I've spent the last two years building a new email client
ivelope.com
ivelope.com
Why? If the product is that good I’ll evangelize it. This is a desktop application, so I don’t see a big boost from a network effect. All this does makes me wonder if the product is more about building hype than value
Although Mailbox could presumably fit into that strategy, Dropbox is instead focusing on its new Google Docs-style document editing and collaboration service Paper, which may gain some of the functionality of Mailbox. "As we deepened our focus on collaboration, we realized there’s only so much an email app can do to fundamentally fix email," a blog post credited to "the Mailbox team" reads. "We’ve come to believe that the best way for us to improve people’s productivity going forward is to streamline the workflows that generate so much email in the first place."
Frame it as a reward not a punishment.
Re: Incentive to share it - Just build a good to amazing product - which the comments and upvotes you have on HN are already significant proof of - and you'll get higher adoption in the long run with exponential growth, without adding friction of little tricks like this which will be relatively inconsequential in the long run, other than perhaps causing friction with early adopters who will get turned off by them.
Maybe a quick survey with questions like, - what email client do you use now? - what is your favorite/least favorite feature of said client? - how often do you check your email? etc
In a world where publishing is essentially free, reputation is an extremely valuable commodity. The ask here is not trivial.
I tell my friends about new apps, startups, and projects all the time. None of them think I'm staking my reputation when I shitpost about some new thing in Slack.
Apart from that, the e-mail form doesn't let me control what I'm sending.
You're taking a needlessly confrontational stance here with insulting language, and people are responding to that.
How can we ever expect a reliable, non-garbage-dominate internet when it is funded by perverse incentives?
But if a friend of mine recommends a product to me, well, I do think all of those things.
My reputation is worth more to me, than trying to get higher up in a queue to a product i haven't tried. I don't share things with people lightly, and there are clearly a bunch of us out there.
Any certainly, nobody is advocating that our view of the world is the correct one, just that we hold that view.
Imagine what the world would be like if everyone had the same attitude towards other people's attention and time as you do.
I'm sure this behaviour doesn't seem like a big deal to you because relatively few people are so inconsiderate.
Then why are you posting anonymously?
reputation is an extremely valuable commodity
This may not matter much if the thing you're recommending is an email client. But it matters a lot if the thing you're recommending is, say, an investment in a startup company. It also matters a lot if you're, say, Amazon or Yelp or TripAdvisor and a big part of your stock in trade is an enormous volume of product recommendations.
Or maybe only send to your friends who a new email client would interest?
Is “hey, saw this on HN, this looks interesting” really going to hurt your reputation?
He’s a dev trying to market, that’s all.
It's totally optional to invite more people, so if it goes against your ethical views, just don't.
Incredibly hyperbolic
It's actually dangerous and unethical TO put my name behind this untested product. It's not open source, and I'm being asked to put my seal of trust and approval on their project. That's a hard no.
Where are the boring products without dumb marketing techniques to generate hype, with actual things to show other than a waiting list?
So what you're saying is that Viktor Hn just shot to the front of the line? Well played, Viktor.
Edit: Actually, based on the invite code, it's likely a specific code for HN. The Developer's name appears to be Viktor Jansson, I just assumed Hn was a last name. :)
Also: If you can't spare Max 300MB ram and you are complaining on HN wtf computer do you use?
https://www.anandtech.com/show/9864/price-of-ddr4-memory-dro...
Slashdot got like this eventually. Slashdot was tech site full of luddites complaining about anything new. Worse, slashdot stopped becoming relevant. When the top comment on an article about increased hard drive space was "why does all this stuff take so much space? bloat!! lazy developers!!!".... it's pretty lame.
300mb of ram is nothing. Your OS will swap the software out when you aren't using it and it will be no big deal. People need to stop micromanaging their computer and go do more productive things with their time....
Wrong, since Electron apps NEVER sit still.
You're so wrong. This hogging literally causes micromanagement. I have to start closing browser tabs and maybe at some point my IDE or a few open files so that just Slack or Discord or some other piece of horrendously bloated software could hog up another half a gigabyte of RAM. When Eight gigabytes stop being enough because of some chat applications it's not okay. Calling people that think software can actually use resources meaningfully "luddites" is counterproductive and damaging to the entire PC ecosystem, RAM and disk space are limited resources on most PCs and people do not want and should not have to spend more just to run a few chat applications.
You can make pretty x-platform apps in JavaFX, QT Quick, GTK, hell even Lazarus, and they don't eat CPU and memory like Electron does.
It is a shame that nearly every app released in the latter half of this decade is just wasteful Electron garbage. Don't forget your 300+mb needs to sit along side Slack's 300mb, Discord's 300mb, and so on... fuck even my Crashplan Backup client eats up three processes and another 300mb. It's inconsiderate as hell.
Done.
I think the problem is Chrome, which the Electron runtime requires. Each separate Electron app has its own copy of Chromium in memory. (What happened to shared libs?)
I see two ways you can help:
(1) you can try to get memory-usage-reducing fixes into Chromium, or,
(2) you can build an Electron-compatible runtime that uses less memory (maybe by transpiling it into code that runs on a native toolkit, and not having a static copy of that runtime per-app).
Is it inconsiderate for Ford to make a larger SUV because your garage doesn't have unlimited square footage and you only want to buy so much gas? Of course not. Why is this any different? You can decide not to buy the SUV just like you can decide not to download this application.
(edit: Flash, maybe? Though people mostly didn't try to write too many full apps in it. And Flash projects could be fairly CPU-efficient if effort was put into it, but way less effort than, say, MS with VS Code)
We have regular audits to find ways to make things lighter/faster, and therefore better. Occasionally "flashier" mandates from on high override those considerations, but so far it's been specific and rare.
It's probably because our target audience isn't developers.
But the devs coming out of schools today (and half of HN) believe it's OK to build a skyscraper by stacking frameworks one upon the other.
