Wmail – Desktop client for Gmail and Google Inbox

I think "secret" is a misnomer here.

The process results in a client ID and, in some cases, a client secret, which you embed in the source code of your application. (In this context, the client secret is obviously not treated as a secret.)

https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/OAuth2 (under "Installed Applications")

There's not really anything you can do about this unless you want Wmail to have to stand up a server to authenticate with, at which point you're no really getting any additional security because Wmail still needs to store some sort of credential on your machine for persistent login that an attacker could steal to authenticate with Wmail on their own machine.

An attacker would have to steal your access token stored locally on your machine to use with this public client id and client secret, and if you have software that's maliciously scraping credentials from your machine you already have a problem.

> I'm trying to find a feature it has that I can't get through Chrome...

An individually dockable app with a badge icon showing unread messages?

Perhaps a little more privacy? You can browse the web without being logged into Google.

I know you can have separate Chrome users, but this may separate concerns slightly more. Not sure.

I use mbsync and alpine but obviously since alpine is just an interface to the local maildir I can hop between different mail clients without anything breaking.

That's more of a good thing than a bad thing for Gmail users: Gmail's search based inbox does not logically map to IMAP and Google don't have a full public API for Gmail.

This is even worse. While with Java you have to install one JRE instance, Electron duplicates whole browser for each app.

It reminds me of Radiant[0], which does the same thing for Google Music.

Google has bet big on web apps. They are pushing hard to make the web app the way of the future. I don't have a problem with that, and to an extent I'm getting used to it (while simultaneously moving my clients in that direction like I've been doing for ten years), but in an age when it's still very transitional, it is nice to have these wrappers to make everything a little smoother.

If they published desktop apps, folks would never migrate. They would complain about the poor experience on the Chromebook, etc.

[0] https://github.com/radiant-player/radiant-player-mac

I'd hazard that google doesn't see a need. I like this but I can understand that they may feel that you don't get extra features and isn't worth the work to create and support the app/program. The likelyhood is that if they did make a desktop client that it would be something similar, i.e. it just loads the webpage in a nice looking window. Which chrome does a pretty good job of already.

Why would Google make a webapp in a chromium wrapper, if they can just stick to their web interface in chrome?

> Looks great. But it makes me really wonder why somebody is doing Google's job.

The same could then be said of any mobile app used to browse HN or Reddit I guess.

  google-chrome --app="https://inbox.google.com"

I think google already did their job.

This desktop client appears to load the inbox interface and gmail interface in a iframe and has extra related functionality on the side . So it isn't just an email client. Looking at it I don't see how it is much Of a desktop client unless they added offline functionality .

On Linux, there's Geary (now pantheon-mail):

http://blog.elementary.io/post/139731273161/re-geary

What about Thunderbird?

Ahh yes, Bupkis: my grandmother's preferred Linux desktop mail client.

For me, the main dealbreaker of Windows 10 Mail is lack support for email aliases. One can forward multiple accounts to a single gmail account and select the "From" address when composing messages.

Many people use third-party email clients via POP, IMAP, or an application-specific password. Just think about all the people using Thunderbird, mobile email clients, etc. The day they stop permitting that is the day they no longer offer an email service.

"Coming soon"

Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155781 and marked it off-topic.