gladly pay a solid price to own (in the ballpark of $50?). I would _much_ prefer that over a subscription model. Because the site mentions eventual payment, but doesn't specify a pricing model, would you be willing to elaborate on your intentions?

Gys 6y ago
I am not in the market for this, but would prefer a subscription model. Because a one time fee means the developer has to grow the sales constantly to keep receiving revenues. I think that gives the wrong motivation: adding features might be prefered to solving bugs. Or just stop working on it all together because the growth has stopped.
njhaveri 6y ago
Thanks! So, I don't know exactly what the pricing model will be yet, but I definitely hear your feedback on this topic, and I'm looking at pretty much every option :) My intention is to build a sustainable long-term business, and deliver a continuous/regular stream of updates (e.g. see the Release Notes at https://mimestream.com/releases https://mimestream.com/releases), so the pricing model will need to support that goal.
- antaviana 6y ago
  IMHO, if you are looking for long-term business, you need to go the subscription-only route. Probably $19/year. Don't offer permanent licenses, it will add complexity to purchase and support. You do not want a users with a product of yours with a vulnerability they are not entitled to update. A subscription-only model will allow you to focus on only the last build which everyone will be entitled to download, greatly simplifying your support. You will be able to add features at your pace and will avoid the bloating that results when you compete with yourself as is the case with a permanent license model and (increasingly stupid) upgrades. You will focus on quality not on corner case features to justify upgrades or interface revamps for the sake of it, confusing your existing user base. If you keep your quality high and the product is stable and reliable, your users will stick. We have been selling our desktop product (in our case B2B) as subscription-only for 8 years and we couldn't be happier about the decision.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mronge 6y ago

I've been using the beta for a while and I'm happy to see it land here on HN. The two things I love most about Mimestream are: 1. It's wicked fast (seriously) 2. It has Gmail style shortcuts The only thing I wish it had was a generic IMAP support for some of my other accounts. Either way I've been liking it!

njhaveri 6y ago
Thanks! IMAP account support is something I would really like to add (and Mimestream already uses IMAP for some specific operations where it is a better fit), but from past experience I know that it is complicated ;) I'm also really keen on adding support for JMAP and Office 365 I the future.
- HashanP 6y ago
  Support for both Gmail and Office 365 with their own proprietary APIs would be a knockout feature. Also I really appreciate the fact you don't use any intermediary servers, which has held me back from using some other macOS email clients.
- colinhb 6y ago
  Excited that you're considering JMAP! Hopefully it solves some of the pain-points of implementing IMAP and makes it easier to deliver a great UX. If e.g. Mimestream can deliver as good a UX with a Fastmail account (or Cyrus IMAP or Dovecot installation) as it does with a Gmail account, I think it will help the independent email ecosystem. (Though there is a big headwind, so I understand focusing on Gmail now.) Edit: downloaded the beta. Will give it a shot with my work G Suite account.
  - njhaveri 6y ago
    I am really excited about adding support for JMAP – I participated in the IETF WG for it, gave some feedback, and think it's a very well-designed protocol that should be really efficient at syncing email. It would probably be one of the most fun features for me to add to the app, but yeah, there's still a lot of work left for the Gmail account experience first.

darklion 6y ago

The application itself looks absolutely amazing, and the authors should be commended for it. That said, the FAQ mentions that the for-profit model is designed to avoid ads in the client and to "take a strong stance on privacy", which is a little bit disingenuous given that the client exclusively relies on an email service provided by the world's largest advertiser and email data miner. Yes, Mimestream itself isn't using my data, but there's a bit of induced cognitive dissonance in taking a strong privacy stance for a Google-specific product.

vslira 6y ago
> In order to build a sustainable business that can continue to innovate and improve our products, Mimestream will eventually transition to being a paid app. Come on, they're explicitly saying that they're charging for the service. It's pretty clear that when they're talking about privacy the caveat is that they won't suck your data into another sink (them) _other than google itself_, being the provider of gmail and all. I'm all for privacy and informing the user but they're hardly playing word games here.
- darklion 6y ago
  > I'm all for privacy and informing the user but they're hardly playing word games here. I'm not saying they're playing word games. I'm saying the strong ethical stance on privacy is diluted by the underlying service they built their product on. If I built a new automobile refueling station that dispensed diesel and gasoline, but used the fact that the pumps themselves ran on solar energy to claim "I strongly believe in 100% renewable energy", well yes, in one way you're living up to your ideals, but in another larger way, you're really not.
sneak 6y ago
Google also provides the account contents to the US military intelligence community on demand without a warrant via the PRISM program, so it is impossible to use this program as it exists right now and have private email. Here’s hoping you can use it with an actually private email service in the future.