I wonder if electron is a bit of the same deal, with the recommended way of using it optimizing for developer efficiency over resource efficiency.
Electron being in vogue does definitely compound this issue but the benefits from using it (e.g. cross OS development on a familiar platform & language many devs already know) seem to outweigh the resource problem.
Do any major code bootcamps teach C#, C++, or Java? Or is it all just webtech?
Because I chose my OS carefully and found that I like the way its native controls work. It has a number of features missing from other OSes and I want to use apps that integrate naturally with it. I have yet to find an electron app (or web app) that is 1/10th as good as a native app at fulfilling that desire. Electron apps feel like generic imitations of native apps. Yeah, they work, but everything is just off. Also, it comes from Google so I can only assume it's doing some sort of tracking of me and/or my machine resources. No thank you.
> Is it inconsiderate for Ford to make a larger SUV
It depends on which dimension they extend it and by how much. If they make it wider to where it doesn't fit in a lane on a normal road, then hell yes it's inconsiderate. That's essentially what electron does.
Electron was developed by GitHub for their Atom editor, actually.
There is no such governing body for Electron, save for the nebulous "market"; nobody with any authority is forcing them (GitHub et al) to fix their shit or GTFO
If you stick to using the GUI part minimally, it's easy to build very light weight applications with electron. I've been building my own music streaming server with electron and its gotten some traction since it's easier to install. The GUI layer is only used for editing config options, so the app typically runs with under 50mb of memory consumption: https://github.com/IrosTheBeggar/mStream/releases
If used smartly, electron is a powerful tool for developing desktop apps quickly. However thanks to modern frontend dev practices, it's easy to build a bloated pile of crap.
I get why you don't like Electron apps. I share your position in that. I would expect that if Ivelope grows quickly enough to justify it, time will be spent on improving resource utilization. That could be through scrapping Electron or through optimizing within it - but either way, at this stage "time to market" and "speed of iteration" are much more important than resource utilization.
It's not just one user that they've lost…
- we're not talking about space probes, - this is just one dev who thought "I want to write an email client" and make a tech choice based on his/her own proficiency with that stack and his/her project constraints (time, cost, quality, scope).
It seems unfair to rant so much about it. If it's feature full and good and perf becomes an issue, consider it an MVP and a stack change is doable. If the thing blows, trash the MVP.
Personally I'm far more worried about the first noted limitation about email forwarding with attachments not being available. I'd have wanted that before most of the showcased features, none of which I find particularly interesting. But I applaud the effort and the Polish, and the approach to build the tool that you want/need when. You can't find one.
(Second worry would be: if it's not open source, please make so.)
+1
Do you praise the builder of that Brazilian skyscraper that caught fire and collapse for the thousands of hours that went into its construction?
> You can make pretty x-platform apps in JavaFX, QT Quick, GTK, hell even Lazarus, and they don't eat CPU and memory like Electron does.
lol, if those are your idea of pretty... The reason Electron is popular is because those frameworks are, and have always been, garbage for garbage software.
Plus Gmail and a few others big names in webmail require a HTTP client for authentication if you want to use their proprietary sync (granted there's also POP3 and IMAP. But while IMAP is good in a number of ways it's still far from perfect).
As far as I know, every single usable language comes with a HTTP client, and every single GUI framework has a "WebView" control or equivalent.
As for the HTTP client point; you can use a simple HTTP API (libcurl or whatever) to perform the webmail authentication but honestly you're in for a whole world of pain because it's really more than just a HTTP call. Ideally you'd want another webview for that as well. Oh how all those individual webviews are going to add significantly to your memory usage. You might as well consolidate them all into one...let's call that new WebView "Electron" shall we ;)
So it's not electron vs native, it's electron vs nothing.
You're free to use gnus, notmuch, mu4e, whatever million other variants if you're so concerned about your "precious" resources. This electron app that's been built has some neat features that a lot of people might find useful, like that search seems pretty cool.
Wastefulness is not cool.
I have a couple of development virtual machines (VMs), and build containers running on my laptop. They help me with a range of tasks (some are memory intensive). Further, I configure nested virtualization, which lets me setup two level-1 guests (A and B), and inturn run a level-2 guest (C) in either of them. Now I can test live migration of VM C between A and B. So I really try my best to stay away from memory-hogging applications.
That's one of the reasons why 4-ish years ago I ditched Thunderbird, which was hogging memory, and switched to the venerable mutt e-mail client. (Also ditched HexChat for irssi.) FWIW, switching to mutt was one of the best decisions I made for my productivity -- I spend a lot of time wrangling high-volume technical mailing lists; it's unalloyed joy to use mutt on a daily basis (especially if you deal with e-mail based patch workflow).
Granted, it might be a niche scenario. I just wanted to call out that there are damn good reasons to conserve memory.
Minified JS and obfuscated Java (DexGuard or ProGuard) are almost identical in complexity, you can restore the actual datatypes still, and you can even restore the rough outlines of where control structures were.
Obfuscated WebAssembly, NaCl or native code is much worse to work with, and often data structures and control structures are gone entirely.
Janne Koschinski, CompSci student. https://github.com/justJanne
Current maintainer of QuasselDroid https://quasseldroid.info/ https://github.com/sandsmark/QuasselDroid
Generally I share such info on IRC, and then it gets just forgotten over time.
Or, at least, it has the potential to be better.
She wants an e-mail client that stores attachments remotely, only downloading them as requested by by the client. Is there an e-mail service that does things this way?
