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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

Do you think Nylas is headed towards this eventual doom too?

I guess Mailpile isn't trying to be commercial, so perhaps it will keep soldiering on the power of donations for as long as that keeps up.

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Hey there-- I work at Nylas.

We've structured our business to... actually have a business. Our team spent the first year selling APIs to developers [1] which already power lots of paid apps. The N1 mail app we released two months ago[2] follows this and will have paid features next year.

Plus both are open source free software, and quite popular on GitHub. [3]

[1] https://nylas.com/features/

[2] https://nylas.com/n1

[3] http://github.com/nylas/

Can you compare yourself to Mailpile? I want an email client (and maybe server) that is privacy-conscious and easy to configure. Are you two completely different projects?

We're two totally different projects. We focus on a lot of stuff in addition to privacy (like great design).

I understand what Mailpile is. It's a self-hosted email web client.

What is Nylas? The website doesn't seem to be written for me, but for PHBs. Apparently you have great business, design, and APIs, but what is it that those things do? Are you an email client? A server? A webmail service?

What makes you different from Gmail or from Mailpile?

Nylas is two things:

1. APIs for developers that replace IMAP/SMTP/Exchange. Use this to build any app that integrates with a user's mailbox, calendar, or address book.

2. A new extensible email app, built on web technologies (Chromium+NodeJS). This is called N1 and was released about 2 months ago.

We sell the APIs as an infrastructure business (like AWS).

I’d pay to have delete actually delete email completely (not just from my inbox, but from all as well).

What?

I think he means he'd like to be able to irretrievably destroy all records of an email.

Yeah right now it labels the email with “trash” in the all folder instead of actually deleting it.

@softawre: He's asking for it to delete on the receivers side too.

I think certain enterprise-y email solutions have this, but there's no way to have that happen in the distributed email ecosystem unless all your messages were just links to a website that could delete the content centrally, or similarly, jpg's of rendered text that were somehow forced to be remotely fetched each time.

And, indeed, that sort of functionality runs counter to the idea that once something has been sent to me, it's "mine" to keep/delete/whatever without someone else having the ability to change or delete it without my permission.

You have no idea how much some managers love this idea.

I know I had a former boss that loved to try using the outlook "unsend the stupid thing i sent" feature.

Little did he know the cients could turn that bit of functionality off. He hated when we replied to the emails he had "purged".

Well there is https://www.criptext.com/

in order to do that, you can send an unique link as content so you can have total control over what you sent. doubt that many would click but i couldn't think of any other way.

other than that, i don't think receivers like the idea that others can control what's in their inbox.

This is the first I've heard of N1. It looks appealing, but after following the links and looking at it on GitHub, it seems like installing the sync server for self hosting is still non-trivial.

I went to the "releases" tab on GitHub and it looks like the last one was in 2014. I see things in the GitHub repo that suggest there are Dockerfiles and Debian packages, but I don't see an actual Debian package repository or an entry on the Docker Hub. Is the recommended way to use it today just cloning the git repo? Or is there a stable release of the sync server that's tested/known to work with the binaries of the client?

Yep, just clone the git repo and set up on Debian (like Ubuntu 12.04) and run setup.sh. Most developers run it in a VM.

We don't have "releases" because we are constantly releasing to production. Check out the `production` branch on GitHub for what we're running right now. Usually it's just a handful of hours behind master (at most).

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