philips 6y ago

Looks great! Given how bad Gmail is on iPad Safari and how bad the Gmail iPad app is there is probably a market there if you port.

njhaveri 6y ago
Thanks! Porting to iOS/iPadOS is something I would really love to do, but I still have a lot of work left on the Mac client. I'm curious to hear more what your pain points are with Gmail on iPadOS – I've been using the Gmail iOS app on my phone lately, and aside from the nonstandard UI, my experience has been fairly positive.
- pantulis 6y ago
  Easy: no autocomplete on label selection for assigning labels. This drives me nuts on the iOS app.
- philips 6y ago
  The GMail app has no keyboard shortcuts- pretty important for iPad users.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    > keyboard shortcuts- pretty important for iPad users I admit I cannot see the logic of this statement. Explain?
    - InvaderFizz 6y ago
      A lot of iPad users use the iPad like the Surface these days. Touch + Keyboard.
  - ymolodtsov 6y ago
    Haven't they added some of them? I think should be enabled in settings.

timwis 6y ago

Cool! I use MailPlane but would be happy to try this out. I'd need two things though: gmail-style keyboard shortcuts (or at least sufficient alternatives) and a way to link myself to an email (so I can put a link to an email into my task manager). Any chance those will be possible?

njhaveri 6y ago
Gmail shortcuts (and Apple Mail shortcuts) are available as an option in Preferences > General. Linking to a specific email in the app is something that's on the roadmap, and I've gotten several requests for it (all mostly for your use case of putting emails into a task manager app).

narenkeshav 6y ago

To the author : There are times where I would like my mail to be delivered at specific periods of time in the day rather than disturbing with any new email. Or perhaps a snooze button for specific period of time. Do you have any intention of such features? Besides, the application is great. Good work.

ivanr 6y ago
I would love to be able to send an email tomorrow. I like to respond to some emails to get them out of the way, but the more email I send, the more I get. I would therefore love to be able to slow down the exchanges. Gmail has only a limited-time undo, with delay that's too short and almost entirely useless. I'd be quite happy with a default, say, 5-minute delay and undo. Similarly, it would be awesome to hide inbound email until I want to see it (while I am still able to use my mailbox to send email and respond to already-received messages.) EDIT: Ah, it turns out Gmail can schedule email sending. Thanks @llarsson!
- llarsson 6y ago
  No, Gmail has scheduled send, too. Hit the downward arrow in the right part of the Send button and you can schedule sending the message.
njhaveri 6y ago
Thanks! I've heard this request before in a few different forms, and I have it on the backlog. In the meantime, one option is to just quit the application, and you'll stop receiving any new mail notifications.
- narenkeshav 6y ago
  Thank you for your response. An addition to what I said is to have a access/noaccess list of domains within which you can accept emails. There are loads of email clients but something that would not be distraction for an end user is a market on it's own. Do you intend to have a subscription based plan or one-time fee purchase?

caillou 6y ago

I have been using the gmail web app exclusively for one reason: I use the following Chrome Plugin to convert Markdown to HTML emails: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-here/?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-here/?hl=... Did you ever consider adding a Markdown to HTML email option? This is especially helpful when sending formatted code around!

tta 6y ago
This is doable via a shell script (+ pandoc): # 1. Put markdown on clipboard # 2. Convert to hex out=$(pbpaste | pandoc -f markdown -t html -s | hexdump -ve '1/1 "%.2x"') # 3. Convert to an applescript data class osascript -e "set the clipboard to «data HTML${out}»" # 4. Paste rich HTML You can use something like Alfred or Keyboard Maestro to trigger that script with a keyboard shortcut.
- njhaveri 6y ago
  Very clever! Thanks for sharing! As a programmer, having native markdown support in the app is something I wish for almost every day (especially for code blocks). It's something I plan to add.
  - rhodysurf 6y ago
    That would for sure get me to pay for it tbh never even thought of that as a feature

comex 6y ago

Nice! More than once I’ve gotten my hopes up after seeing screenshots of a spiffy new macOS email client, only to learn that it was Electron-based. At the time, I was using the Gmail web app but searching for a native alternative. Since then, I’ve settled on Apple Mail for the time being, but better Gmail integration is an enticing feature and I’ll definitely be trying Mimestream out.

samat 6y ago

I'd kill for it were I using gmail, but I am with fastmail and mail.app now ;) Still, great job!

endlessvoid94 6y ago

Loving this so far. I've always hated how Mail.app uses a gargantuan amount of disk space for my gmail account. Thanks!