In the description it is said one can file email with a key, by associating folders to keys. Keyboard operation is very important to me. However direct key/folder association doesn't scale to a large number of folders. Have you considered a feature like the "Nostalgy" extension for Thunderbird? [1]
With Nostalgy one type "s" to file/save an email, then a string which is matched to folder names. It's a bit like helm for emacs (except it's exact match, space is not interpreted as an "AND" like with helm). The commands are go/save/copy, and then string match. This scales very well. That could be an advanced feature, as for beginners the direct key/folder association is simpler. But I guess you will target advanced users too, and for them it may be an important feature.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/nostalgy/
I have a bunch of questions that I couldn't find out from the website (but are obscure enough that I shouldn't expect to):
* Is this a purely native app, or an Electron / Javascript app? Personally I'm only interested in native apps & Electron would be a deal breaker - but I'm weird, most people won't care.
* What format are you using for email archives? Mbox, Maildir? Can I import my Thunderbird / Postbox Mbox archives of 21 years of email?
* Can I turn off threaded & conversation views?
* Do you support POP3? (You only mention IMAP... I'm sure that would be fine, but I still have accounts configured via POP3.)
* Can I change priority of individual messages after they arrive? I sort my inbox by priority and then date-descending, not by date.
I'm a hardcore Postbox user and email is critical infrastructure for me, so I probably won't try it or switch anytime soon... but I'm always keeping an eye on powerful desktop email clients, in case I ever need to switch, or find something dependable that really blows away Postbox.
Well done! Looks very promising!
2. Currently not supporting Mbox/Maildir but downloading emails directly from the server, however an import of this is on the todo list
3. Re: turn off conversation view: not at this time. Do you prefer not having it in a conversation view?
4. No POP3 yet
5. I think you can achieve this using folders/labels in Ivelope
Thanks for the positive encouragement!
Edit: formatting
As a past (very minor) contributor to chromium+webkit I'm curious if there's anything one can do to help, but I haven't kept up with their status in a long time.
It's a 10 year old project and memory usage has always been fairly high, I don't see any indication of a major focus on reducing it anytime soon.
I don't hate Electron apps or anything, but the ones I already have open are using up enough of my memory that there isn't much left to run more of them. I really do hope this improves in the future though. If not I may just have to buy more RAM.
I couldn't find exact figures for MS Outlook but Office 365 seems to require 1Gb as a minimum.
A quick look at the Gmail tab I have open in Chrome seems to be taking roughly 390Mb so this would seem to be an improvement over that.
As a genuine question, what sort of size would you expect for an optimised native app with the same functionality?
I’m tempted to make a FastMail Electron app just to demonstrate that Electron/HTML/CSS/JS doesn’t need to mean slow and heavy (it just normally does).
Later: OK, so on Windows a trivial Electron “just load https://www.fastmail.com/login (and then log in)” app uses ~230MB of RAM. Not what I was hoping for, though it doesn’t surprise me a great deal—Chrome is quite happy to use lots of memory. Interestingly, when I reduce it from 3000×2000 to 1600×1200 (device pixels, it’s a 2× display), it goes down to about 160MB after a bit, and minimised to 180MB or 120MB for the two window sizes. Still very snappy despite this memory usage, though, for FastMail is fast.
For reference, I’m using the explicit/window-objects/top(…) figure from about:memory. This is not an accurate representation of the full footprint, but is close enough.
Yes, but that’s not a fair apples to apples comparison with his 300mb number. Your looking at the memory used for that tab, not the shared memory used by the browser across tabs. Open Firefox with no sites open and check your baseline memory usage. Add that to the numbers above for a direct comparison.
I’m tempted to make a FastMail Electron app just to demonstrate that Electron/HTML/CSS/JS doesn’t need to mean slow and heavy (it just normally does).
One avenue would be to use a different, more light-weight engine; https://github.com/zserge/webview, for example, can use the local platform’s engine, which is likely to be somewhere between a little and a lot more efficient than Electron/Chrome. Running FastMail with the MSHTML renderer via the Rust bindings for that (DPI scaling issues, but meh), it starts at about 60MB but is easy to get over 80MB with some use. Still quite a lot less than Electron/Chrome.
On my laptop with 16GB, it's certainly been at least a few months since I've done anything that made it hit swap.
> I said "unintentionally" as a hedge for corner cases like VMs where you are likely aware of the limits.
I was aware of the limited memory of the VM, but almost everything I run there is a text-mode application, so it usually doesn't matter. Honestly, I thought that Slack would fit easily in the free memory, but I'm logged into 3 teams, so it ate more than I expected. And it's a spinning rust drive; swapping sucks, and it slows down the host OS at the same time.
It's an avoidable situation; just run Slack under the host's Windows, instead of in the Linux VM. But it remains the case, in my uses, that memory has caused more issues than CPU, and that CPU has caused more issues than battery drain. I don't know why everyone else focuses on memory so much...I perceive my own issues as kind of a corner case.
It might be me, but i prefer them to be rendered incorrectly in a text-only view :-P. I use email since the 90s and so far i do not think i can come up with any case where the HTML in an email was actually useful and not used for fluff (which i do not mind but can do without), branding (which i do not care at all about) or -way way more often- advertisement.
Also almost all HTML mails i've seen come in text-only version too and any useful bits are attachments anyway.
Great work by the way!
What is the reason you do not store in a standard format?
Yup, that's what I wanted to know. Since Thunderbird & Postbox both used the same Mbox Unix format for my 20 year email archive saved on disk, it was very easy to switch between them. And since it's an industry standard, I'm reasonably confident I could export/migrate it to a new email client when I have to - or find someone who has written software to do it.
For a email client that is still more than I ever would accept. Do you hold all conversations in the RAM for searchability or something?
When I use mutt I doubt it goes over 20mb.
But then it is mutt running inside a screen session in an xterm.
Screen is using 4m, and the largest xterm open is using 2.4m. So even adding in screen and xterm overhead that's still only 34.4mb.
1. Is there an extension architecture, that I might be able to write my own extensions?
2. Can I edit the "From" address on outgoing mail, and will it remember my preferred "From" address on a per-recipient basis?
