Canary Mail – Smart Email Client for Mac and iOS with PGP Support | Hacker News Reader

Canary Mail – Smart Email Client for Mac and iOS with PGP Support

canarymail.io

49 pointslorenz_li42 comments

This looks like a decent mail client and making PGP more accessible I think is an admirable goal but I wish designers would stop patting themselves on the back...

"Simple. Secure. Stunning." is right up there with all these "show hn" that start with "beautiful".

Let social proof speak for itself. Show a quote from a major publication calling you stunning. Don't call yourself stunning. I bet you it is more effective that way.

Edit: the thought occurred to me just now, imagine if in online dating profiles someone started their profile with a self-proclaimed "Handsome and sexy"... would you go out with that person? Then again, I haven't been d ating in 10 years, maybe it's changed.

I don't think the comparison works. Choosing the words Simple. Secure. Stunning may or may not accurately describe what the application may be, but it clearly describes the priorities of the designers of the application.

Not all applications consider looking Stunning an important goal. These 3 words tell me that the application designers consider security, ease of use, and good looks as their major priorities while designing the application.

A person self proclaiming that they are sexy and handsome is either lying (if they are not) or they are boasting about their genes, which is not something today's society considers boast worthy.

> I don't think the comparison works. Choosing the words Simple. Secure. Stunning may or may not accurately describe what the application may be, but it clearly describes the priorities of the designers of the application.

I can see that. I don't think I'd have an issue if this was their mission statement and plastered all over their office walls as something aspirational. But that's not how it is being used here.

I keep trying these (Canary, Polymail, Spark, Airmail), and they all disappoint in some way, and I always end up going back to trusty old Apple Mail.

One big point for me: Except for Airmail, none of the new "minimalist" mail apps do plaintext. They all force you to send as HTML. I would love for "rich" email to work, but it's not nice the way current clients do it. In particular, I think it's incredibly presumptuous for the sender to specify which font the recipient should read the text in.

My favourite mail client ever was Sparrow, until Google killed it.

I feel like you're me. I've the exact same experiences and I keep trying something else but they fall flat and often miss some basic (important) features. Always going back to Apple mail.

Heh. Did you try Airmail? That's the only one that I liked.

The only reason I'm not using it today is that I was using the beta, and at one point they did a lot of frequent bugfix releases, and each new release started to require that you set up all your settings (mail accounts etc.) from scratch. I got tired of it and abandoned the thing.

I'm sure it's better now, I just haven't felt like going through all the steps again yet. Airmail does plaintext email, too.

Hey, I know someone working on a plaintext email service which should be encrypted by default, without attachments. I can post to HN if/when it's public.

What is a "plaintext email service"? Is it a native Mac/iOS app?

Standard SMTP and IMAP but only plaintext is allowed, no attachments. If it works out it will be encrypted by default with a privkey + passphrase upon account creation, and you can of course encrypt on your own on top of the defaults.

I keep coming back to Postbox. The underlying engine is a bit more reliable, the PGP support is a bit better, and it's still a nice-to-use Mac app.

Mailmate for me. It was good when it had that dumb brown icon, it's even better now

That moment when I have to go to Product Hunt to see screenshots of your app because apparently they aren't important enough to put on your landing page. Why do so many app landing pages leave out screenshots?

They have screenshots. 30% of the landing page is that. But the screenshots they choose are the on-boarding/startup screens.

The on-boarding screenshots are a bad choice for the landing page.

I had to switch to another computer to see screenshots, I couldn't see them either from Chromium or iCab under iOS 10. Whatever fancy stuff they're trying to do on their site comes with a significant(ly irritating) browser compatibility cost. The iOS screens themselves are also pretty mediocre. I do not think stuffing them into that iPhone frame is at all helpful in making them informative, and they don't cover a lot of important basic questions I have. I guess I'm supposed to go to one of the linked other sites for more information but I consider that a significant fail in a product, IMHO their own web page should be the authoritative source that can answer most of my questions about core basics of specs and interface.

Because they need upvotes for their product on a community homepage that churns out tech spam and the occasional golden goose.

Product Hunt is beyond the tipping point of being an inside community where your product only succeeds if a dozen or so other "makers" (as they call it) can also advertise their churn in your thread.

Just last week that Spreadshare product was at the top of the page because their maker went out and spammed Slack channels soliciting upvotes under the false pretense of offering jobs to developers.

I want this to be awesome... but I'm also terrified of applications that tell me they are secure with no proof. Can you provide some additional information to quell my fears?

Perhaps information on a third party auditor?

I completely agree, design so often disguise missing security. I want this to be good but am lacking a security audit or open source.

When the first tab on your website is "Privacy", don't make "Read notifications" the default.

From the http request you're taking all kinds of metadata to your server. I don't want to add my PGP key in here to check, but I assume this is default for PGP messages too?

I regret to say it but I loathe their website. That sort of ultra-sparse modernist UI, where text and links are visually indistinguishable, informational text is spartan, and images are minimal and compressed is not helpful. Having to download and test a program or go read reviews to get a basic sense of UI is off putting. For software where UI is in fact a major part of the value offering, that's particularly concerning.