garblegarble 6y ago

This looks really nice! Does it support e-mails with winmail.dat? That's been my biggest annoyance with Airmail, I end up having to go to the gmail web interface to view any e-mails with winmail.dat

wkirby 6y ago

Looks great. Missing 4 Gmail features that I dearly miss from the web UI: - Snooze - Scheduled Send - Undo send - Missing attachment warnings ("you said see attached but have no attachments, did you mean to attach something?")

njhaveri 6y ago
Undo Send is definitely planned! The missing attachment warning is a great idea, I just added this to the backlog. Unfortunately, Gmail API support is lacking for Snooze: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/109952618 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/109952618, but I will eventually add the ability to do a Mimestream-local snooze (which makes more sense once there is an iOS companion app) Same for Scheduled Send, see https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/140922183 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/140922183 :(
- wkirby 6y ago
  Thanks for the prompt reply. Will Mimestream-local snooze necessitate introducing an intermediate server to track across platforms, or will you use something like iCloud sync to keep track?
  - njhaveri 6y ago
    Definitely no intermediary server with access to your account. This idea would be to use iCloud to sync a set of snoozed server IDs, and only "hide" those messages from within the app, leaving those messages actually in the inbox on the server. No message data going into iCloud, either.
    - jasongill 6y ago
      The way that other platforms have done it is by using custom labels - so the messages just get labeled as "snoozed until tomorrow", and at 9am the client simply grabs all those and moves them back to inbox and deletes the label. That's how Mailbox did it, for example. Once Snooze is added, I'll happily buy this app for $20+ - I've been waiting for something like this since Inbox and Mailbox were killed off.

vimy 6y ago

Looks great. I'm currently using Canary mail because the Apple mail data loss bug still isn't fixed after almost a year! Canary mail doesn't feel as polished as Apple mail so I'm happy to see a potential replacement. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-10-15/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...

agambrahma 6y ago

Sweet! I would switch to this right away, if I hadn't already discovered MailMate.

ValentineC 6y ago

Thanks for releasing this. I've been looking for a Mailplane alternative for a while, ever since Gmail started becoming a resource hog when they forced everyone onto their new interface. Is there a chance you could recompile this to support 10.14? I'll most likely not be upgrading from Mojave for the foreseeable future, until my 2013 MacBook Pro stops working and I'm forced to get something new.

njhaveri 6y ago
Sadly, no. Mimestream already uses SwiftUI for parts of the UI, and SwiftUI requires Catalina. I plan to release an iOS/iPadOS version in the future, so Mimestream will be investing even more heavily into SwiftUI. At some point later this year, Big Sur will become a requirement, too. I sympathize with those that remain on Mojave, especially those who need to run 32-bit apps, but as a 1-man project, it seemed like a necessary tradeoff to make.
- donatj 6y ago
  Oh this hurts my heart. The App looks beautiful but I am tied to a number of 32-bit applications.
- MilaM 6y ago
  This looks really promising and could be a good replacement for Mailplane. One thing I don't like though is the Big Sur requirement as early as this year. I'm also still on Mojave and will probably upgrade to Catalina in the coming weeks.

summitsummit 6y ago

this looks amazing! pretty excited to try it. signed up for the newsletter and downloaded it. however... > Read, compose, send, and permanently delete all your email from Gmail anything you can say to make me feel better for allowing this level of power for a beta app from a random person on the web? i'd really like to try it out.

cridenour 6y ago

This looks really nice and runs great. Does the GMail API let you tap in to the "Important" tag?

njhaveri 6y ago
Yes, it does! Flagging messages as important/unimportant is already supported in the code, but the feature is currently disabled in the UI. I plan to enable it once I add sections support to the Inbox to match up to Gmail's Priority Inbox feature.
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  On this note, the notifications are popping off about every 10 minutes for me. It would nice if I could set notifications to only show for "important" emails. PS - Thanks for the app, it's already an improvement in some ways over the gmail interface... looking forward to even more!