3. Does it have extensive keyboard shortcut support, or does it require a mouse?
4. Does it work well with both of the Linux clipboards, the standard system one and the X-provided middle-click one? (Other Electron apps, such as Postman, do not)
2) Not at the moment, but it supports multiple email accounts at once and you'll be able to move emails effortlessly between accounts in the near future.
3) Yes, it has extensive keyboard shortcut support
4) It hasn't been released for Linux yet, but once it will, I'll make sure to try to address this issue.
Not yet, but I assure you that I will! Especially if the answer to the next question is negative...
> 2) Not at the moment, but it supports multiple email accounts at once and you'll be able to move emails effortlessly between accounts in the near future.
I have literally thousands of "accounts" as I have a catch-all domain that I've been using since 2001. I need the ability to edit the "From" address, minimum. And if I'm going to use the email client regularly, then it needs to remember the "From" address to use on a per-recipient basis. That is what extensions are for!
> 3) Yes, it has extensive keyboard shortcut support
Terrific!
> 4) It hasn't been released for Linux yet, but once it will, I'll make sure to try to address this issue.
You are welcome to contact me for testing. muszc-master splat dotancohen spot com.
I feel bad but you have already lost me there :/
Not in terms of resources (CPU/RAM). It's way better than Electron.
And I don't believe that only having experience in web development is a good enough excuse for shoehorning web dev things everywhere else.
Before that I used mutt - also very little.
Native Emacs in a GUI can also show inline images (but not when running in a terminal, obviously).
[0]: https://senglehardt.com/papers/pets18_email_tracking.pdf
I strongly prefer to disable conversation view, because the time (recency) and time interval (frequency) are obscured, at least from the inbox view of most readers.
There is a big difference to me between a thread with 10 emails in one morning, versus one with 9 emails over a week, followed by one this morning.
150-300MB seems more than acceptable for a local email client. A pedantic, vocal minority may be over-represented in this thread (it IS HN after all).
IMO Electron apps present significant advantages that justify its negligible cost, eg skinnable with CSS, inspected live with a web inspector, cross platform etc.
All of these have been possible with Qt circa 2006. (There is no inspector out-of-the-box, but KDAB made one that could be injected via LD_PRELOAD.)
That said, electron can have a small fingerprint if the dev team is carefull/good enough, and is hte best option when your app have to be able to read HTML (and copy HTML formatted string). To me, an email client is a good way to use electron for an app.
Or for advanced situations "selectively efficient" - using something other than Electron for an app that is intended to be cross-platform because [insert-alternative-here] is smaller/faster/other may be an example of premature optimisation and using something else (especially where that involves learning something else) could mean trading off elsewhere.
Not just Electron but Sciter too in that sense.
"electron can have a small fingerprint if the dev team is carefull/good enough"
Only to some extent. You will have two separate process (at least) in any case and so two sets of the same system libraries loaded in them, IPC between them, etc.
Main task of browser engine is to provide safe browsing experience. Presenting HTML is only second its task and so browser based UI will always be sub-optimal (at best).
In the long term web will totally replace desktop UI. This could have been avoided if Apple, MS, and Linux would have agreed on a common desktop UI API 5-10 years ago but the ship sailed.
(1) With web technologies you can write once and run everywhere including mobile to some extent. Writing a UI multiple times is monumentally expensive. Even huge companies don't like to do this, let alone indie efforts and startups. If Slack with its billion dollars doesn't do it what does that say?
(2) The ecosystem is far more active. The web is the largest open source ecosystem in history. There is code to do literally everything and an embarrassment of riches when it comes to libraries, frameworks, connectors, etc.
(3) Qt isn't that much less bloated than Electron, especially when you start styling it and get dynamic.
(4) Long build times mean that I have to wait a lot longer between dev/test. UI development tends to be a whole lot of iterative hack-test-hack-test. With web tech it's literally edit-refresh, which is much faster than edit-make-wait-launch.
(5) To make Qt look good you have to start styling and using its weird surprisingly web-like stylesheets, which takes you out of pure native mode and into a hybrid rendering mode. At that point I'm halfway to browser rendering.
(6) If you code UIs with web tech you also get the web, meaning your app could be run remotely in a browser as well as locally. This is the networked app promise of X11, Citrix, etc., and you get it for free.
Electron is popular because it delivers a ton of value in terms of cross-platform compatibility, reduced effort, rapid development, consistency, and ecosystem. Performance and memory use problems can be fixed.
I have been watching this project:
https://github.com/andlabs/libui
It's a genuinely lightweight wrapper that looks really promising. Trouble is everyone I show it to says "ugly" as their first comment. Everyone wants styled apps today with polished UIs and that takes you down a path that looks increasingly like CSS whether you like it or not. I also have this strong feeling that if I wrote with it I'd be rewriting in 5 years after desktop UIs are abandoned in favor of 100% web technology everywhere. Of course web UIs shift a lot too. Maybe the fate with UIs is to rewrite every 5 years no matter what.
Note that Qt does not have a pure native mode, it always draws its own controls - it just has a very good imitation of the native controls (especially on Windows).
Given how many smart people are working to make the browser techs as efficient as possible, and the way that things like QT get "bloated" as soon as they start trying to do what browsers do, I've pretty much arrived at the idea that once you have images and an engine that can reflow text and load fonts and so on, and you want this rather complicated functionality to perform at a reasonable level, you're looking at browser levels of resource consumption no matter what you do.
I mean, if you start working the math on what it looks like to have a bitmap of the screen in memory (which you may not literally have as a single flat plane, but we've got character caches, images, and all sorts of other things that add up to that pretty quickly, if not surpass it entirely very quickly), on a high-resolution display, a bit of extra memory left over from packing those resources, the dynamic scripting language space, the other support modules, various other bits of uncompressed media even if it's just windowed... you've gotten into the hundreds of megabytes pretty easily there. Maybe you could keep this below 100MB with a lot of work, but in a world where a single uncompressed 4K full-color image/framebuffer is running you at least 24 MB (for RGB, 32MB for RGBA), 10-50MB just isn't going to be an option.