Having said that, sometimes this can be overcome by virtue of a killer app, and Canary Mail may have one in the form of PGP for iOS. For whatever reason despite iOS's strong overall security narrative and use by people concerned about security, and despite native S/MIME being available since IIRC iOS 5.0, there has been a curious lack of PGP availability in any alternate iOS mail client. I say curious because email clients are one of those areas where it is very hard to get people away from the overall functional native one, so uncovered features that a niche user base will find extremely compelling matter more then in other kinds of software. Lack of PGP with iOS has network effects in that these days email that can only be read via a PC OS and is unreadable on mobile is pretty hard to accept. If Canary has no utterly breaking flaws then PGP support would make me at least take a hard look, including buying a copy purely for evaluation purposes whether I ultimately use it or not.

Interested in the read tracking and in a nice email client that will help me get through my backlog. Installed and configured my main mail account.

Advanced account settings was prefilled with almost-right information, which legit helps, but the labels only appear when the fields are empty, so I had to delete the prefilled info to see which ones needed to be changed.

Waiting on the animation between messages got old halfway through the first time, so I looked around in preferences for a way to shorten or turn it off. No luck, but in toggling the option to display or not display the message pane, I ended up with a window that consisted of disconnected segments of the top of each of the three panes. Quit was necessary to restore.

Did a quick search to collect a bunch of github messages from one project and delete them. Seven threads from my inbox and one from my archive were included. Not what I meant, no obvious way to change, but oh well I can live with deleting that one too. Right pane showed eight threads, gave bulk option to delete. Deleted, but then the right pane remained, the search now showed more entries, seemingly including both the now-gone inbox entries plus all the messages I'd just trashed in the trash.

Processing a few more messages, I ended up with the message pane showing only a ~20 px sliver of each message. Scroll bar still behaved as though the whole message was visible. Quit was again required to fix.

I'm on the mailing list, so hopefully I'll hear about future bug fix releases, but the app's too buggy in five min of use to even think about making it a daily thing as is.

> so I had to delete the prefilled info to see which ones needed to be changed.

Gah! What an anti-pattern!

Total OT sidebar, but UX has gone through so much regression in the last decade I'm starting to view it as confirmation of the cyclical theory of history: flat UI, tiny thin fonts, washed out colors, material design removing differences between tabs, labels, buttons and badges, etc.

Maybe it's just temporary insanity, but holy cow things have gotten bad.

At this point, I'm just happy there is a new email client that isn't storing anything on the third party servers. Good for Canary and I'll give it a try.

Email client economics are tough, you need some sort of service-like revenue associated with it or you sell your customers data in order to have a sustainable business.

I hope canary has something non-evil figured out, the client looks nice.

...or you could just sell the software? That's how we used to do it in the Olden Days.

That model only worked when people would buy your new software every year. Now a lot of software is good enough, and maybe your competition is even free, and the revenue dries up.

Considering the amount of the personal data still going through email, this is one of the few areas that no one should be giving up to any third party services, regardless of the benefits it may provide.

Encryption with you owning the key is a requirement if it is going to be stored on a third party service. You can provide a subscription model for the server costs if need be.

They actually mention in the FAQ [1] that once they officially release their apps there will be a free and a paid version.

[1]: https://canarymail.io/faq.html

Does Spark store anything on 3rd party servers? I didn't think so.

Yes, they do. It's why I don't use them.

Source: https://sparkmailapp.com/privacy

> Accounts are added to Spark through OAuth where possible. Where OAuth is not supported we keep your account username and password on our secure servers. We then use the authorization provided to download your emails to our virtual servers and push to your device. We use Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure to store your data. Apart from the AWS' security policies we take a number of measures to ensure that your data is never read by anyone else. We ensure that all transmission is secured with HTTPS so that no one else can access your data. Your account credentials are stored on secure cloud-based servers using asymmetric encryption.

I may be wrong, but that seems like the only way to provide push notifications. I guess that's the trade-off.

My kingdom for an email client that works well with gmail, works offline, is fast, supports editing in an external editor and lets me quickly skim email.

Mutt?

Exciting. Where's the source?

Please read the website a bit better! "SECURE EMAIL CLIENT FOR MAC AND IPHONE"

It's a secure e-mail client, so they can't release the source! /s

Airmail is quite ok but still far from Sparrow usability and performance.

Airmail hangs several seconds on startup doing god-knows-what.

i miss sparrow! :/

How does read-tracking work (a feature I don't even want) with a client-only email solution like this?

Making an assumption from the FAQ.

When you send the email it generates a unique hash it places a tracking pixel (1x1 transparent gif image) served off a canary mail server into the email with that hash. For a period your client queries them for the a yes/no on if that tracking pixel with the hash has been downloaded.

That is typically how email marketing platforms do it, and it appears to be consistent with the FAQ.

Does it work offline, like when I'm on the subway or a plane?

The website looks like an ARG for the next Halo game.

and like always , everything is for iOS , like other OS doesnt exists... great

Subjective, but I found the landing page design off putting when viewed on my iPhone

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