Zaheer 6y ago

The simplicity reminds me of Sparrow for Mac [1]. One of the best email apps ever made! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_(email_client) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_(email_client)

leokennis 6y ago
When I was still on Gmail in 2012 or so (?) I really really loved that app! Actually, I’d easily pay $25 or even more for a similar app, for Fastmail.
- Amfy 6y ago
  this. I will pay $50 for such an App for Fastmail (or really, just IMAP speaking please)
  - ricardobeat 6y ago
    Have you tried Spark? It's the spiritual successor to Sparrow, I use it on phone and laptop and really like it. The only downside is that it's on a freemium model... [1] https://sparkmailapp.com/ https://sparkmailapp.com/
    - koltzu 6y ago
      I'd avoid Spark due to privacy concerns. You can't turn off their 'collaboration features' so that they don't collect any data [0]https://sparkmailapp.com/privacy#privacy_2 https://sparkmailapp.com/privacy#privacy_2
- jpwgarrison 6y ago
  Mailmate at https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/ is fantastic. My only gripe is that it is Mac-only, so I can't use it on my work desktop. (linux)
  - jdhawk 6y ago
    what do you use on linux?

blweiner 6y ago

Just downloaded it and it looks very nice. One of my favorite features of Gmail is multiples inboxes which I use for a GTD-like set up with "To Do"/"To Read"/"Waiting For" etc. Any plans to add support for that?

njhaveri 6y ago
Yes, this is definitely a planned feature!

njkleiner 6y ago

Does it support sending from a custom domain connected to Gmail, like the web interface?

njhaveri 6y ago
Yes, Gmail aliases are supported and automatically synced (e.g. I have my old ISP email address set up as an alias). G Suite accounts on custom domains are also supported.

thomaspaulmann 6y ago

It’s wonderful to see more native macOS apps popping up recently. Having a great Gmail client is certainly one of the nicest I’ve seen lately! What’s your stand on the latest changes announced at this year’s WWDC for Mac development?

njhaveri 6y ago
I'm very excited about the continued evolution of SwiftUI, as well as Apple Silicon! I think these are both great moves for the Mac, and while there are some aspects of the Big Sur UI I'm not totally sold on, I think these will be refined over the coming years. I'm hoping for way more new Mac apps with SwiftUI and Catalyst making it easier for iOS developers to write Mac apps!

kristofferR 6y ago

Great app, looks really neat. One criticism though, the swiping is incredibly annoying right now. You have to swipe an almost painful amount to archive emails without a click, it should require less than half the swipe-distance of what it does now. Look at how little swiping Chrome needs to go back to the previous page, and emulate that.

njhaveri 6y ago
Yeah, I've heard this a few times now. This is the standard AppKit NSTableView swipe action, but I agree it's not tuned very well – I'll look into improving this this. One tip: by default, the Delete key is mapped to Archive (though you can change that in Preferences to be Trash if you prefer that). A little faster than swiping.

brentis 6y ago

+1 for outlook 365

smoyer 6y ago

I was really hoping this was a very quiet video streaming service ... I'm not a MacOS user so I can't take it for a test-drive but I'd like to say congratulations on launching!

wasd 6y ago

I use Superhuman. I can see myself switching over to Mimestream. One of my recent complaints is the lack of deep integration with GSuite. If you can match the speed & shortcuts AND integrate deeply with GSuite, I think you have something really compelling. > The app is a traditional email client that makes direct connections to Gmail and stores your data on your Mac. There are no intermediary servers with access to your account or copies of your messages. Mimestream is free for a limited time during the public beta, but will eventually be a paid app by the time it gets to the Mac App Store. I appreciate the thought behind this. However, it means you can't implement some other features (pixel tracking, scheduled send, snooze) unless GSuite opens up an API for them. Consider having a subscription which uses a 3rd party server. I would be happy to pay for it.

arvindch 6y ago
Reading the posted website, the app positions itself as privacy-first and blocks 50+ pixel trackers.

jooize 6y ago

Makes me wish I use Gmail. I want a natively designed email app for IMAP. There's one feature I desire: group by sender. Unibox does it, but the apps jump around when loading email contents and aren't that fancy other than that feature. The app I use must not use an intermediate server.

howmayiannoyyou 6y ago

I rely a several add-ons for Gmail. As such, can't use this.

samatman 6y ago
The author is on the thread, and has been very responsive to input. This comment isn't useful to me, or him, without specifics.

gleb 6y ago

Could you compare to Superhuman?

jarym 6y ago

Downloaded and installed. First impressions, very positive. I like clean UIs and the GMail web interface has become cluttered over time. Excellent work guys. I hope pricing is reasonable and perhaps there's a family package or something.

flarex 6y ago

"Advanced Protection prevented your Google Account from signing in. This security feature stops most non-Google apps and services from accessing your data to keep your account protected."

aborsy 6y ago

A similarly named technology offered by many email clients is S/MIME. Does it support end to end encryption with PGP or smime?

njhaveri 6y ago
Mimestream doesn't support S/MIME or PGP yet, but this is something I'd love to add someday!
fossa_team 6y ago
Fossa Guard web extension supplements Gmail with S/MIME support on Web and Android platforms https://fossaguard.blogspot.com/2020/06/fossa-guard-pro-10-released.html https://fossaguard.blogspot.com/2020/06/fossa-guard-pro-10-r...