I've got an emacs here with a couple dozen source code buffers loaded and it's running at about 60MB resident. That's a mere 1/5th of the Slack usage that everyone is incensed about, and while emacs can do a lot of things, it's still taking a pretty substantial capabilities hit vs. Electron to get that small.
Yes, I know emacs can have a web browser in it and such. And if I use eww to load news.ycombinator.com, emacs resident usage just jumped 15MB for what is, frankly, a terrible rendering. It isn't even rendering my jerf.org terribly well, which in modern terms is basically built by rubbing two sticks together and sending the resulting sparks down the wire. That's what 15MB on top of the already-loaded emacs bought me.
Modern UIs with support for themes, complex interactions, multiple screen and pixel formats, and every language spoken by Homo Sapiens since Gobekli Tepi was built are large and complex. It's not avoidable. That is the problem domain. If you're doing less than that you'll regret it when more and more users start requesting features you don't have or complaining that your product doesn't look right on X or with X language/font/etc. That's my problem with all these ultralight immediate mode UI libs like nuklear. It's like going back to MS-DOS or CP/M and saying "wow that's simple and fast!" Yeah but it lacks a lot of stuff you will need.
The web's rendering layer isn't perfect but it's better than many alternatives and isn't going anywhere, so putting a lot of effort into making it more efficient and robust is very logical.
And don't forget accessibility. That's the part that makes me want to scream whenever I see a new lightweight UI toolkit on HN.
My OS has UI semantics. I want most of the apps to work the same everywhere. Your app is not special. Stop reinventing a "visual identity". Give me congruency and features.
Actually, I'm not referring to things like colors or fonts. What I'm referring to is the fact that had the web-browser style layout algorithms not been already invented by web browsers, they would have been invented by the inexorable progression of the pressures and features in desktop toolkits by now. If the people using web toolkits want to be able to lay things out without having to laboriously bundle things into horizontal and vertical scaling groups and specify flexing ratios and all the other crappy layout mechanisms used in desktop toolkits since they first came out, but to use a simple (to use, not implement), powerful HTML-esque layout mechanism, you're going to pay for that on the resource consumption.
And the people writing these programs want that, and will use toolkits that offer that, and if that's bothering you, well, spend some time writing this stuff yourself and you'll stop being bothered, you'll happily spend 100MB of the user's RAM to make the pain end. As neat as it is in some ways, and as much as it has been made to sing and dance over the last 50 years, that style of layout really stinks to use.
And users, at least the savvy ones who hang out here, are saying that this RAM isn't ours to spend. Is there no way that we could spend more resources on our dev machines instead, at build time, to take a piece of code that was pleasant to write and convert it into something that's frugal with resources on the user's machine? C++ and Rust promise abstractions with zero runtime cost compared to the best that you could hand-code. I wonder if the same can be applied to multi-platform GUI toolkits, perhaps through compile-time metaprogramming.
I'm confused by this statement. The point of Qt is that you write the UI once. Your controller back-end might have platform-related pragmas, but not the UI.
> If Slack with its billion dollars doesn't do it what does that say?
When you give programmers freedom to choose what makes life easy for them, end-user experience suffers?
I really think all dev companies should have a lab of 'consumer-grade' laptops with 4GB of RAM and 20Mbit/sec networking. And QC shouldn't let anything ship until it runs adequately on those. Particularly for a company like Slack that is targetting corporate users, the bulk of whom aren't software architects with 2017 MBPs ( who make the choice ) but small-cogs with a five-year-old Dell.
As others have pointed out in this thread: Qt is not really that much lighter than the web. It draws its own controls and even has css-like styling. I remember Qt apps being relatively slow on small machines... maybe not quite as slow as Electron but the latter could be tuned and improved and made competitive IMHO.
Your main point is valid, but you shouldn't be focusing your anger at Electron or at programmers for choosing it. You should be focusing your anger at desktop vendors for refusing to offer a better way to develop cross-platform apps in favor of an ultimately foot-blasting quest for platform lock-in. By refusing to play with each other desktop vendors have doomed all their platforms to obsolescence and abandonment.
I don't think I'll ever understand this. What about consistency between apps? Sticking to the OS's native widgets and style will get you that. Do people really like it when each app has its own look?
Of course, I'm no judge of aesthetics. Being visually impaired, my idea of a perfect UI is something with high contrast and large text.
In terms of Electron, I have installed: Slack and VS Code (although I later uninstalled VS Code, and will have to put Slack on a machine with more memory than the VM it's in now).
I can usually spare the memory, at least on my non-crap machines, but I haven't really had the need to.
You say that like HTML emails don't exist. If the client has to embed a web view anyway...
Designed emails using HTML are used by marketing teams - not by people. I don't care to read emails from marketing teams "as intended to be viewed". Show me the email and let me read an email that's just a bunch of plaintext markup.
Guess I'm weird too.
More because we're getting close to finishing the spec, and feedback from someone who's build a client recently about whether the spec suits their needs would be valuable!
I have a talk planned entitled “building a fair dinkum email client in half an hour with JMAP”—because you genuinely can make a basic but useful email client that quickly! (I’m planning to submit it for Strange Loop. Any know of other conferences that would like such content?)
JMAP’s support for both labels and folders may be helpful for Ivelope too.
I love seeing a new approach to an email UI, based on the same old email that still works. Thanks for making it!
I doubt the ability to do "var client = new JMAP()" instead of "var client = new IMAP()" will lead to a flood of new clients.
IMAP is a mess if you try to do much beyond the basic “retrieve list of folders, retrieve messages, now just leave it alone”; and most IMAP client libraries are worse than IMAP need be. There are many extensions for many features, poorly supported in various clients and servers, and various things that are slow, difficult, or impossible to do in IMAP that JMAP can express elegantly. http://jmap.io/#why-is-jmap-better-than-imap lists a few reasons. Bugs in clients or servers that cause data loss over IMAP are not unheard of.
