Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

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> I used Nylas for a while and really liked it, until they they forced everyone to pay $7 per month to use it.

Sorry, but that isn't a fair way of describing what occurred.

Nylas is a startup, trying to figure out a business model which works for them.

You're not yet forced to pay. If you had a Nylas ID back when Pro was announced you got a gratis year of subscription. Now, they released a gratis version once more, called Nylas Mail, which is also open source. The backend is also open source.

What this means is that they've adopted a freemium model, and you got approx half a year to still enjoy your Pro license.

I haven't done a feature comparison between Mozilla Thunderbird (which I know is not everyone's preference but was my previous cross platform e-mail client), Nylas Mail, and Nylas Pro. If anyone knows one, please share.

My main concern is the backend being hosted in US by a US corporation. I don't like my data being hosted by US corporations, on US soil, and I recommend non US-citizens/residents to care about this.

> If you had a Nylas ID back when Pro was announced you got a gratis year of subscription.

Well, uh.. that didn't quite go that way for me.

The Pro 'transition' was a miserable experience that made me stop using it altogether* - it literally popped up asking me if I wanted to subscribe to Pro, and if I said 'no' (thinking I'll just continue non-Pro) the whole app quit.

* Coincidentally I tried it out again (seemed to get a 14day trial even though I'd used it before) a few days ago. There's still lots I like; the Basic tier is exactly what I needed really - last year when it suddenly held my emails hostage (slight hyperbole of course, there were still copies on the server).

I'm sorry to hear about your problem with the transition. Did you attempt to contact customer support about this?

My experience was I received a coupon via e-mail at june 15 2016. I upgraded the same day. But I also still use other e-mail clients to access my mail e.g. from my phone. So I would not be locked out of my e-mail if Nylas quit working that same day.

Hey – I'm an engineer at Nylas. To add to what you said, the newly released Basic edition does all email syncing client-side, and uses our servers for minimal things (i.e: auth).

How about not using your servers for anything?

Unfortunately, we have to use an intermediate server to use Google OAuth.

If a malicious party successfully attacked the Nylas auth servers, how much of my email data would they be able to get? All of it?

The backend speaks SMTP, IMAP, and HTTP. It is basically a glue (or proxy) between SMTP/IMAP (including those protocols over TLS) and HTTP. Nylas Pro talks HTTP to the glue (I assume that is using TLS, so HTTPS). Nylas Mail also talks HTTP to the backend, but the backend runs locally, so you're self hosting the backend. I suppose this has a performance loss. (With Nylas Pro, you can set a separate backend server if you desire but that requires work. That is a really cool feature for a business though.)

So I would assume you are hosed. The passwords need to be stored plaintext.

I don't think the free version of Nylas Mail is storing IMAP passwords, plaintext or otherwise. For Gmail, at least.

1. You never enter them into the client. It uses Oauth to authenticate.

2. By the comment here, it seems that they're using Google's Gmail API. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13417904

Oh, it does save the password.

Oauth makes sense that there's no password saved. A unique key is saved which is authenticated with Google. If this key leaks, you are hosed, too, but at least you can revoke that key.

I tried grep mypasswd ~/.nylas-mail/* and grep said Binary file shared.sqlite matches. This did not occur in ~/.nylas it makes sense and it is inevitable, a client like Thunderbird suffers from the same.

It can be circumvented by saving the password encrypted and decrypting it using a master password. That is akin to how LastPass and Mozilla save their cloud data.

Using containers etc would also lower the threat.

In a way its good the password is saved locally. The engine also runs locally. It moves the threat model to the client, away from Nylas servers. Kudos.

The app looks great, but I just am not in favor of piping everything I have with email through your servers. Just a standalone app as basic version with opt-in for Google OAUth would justify its use case.

> If you had a Nylas ID back when Pro was announced you got a gratis year of subscription.

If you didn't, you had to pay.

True, if you did not have a NylasID before May 1st 2016.

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