lucasnortj 6y ago

Another app so another company can surveil the user as well as google?

dtarik 6y ago

I've been looking for an initiative like this for so many years! Not even a month ago, I spent an afternoon looking all over the internet for somebody trying to build a native mail client for MacOs. Since DéjàVu from the lead dev of Sparrow, nobody it seems nobody has tried to do this. I haven't yet tested Mimestream but I already praise you for trying to do it! I will definitely give it a try and pay for it!

c1yd3i 6y ago

Uh, where's the source code? If I'm trusting you with my mail, you should be trusting me with the source code.

saagarjha 6y ago
This looks macOS-only, which is largely closed-source. Are you sure you're complaint is directed the right way?

dugmartin 6y ago

Interesting to see the Gmail API being used for a general purpose email client when Google has a very visible note on the overview page that says: > Note: The Gmail API should not be used to replace IMAP for full-fledged email client access. Instead, see IMAP and SMTP. I'd be a little worried they will disable API access for the client due to this. https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/guides https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/guides

judge2020 6y ago
They did perform the audit in collaboration with the author[0], so chances are it's fine, but you never know when a new manager might come in and flip the script for what's acceptable use of the api. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24426342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24426342
- njhaveri 6y ago
  This is something I asked about a few years ago when it was first introduced, and the vague answer I got is that the warning exists because the Gmail API is not as optimized as IMAP for some common email client tasks. (Indeed, for better performance, I would like to switch a few tasks to use IMAP instead of the Gmail API someday). Google did vet Mimestream as a general-purpose email client before approving API access, and on the paperwork for that process "general purpose email client" was the app category that I selected, so I'm hoping all will be OK, or else I will be really scrambling to implement new protocols :P
ymolodtsov 6y ago
There are more than enough email clients that only support Gmail. It's OK.
- nailer 6y ago
  Sure but Google could do a Google and pull support, say 'I told you so' and you'd have wasted years of effort.

qaq 6y ago

Any chance sorting can be supported?

loosemonkey 6y ago

pls make linux version

devin 6y ago

No shade being thrown as I recognize this is a beta, but I seem to be crashing with regularity. I submitted reports, but was wondering if I'm alone.

njhaveri 6y ago
Mind sending the crash reports to bugs@mimestream.com? If you aren't sure where they are, just run /Applications/Mimestream.app/Contents/Resources/collectDiagnostics.sh in Terminal and that should zip them up into a file on your Desktop. Thanks!
somishere 6y ago
Ditto. Now opening for ~3s before crashing. Possibly coincidence but began after marking all messages in an inbox category as read (there were tens of thousands). [edit] logs forwarded

jedberg 6y ago

Trying this now, but I'm stuck on authentication. My default browser is Firefox, but I have Firefox specifically configured to block access to Gmail. It would be great if I could choose the browser to use for login, or at least be able to copy the URL so I can put into Chrome. In the meantime I'll change my default browser for a moment and see how it goes. Edit: It worked switching default browsers.

Lightbody 6y ago

This is really great. Way to go. I've always been a big fan of Mail.app, but it's Google integration always felt clunky and sometimes even buggy. Within a few minutes I can see how much snappier and more "native" this feels. Kudos!

statictype 6y ago

Looks like exactly what I’ve been looking for. I tried a bunch of these - AirMail was good but buggy. Superhuman is good but expensive. The only snag here is that I haven’t updated to Catalina. Will be trying this out when I finally upgrade (possibly directly To Big Sur).

acherion 6y ago

Great work! I look forward to using this. Not sure if this has been mentioned in the comments yet (I came across this post 100+ comments later), but one thing I miss terribly after leaving AirMail was the ability to write markdown in email. I absolutely loved the split-pane window when writing an email, and see it update in real-time as I write my markdown'ed email. I am on the web-client for Gmail for now, and although there are browser plugins for MD, they feel quite clunky to use. It would be great if you could consider MD support in composing emails!

njhaveri 6y ago
Markdown support has been a major theme from the feedback I've gotten today by email and here. In addition, I find myself personally wanting it all the time, at least so I can insert code blocks. I definitely plan to add this in the not-too-distant future!
- SpelingBeeChamp 6y ago
  Keep in mind your audience here. I don't want to discourage you from adding markdown support, but I suspect that the overwhelming majority of your users won't know what markdown is, let alone actively want it.
kochthesecond 6y ago
Why did you stop using Airmail?
- acherion 6y ago
  It got very buggy over the past 12 months or so. I needed something more reliable, so I switched to the Gmail web-client (my workplace is using Gmail for business)

mahgnous 6y ago

I think the UI looks really boring and bland, kinda like every other native mac app.