IMAP is also only one part of the app: one of the hardest parts is MIME, and figuring out what to show for an email and how to craft an email; there are fewer libraries to do this than there are IMAP clients—and almost none that are any good. (You’ll find some that do the plain parsing of most of the message, but how do I decide what to do with multipart/alternative, multipart/mixed, text/plain, Content-Disposition, Content-Encoding, &c. is answered by no library that I know of.) JMAP doesn’t solve all these problems, but it handles most of them by handing you a sanely parsed message (putting the burden of sanity on the server, and the spec provides good guidance and there’s a JMAP test suite being made to ensure the sanity of the server): things like exposing To, Cc, &c. as lists of addresses; and fields like preview, htmlBody, textBody and attachedFiles to save you the trouble of deriving the crazy convoluted rules of multipart messages. You can send messages without having to implement SMTP and grok MIME, too.
For authors of existing MUAs, JMAP doesn’t have much to offer by this stuff from the last paragraph—they’ve already done the hard slog. But for authors of new MUAs and other programs that might want to do email at all—sending or receiving—JMAP really is “all that”.
Some of the experiments that I’m looking forward to seeing won’t look like existing MUAs at all. They’ll be other things altogether that just happen be able to send or receive emails directly, now, because it’s finally easy enough to.
IMAP is not particularly well suited to being used as a purely-online client with no local storage or persistent cache. You can do it, and many clients have over the years, but you will sacrifice a lot, like the ability to search multiple folders efficiently. We couldn’t make something like the FastMail web UI speaking IMAP; it just wouldn’t work in too many places. JMAP, on the other hand, is designed to work in such a situation, and suffers from few of those sorts of shortcomings. Sure, you’ll probably want to introduce offline support and may want to reimplement search on the client somewhere down the track, but it’s not necessary-work-that-must-be-done-before-the-client-is-generally-useful like it is in IMAP.
JMAP allows you to get started quickly and efficiently. Because it speaks HTTP and JSON and is deliberately designed as a synchronisation protocol, and because it lacks the cruft of decades of fragmented extension that IMAP has¹, JMAP is really easy to work with. Even things like synchronisation and notifications come at very low cost even without a library, especially if you are running in a web browser.
Don’t forget that JMAP replaces IMAP and SMTP for the MUA. And having only one thing to configure and get right, with a standard configuration procedure (SRV and .well-known, so that you can just provide an email address and it’ll figure out the rest) instead of two with no consistently applied configuration procedure is a surprisingly big deal for users.
The talk that I plan will be predominantly live coding, starting from scratch—no frameworks at all—and building a basic but functional MUA in half an hour. You really can’t do that in IMAP/SMTP, but you can in JMAP², and it genuinely gets better beyond there.
I have no interest in making a realistic MUA with IMAP/SMTP, because I know that I would spend weeks on the groundwork, to produce a result that is strictly inferior to what I am confident I can produce in an hour with only a general understanding of the JMAP spec, and access to the JMAP core and mail spec docs.
Oh yeah, I just remembered another absolutely massive thing about JMAP, though the dust has not yet fully settled—calendars and contacts. Because this IMAP/SMTP MUA estimate of mine just went up by a couple of months to handle them for some ESPs, whereas with JMAP that groundwork will take maybe another whole hour.
Seriously, JMAP is a big deal.
---
¹ For now, and it has a more thoughtful design to future extension so that it will avoid some of the troubles of aging.
² I’m delicately ignoring the matter of authentication here, which is omitted from the JMAP spec, and assuming something really basic.
I, too, am quite excited about JMAP, although I have my doubts about ever trying to write an MUA ever again.
> You can do it, and many clients have over the years, but you will sacrifice a lot, like the ability to search multiple folders efficiently.
By "folders", I will assume you mean "mailboxes" (as that is how most, if not all, existing clients and servers choose to represent "folders"). This was addressed in RFC 7377. I realize that you will argue "but what servers actually implemented that?", but the answer is "probably more than have decided to implement JMAP".
That said, JMAP has chosen to unify labels and folders into a term "mailboxes". The same solution applies to IMAP: I think a more correct usage of IMAP is to unify labels and folders into what IMAP calls "flags" (as opposed to what IMAP calls "mailboxes") at which point I think you will find that 90% of the struggles people have with IMAP disappear.
I realize that no IMAP server does this, but that is for historical reasons related to how mail was stored on disk and I think totally ignores what makes IMAP as a protocol interesting. I honestly feel like a lot of people just never took the time to understand either IMAP (or Mark Crispin) (or how to quickly write a parser :/) and then spent decades complaining about the annoying and limited ways people mapped semantics.
That all said, I would at least begrudgingly agree that for some simple use cases, JMAP is likely convenient for certain classes of mail consuming systems. But come on... to try to claim that IMAP is somehow not designed for online usage or is somehow broken for that usage is such a totally disingenuous claim that I will go so far as to say that it outright slanders the memory of Mark Crispin, who seriously seemed to believe people writing offline email clients with persistent caches that required synchronization were embarking on a "fools errand", and (for better or for worse) effectively assumed servers would always be better than local hardware.
Unfortunately for you, your perception is wrong. Writing an IMAP client library is my go-to project when I'm learning a new network stack / language. I am very familiar with the way it works and it's various problems, and have been paid to write software that uses it.
I am not as familiar with JMAP, but I did look into it a year or so ago. I recall at the time that it didn't seem to solve that many problems, and introduced problems that I never previously had when working with IMAP. I triggered a discussion on the IETF mailing list regarding one of these problems (https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/jmap/7dSQsqRBJ_YlZ7wF8...). Somebody said at the time that they would look into modifying the protocol to address that problem, but to me (and I could be wrong) it looks like this hasn't happened.