dwrodri 6y ago

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but I'm looking to tech myself iOS app development, and I'm wondering what y'all think of SwiftUI. Generally, I am quite the fan of iOS's visual defaults and I have prior experience doing backend work, but I'm quite unfamiliar with UI design. After watching WWDC2020 this spring, I'm pretty convinced that Apple has set itself up with what looks like one of the cleanest IDEs for building user-facing ML applications and I'd like to give it a try.

allenu 6y ago
I'm have about ten years experience with macOS and iOS development. I have not yet taken the plunge to do SwiftUI development exclusively, but from what I've seen, it's the future of UI development on iOS and macOS. If you're interested in iOS development, definitely learn it. It uses a declarative language to describe the UI, so I think it should be much easier to learn than the previous imperative paradigm. For the most part, you can get away with the standard "visual defaults" as you call them on the platform. You can easily create a complete app without having to customize any UI, although it obviously adds to the look and feel if you do.

anibalin 6y ago

Fantastic job. Works great.

nguyenkien 6y ago

@njhaveri: It's seem the sign up button on top not working

njhaveri 6y ago
Try again? I've been having serious trouble with my email list service (Mailjet).
- nguyenkien 6y ago
  The bottom button still work

dylanz 6y ago

I'm a Mailplane user as well and once (if) I move to Catalina I'd love to check it out. What would you say are the benefits to Mimestream over Mailplane?

CGamesPlay 6y ago
I'm a second Mailplane user who would be interested in a native app, but I'm on High Sierra and can't use this one. Benefits: this app likely doesn't use 1 GB of RAM. That's pretty much my only complaint about Mailplane (not blaming them; there's not much they could do about that). The native UI is likely nice, but not going to be the main factor causing me to switch.
ymolodtsov 6y ago
I used Mailplane in the past and like the team, but honestly, it just didn't operate as well as pure Gmail in the browser and I had to switch back. This app is native and fricking fast.

meehow 6y ago

What are the advantages (for users) of using Gmail API over IMAP/JMAP? It sounds like huge disadvantage when email client works with just one provider.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Since Gmail is monopoly-scale though, they have plenty of users to serve. Gmail has a lot of proprietary features that don't work through IMAP. Most of them could work with JMAP (like labels) but Gmail doesn't support that (yet, at least).
- philipwhiuk 6y ago
  Except labels does work via IMAP: https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap/imap-extensions#access_to_gmail_labels_x-gm-labels https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap/imap-extensions#acc...
  - ymolodtsov 6y ago
    That support is limited, Gmail API allows you to do much more with labels.

ricardobeat 6y ago

> Instead of using the IMAP protocol, Mimestream utilizes the Gmail API That's sadly a step in the wrong direction. JMAP (https://jmap.io/ https://jmap.io/) has been around for a while and it is a shame google refuses to adopt it.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
To be fair, very few companies have rolled out JMAP support, AFAIK. It's unsurprising Google would hesitate to replace their proprietary API/advantage with an open standard while it's not well-used. Presumably if enough other mail services use it, Google will eventually follow suit.
ymolodtsov 6y ago
So Gmail doesn't support it and yet it wrong for this developer to go this route? Being snobby about protocols isn't useful and comments like that should be sent to Google instead.
- ricardobeat 6y ago
  Wasn't supposed to come across like that. The sad part is that Google has enough grip on e-mail to halt adoption of any standard; GMail has been around for 16 years, you'd expect some kind of standard to come out of it to support modern e-mail features. Developers not having a choice doesn't make it less wrong. JMAP has been around for 5+ years, and specs published last year by the IETF: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8620 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8620 and https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8621 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8621

amree 6y ago

Can we have a link based on the email, e.g: "View Pull Request" if it's PR email? This has been implemented in Canary Mail. You can expand it further for JIRA, GitLab and others. Just a suggestion to create unique selling spoint for Mimestream

saagarjha 6y ago

Looks great! This question is entirely unrelated, but the picture of you that you have on your site looks uncannily like the ones that they do for badges, with the white background and all. Is it one of those?

njhaveri 6y ago
Haha... It's definitely in that style, but no, it's not my former badge photo :)

mapgrep 6y ago

Why would you devote such energy to help people lose their privacy? Do you want to work at Google or something? Disappointed someone would help that company make more money exploiting people rather than making the world a better place (for example, by building a real email client, that works with email servers rather than just google servers).

Brajeshwar 6y ago

Will check this out. I had tried multiple email clients and settled on the default macOS Mail. I try to stay with the default Apps that comes with the OS, even if that meant learning the shortcuts and spending a little more time understanding their nuances, and making use of all available features or ignoring some. As another comment pointed out, can we have the ability to do like Priority Inbox or allow us to just show Unread + Flag (like Mail)? After using emails for 20+ years, I'm pretty immune to all the jazz that comes with emails, and can survive pretty well. The only thing that I need now it the ability to see "Unread + Flagged". Please refer to my screenshot for how my Mail typically looks like -- https://public.oinam.com/photos-oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos-mail-2019nov.png https://public.oinam.com/photos-oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos...

TenJack 6y ago

Does this have the Snooze feature?

aikinai 6y ago
In a different comment the developer mentioned that the Gmail API doesn't support snooze, so he'll have to implement it manually later.

jonny383 6y ago

Looks fantastic. I strongly urge you to reconsider building out an application that serves only Google though!

SpelingBeeChamp 6y ago
"Serves only Google" when talking about email is not as limiting as your language suggests. As of October 2018, Gmail had 1.5 billion users.
- jonny383 6y ago
  I think you're missing the point I was trying to make. When Gmail decides to ship their own native client on MacOS, this platform will become abandonware.
  - bonestamp2 6y ago
    Unless it's better or google disables the api. I say this because I use the paid Apollo app for reading reddit and it's far superior to Reddit's own free app. But I do agree that it's probably a niche user base compared to the OEM app promoted by the service itself.

avgcodemonkey 6y ago

Loving the app so far - I love how speedy it is. I'm glad to see some resurgence of Mac-assed Mac apps [1]. [1]: A term coined by Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire, (in my opinion) the best Mac-assed RSS reader. https://inessential.com/2020/03/19/proxyman https://inessential.com/2020/03/19/proxyman

heipei 6y ago

What is the advantage of this over using the Gmail web ui? The Gmail web ui works great for me, has keyboard shortcuts, push notifications, works on all operating systems, supports multiple accounts with the /u/1/ subpath, etc. What does this offer that I'd be willing to pay for it and lock myself in to Mac OS exclusively?

presentation 6y ago
On my machine it feels 1000x faster since it's a native app.
tienshiao 6y ago
It uses way less memory for me with a handful of accounts. Five tabs of Gmail probably used a couple gigs of memory when left open for weeks. It's only been a day but 5 accounts in Mimestream is only using 350 megs of memory versus 1 tab of Gmail using 1.4 gigs of memory.
bfgmartin 6y ago
Way faster and uses less memory. Unified inbox. And the killer feature for me is Command-Tab - being able to keyboard switch from my email to the browser.

genghizkhan 6y ago

How does this compare to using twobird[0], which was launched recently by the guys behind Notability? Anyone who's got experience with both clients? [0]: https://www.twobird.com/ https://www.twobird.com/

ymolodtsov 6y ago

It looks really interesting, immediately downloaded and would be glad to pay a subscription if it works for me. I have two asks: 1. Glad you're supporting Gmail shortcuts, but sad to say they aren't working in a second keyboard locale which I have (as basically any non-Anglo-American user would). Gmail provides two columns for keyboard shortcuts in settings so I went and manually adapted all keys. Or maybe Mimestream could support that automatically, for instance Superhuman has no issues with the language I'm using. Currently I just can't use any keyboard shortcuts unless I switch my input to English. 2. I specifically dislike unified inbox, could there be a setting to revert the side bar, so instead of the top level Inbox with folders for my accounts it would be top-level accounts with folders for each? Thank you for working on this!

njhaveri 6y ago
#1 - oops, I filed a bug to fix this up. Thanks for pointing it out. #2 is something I'm hearing more about... I'll plan on offering this in the future.

HeadHonchoSP 6y ago

The only thing I want to ask, at least from a marketing perspective, why Mimestream. The name doesn't really tell what the app is, and if it wasn't mentioned in the title I would assume it is something that has to do with streaming. Just a minor gripe, otherwise looks great, keep it up.

leggenda47 6y ago

Hello! I downloaded and opened the app and it looks great! I saw I had 5k+ social and promotion messages so I right clicked and marked all as read. That however crashed the app and even if I open it again it crashes again.

njhaveri 6y ago
Oh no! A few people reported this crash today, I'll be fixing it hopefully tomorrow! You can reset your cache by running these this in Terminal: rm ~/Library/Containers/com.mimestream.Mimestream/Data/Library/Application\ Support/Mimestream/Mimestream* rm -rf ~/Library/Containers/com.mimestream.Mimestream/Data/Library/Application\ Support/Mimestream/Attachments

deagle50 6y ago

Is the local cache encrypted on disk? Really nice app.