My basic perspective on JMAP is: It doesn't fix enough problems to justify the massive increase in pain it would cause developers of mail clients by having to support both IMAP and JMAP at the same time. I'm totally on-board with replacing IMAP with something better. But it needs to be a lot better, or we should just stick with IMAP. To me, JMAP just looks like it will cause more problems than it solves.
["Mailbox/query", { "filter" : { "parentId" : null }, "limit" : 30, "position" : 30 }, "R1"]
It's happened.
The FastMail web UI will soon (later this year, we plan) be speaking JMAP. What it speaks at present is a precursor to JMAP.
I'll be in Munich in June for M3AAWG and then popping over to Paris to meet the Linagora team and chat with them about their JMAP work - don't think I can come up with an excuse to visit Sweden this trip sadly :(
My next trip after that is Montreal in July for IETF102. Hopefully we'll be finalising core and mail specs at that conference, hence the interest in getting feedback now! Easier to fix spec issues before publishing.
I've done a bunch of implementation on two different servers, so I'm comfortable with that half, but we only really have one client implementation in-house (hence wanting to chat to Linagora about theirs!)
JMAP-Proxy is sitting slightly behind, that's on me.
Less up-to-date, there's a few, atmail, Apache James (via Linagora), a couple that aren't published.
- web app: loads from a server and connects to a backend to perform its activities. Business logic is on the server. If at all, very limited offline capabilities
- desktop app: is installed on the local machine, doesn't need any connection to a backend to work, works offline.
I don't mind at all which technology the dev used to implement. Even nerdy metrics like memory and CPU consumption cannot be predicted from the used technology. So why should I care?
1. It doesn't match the words. If that defines a "web app" then where does the web come in? I would think part of being a web app is that you can access it via the web and don't have to install it on your device.
2. Usefulness of the distinction to users. The specific nature of the bundled runtime for the code doesn't matter to anybody. It strikes me as pedantic to insist that because under the hood a thing is running in a browser we should call it a "web app".
I think the most practical distinction is that web apps have a URL as the entrypoint. If you want to use it, you can visit the URL from any browser that supports the app. Web app requires a URL and a compatible browser.
If instead you install the thing on your computer and run it from there, it's not a web app. It's a native app. No URL and it doesn't care what other browser you have installed because it comes with everything it needs. It's independent.
How and why would users be expected to understand anything else?
As for the second issue: users care because performance is worse, accessibility is by and large non-existent and platform features don’t work.
For example: macOS has tabbed windows at the core - any document based app gets it automatically.
How does that work out for electron apps?
You didn't really have to. I guess I made my point badly. The fact that a "web browser" is somewhere in the chain of what is reading an application does not mean that the application itself has anything to do with "the web", so I think calling it a web app is confusing and pointless. And again, seems like a technicality.
> As for the second issue: users care because performance is worse, accessibility is by and large non-existent and platform features don’t work.
I agree with this in general. It doesn't mean it helps the user to call it a web app. Maybe we need a third, generic term for electron apps and others like them. A name that refers to the potential differences in performance, accessibility, and performance that users may notice?
Web app doesn't work for what you are talking about as far as I can tell. Of course this is an industry where terms and definitions change a lot.
In a discussion of 'native apps vs web apps' it absolutely makes a difference that Electron apps are rendered by a browser's web view - they're basically a web page rendered by a local source not remote, but without any of the sandboxing that proper browsers employ for security.
> Maybe we need a third, generic term for electron apps and others like them. A name that refers to the potential differences in performance, accessibility, and performance that users may notice?
Sure. Shit Apps (tm).
Those are also reasons not to call them web apps though: web apps run in your browser of choice (ish) with all of the associated security and accessibility defaults, plus your extensions and whatnot. They are apps on the web.
> Shit Apps
You can do better.
More importantly, so can desktop application developers.
You're confusing web apps and client/server apps. Web apps are generally thought of as apps written using web technologies. This means that a web app may not even interact with a back-end server, or a native app may exclusively interact with a back-end server.
And Electron embeds an instance of Chromium, to provide a webview for the 'application' interface.
How is that not a web app? It's written in HTML, CSS and JS, it runs inside a browser.
Just because the user can't choose the browser doesn't mean shit. Users couldn't choose the browser to run a lot of Microsoft-stack Web Apps in the early 2000's either, because they only worked in MSIE.
In my view, Electron does not embed a browser, it does embed a HTML/CSS/JS renderer.
Like buy one, get two for free.
There is a lot of convenience in being able to log into any computer and access your mail. Plus Gmail search beats the search in native clients most of the time.
And gmail isn't your mail, it's Google's mail. A mailserver that you host yourself is your mail.
Additionally, if we are really picky, only mail written by you is your mail. All mail received is normally copyrighted by someone else and belongs to the sender or/and his/her company. Very strictly speaking in some countries you are not legally allowed to forward someone else's mail if it bears any artistic value.
Yes I know, it is off topic. But it was fun, thanks for the spark!
Source please? Shouldn't there be a creative aspect about it? Which is probably not the case for lots of emails.
>[...] if it bears any artistic value.
Source: As this depends on the country you live in you would have to look up your country's copyright law and see if it's true for your country.
Why do you think it is good?
There is nothing that says that you can't have both web and native mail clients.
Usually when I change jobs I have had another non Gmail account but I have never found the search as good. I have an outlook web client at work and that doesn't find things. Maybe its me being dumb and remembering different phrases from what is actually stored, but I almost always manage to finds what i am looking for in Gmail. I can't say the same with other clients.
Its just a pity that I have to give up my privacy to Google for it.
It's what you'd expect of a cloud service though, they really don't want to go through all of that data.
Any native client though will just go at it and return proper results.
I get paid money for the software I develop too, after all.
Postbox currently only charges $40 for a lifetime free-upgrades license. In my case, they are definitely leaving money on the table, I would've paid a lot more.
In any case Postbox is not available on Linux, but I'd still like to know.