radiospiel 6y ago

This looks fantastic - any chance of an OSX 10.14 version though?

sgt 6y ago
I commented on the same problem. I am very eager to upgrade to Big Sur but I absolutely do not intend to run Catalina yet, so I'll stick to Mojave (10.14) for now.

lalo2302 6y ago

Hey it looks amazing. I'll try it out. Did you do your landing page by yourself? Or are you using a template/service?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sixhobbits 6y ago

This looks great! Just a note that I signed up from my phone but couldn't go through with the direct download. When I tried again from my laptop I got an error[0]. Would have been useful to be able to reuse my email address from desktop but using a different email seemed to work fine. [0] https://static.ritza.co/uploads/mimestreamerror2.png https://static.ritza.co/uploads/mimestreamerror2.png

sgt 6y ago

Very excited to try this, I've registered. I cannot run it at the moment as it requires 10.15 or later. I am running Mojave and not planning to upgrade before Big Sur.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nbap 6y ago

I love the simplicity; form follows function. Is there a way to get rid of the badge counter on the dock icon? I somewhat feel anxious/FOMO when the counter is there.

dhritzkiv 6y ago
The way I get rid of the badge is by reading all my email and deleting the unimportant ones. (Not being snarky, just funny)
njhaveri 6y ago
Thanks! You can disable this in System Preferences > Notifications > Mimestream > Badge app icon

rado 6y ago

Awesome. More native apps, please. Don't pretend you can't notice the difference. Thanks.

housemeisterb 6y ago

Any plans to add a menu bar toggle/counter?

njhaveri 6y ago
I've heard this requested a lot in the last 24h, will add this.

mshick 6y ago

Thanks for this fantastic app. I love the native Gmail features with this level of polish, speed and OS integration. I would love to see — and would definitely pay for — a similar approach to Google Calendar. Unfortunately CalDAV-based clients only offer a fraction of the web client functionality.

bfgmartin 6y ago
+100

gauravphoenix 6y ago

When the app starts, it makes a HTTPS call to the ip address "104.248.78.24" which is owned by DigitalOcean. @njhaveri can you please clarify?

njhaveri 6y ago
This is an HTTPS GET of https://mimestream.com/appcast.xml https://mimestream.com/appcast.xml in order to check for the availability of beta software updates, using the Sparkle framework that is popular amongst Mac apps.
- gauravphoenix 6y ago
  Thank you!

BrilliantThings 6y ago

Will Mimestream support Gmail Templates? They're essential for my workflow.

ak255 6y ago

For the love of god please don't make it subscription based, add the 'Important' category and you have yourself a customer.

ak255 6y ago
Also if you need any design feedback don't hesitate to ask :)

prashaantt 6y ago

I held off from updating to Catalina last year and hope to go directly to Big Sur this year, so I can’t try this out yet but I just gave my email to your website, hoping I’d receive updates on the progress. While we’re on this topic, do you have any plans to add custom integrations with 3rd party services like Todoist and Bear? That’s one reason I’ve switched to Spark and I’d be extremely happy to pay you for it.

ethanliu 6y ago

Would you please add the "Quote Select Text" on reply? It used to be a great Gmail Lab add-on. Another feature request is to support the vertical split layout, it's more comfortable for tall screens.

riobard 6y ago

Is there a plain text composing mode? Or is it by default plain text if I don't turn on the rich text toolbar?

njhaveri 6y ago
Right now, it's WYSIWYG HTML composing only. Got a ton of requests for plain text (and markdown) composing support, and I definitely plan on adding it, though it might take a few months at this point.

mathiswrong 6y ago

really really amazing. Super snappy and minimalist. +1 for snooze and send later features.

bonestamp2 6y ago

First of all, this app is awesome. I started to make some serious progress on clearing up my email backlog. One suggestion: I really love the iOS gmail app feature to quickly switch between all mail and show unread mail only. I'd love a button or an option under the "go" menu to jump to unread mail. I know I can type "label:unread" in the search, but a one/two click method would be awesome!

duyluong 6y ago

Thanks for making this app! I'm super excited to use it as it's much faster than Spark. One thing I feel missing is ability to snooze the email and batch mark as read. Do you have plan to add it?

leptonstanja 6y ago

I’d easily pay $100+ for a native macOS client for GMail that is not a poor IMAP substitute like Mail, Thunderbird, or Outlook. But I’ll wait for v1 before I download anything outside of the app store ;)