But now, I use the keyboard driven Tagging & Quick Move features [1] a lot. They work a bit like Alfred [2]. To file a message in my Filtered folder, I type "v fil Enter" and by the time I've typed v, an Alfred-like window pops up that autocompletes the full folder names as I type - so by the time I get to 'fil', it's autocompleted to the right one and I can hit enter. Standard keyboard shortcuts too like j to junk, a to archive, etc. I'm sure Thunderbird also has these via extensions, but I like having it in the core product supported by the core developers.
There's a word count warning feature that I use a lot too, because I tend to type a lot. The word count turns red when I go over my suggested self-imposed limit, or you can set a timer for when you've been composing one email for too long.
EDIT: I saw you asked elsewhere about editing the From field, Postbox has a pulldown menu on each message you compose where you can choose from a list of profiles / aliases you create. Each can even have their own SMTP server details & default signatures & are separate from inbox accounts. You can switch signatures on individual messages too.
Alfred looks interesting. Other than the workflows, almost everything it does is already integrated into KDE. However it looks easy to use and I will definitely check it out if I move to one of the company Macbooks. Thank you!
Would be nice if a bigger company sponsors such a project, then a greater audience will use it and the Developer could concentrate on developing and not on selling.
Who controls your client has access to your inbox with most services even the few that have separate IMAP/POP3 passwords like Hushmail can be compromised through it.
If your client also integrates with encryption or worse takes charge of it my encryption key is also now at risk.
Lastly since email today is pure HTML you also inherit all the possible vulnerabilities that come with having a DOM parser and a layout engine and even modem browsers still get both wrong.
And using something like Electron or even Chromium won’t implicitly save you because the way you implement them matters a lot and now you are tied with their update cycle which might break functionality forcing you to manually backport security fixes which is hard to accomplish.
So unless you have the source or show an audit from a respected firm (c53, isec etc.) its going to be quite hard to recommend to anyone to take the dive and try this out.
I might try this client with a throwaway email account, but never with something important.
What does it change if you have an c53 audit of Version 1.0.0 and 1.0.1 has malicious code?
I'm not going to make claims that a developer would maliciously embed code into their own product but I do care about the quality of their code and their security practices at large (specifically how secure is their code promotion and binary distribution supply chain).
> Privacy & Security
> Total privacy - we do not have access to your email account, Ivelope only sends your email data and password between your computer and your email server.
If you're really paranoid but still want to try it out, you could run something like Little Snitch to verify the connections the program makes.
I certainly like the idea of new email clients, especially those that integrate with Exchange calender (a weak point for Thunderbird even with extensions). But in my view, building a fast, robust and feature rich email client would take about an effort of 10-30 person years or even more, depending on the feature set. This one seems to stand at a mere two person years, and so my expectations would be quite low (though it's still in beta and states upfront some of the important features it's missing).
P.S.: I'm a supporter of Thunderbird and donate money to the project. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
I'd honestly outsource the indexing and searching to something like mairix which is designed purely for this purpose.
(On my 4.5GB Maildir, 57 folders, 111k emails, mairix takes 205s to index from scratch. Incremental updates are <5s. Worst search I've yet done took 0.5s to return 13k hits for 'bank'.)
This is a person who's worked 2 years on a project, in a neglected space where companies don't go because they can't make money.
He deserves praise for taking the time, creating something that's different, and thinking through the idea. Well done!
IMHO this is justified since people often overlook how critical an attack vector this would be.
Imagine if a state-sponsored "hobbyist" posted a pet project like the OP to Reddit and started harvesting keys/password reset capabilities for huge amounts of users.
Hell, people flocked to use unroll.me and then it turned out they were (predictably) scraping your entire inbox and selling the data to advertisers.
I don't believe that worrying somebody's skepticism might hurt feelings is a legitimate reason to downvote (remember, downvotes aren't about whether you agree with somebody; it's about whether they add constructively to discussion).
Aside: Great work OP. Seems like an incredibly hard sector to make traction with though, so best of luck.
No body is detracting anything from anyone but there is no way I’m trusting an application that can take contol of a large portion of my life without assurances.
If your email address gets compromised it’s game over for most people every service you’ve registered with is up for grabs which is also the reason why I don’t recommend anyone to use personal domains for email unless they are willing to pay for it till death do them part.
As time and time again after buying a domain that was used by someone else and setting up a catch all email address I got emails from Twitter, GitHub and the likes.
Where did you get that idea? If your email is pure HTML all I'll see is your markup, if it makes it through the spam filter to begin with which assigns a pretty stiff penalty for sending me HTML mail.
Also, the whole issue of JavaScript in HTML emails at least deserves a mention[1]. Since Ivelope is an Electron app, I'd guess it would go ahead and just run everything it receives, right?
[0]: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/09/28/i-never-signed-up-f...
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3054315/is-javascript-su...
I'd personally be more picky about my mail provider and not use any offerings by Google or Microsoft, for instance, because they are stock market companies with interests that principally conflict with the interests of their users. In contrast to this, trusting individual developers and small companies makes much more sense. You check out their online presence and decide for yourself. I'd only be wary about individual developers who offer closed-source security applications (e.g. encryption) and have no prior history of working and posting in this field. But an email client? To be honest, I haven't even checked the vita of the maker of my preferred client, claws-mail, let alone those of any of the authors of the plugins I'm using.
On modern operating systems you basically have to trust every developer of any application anyway, since many installers require admin rights and even if they don't it wouldn't be hard for a malicious developer to exploit a security hole. Your kitchen timer application can get your email credentials almost as easily as your email client.
And yes choose your email provider based on your threat model but there is nothing wrong with Google or even MSFT for most people security wise privacy is a different concern but these are different threat models.
An email client won’t prevent my email provider from snooping on me (E2E maybe), and no email provider could prevent my client from snooping on me either.
There is nothing wrong with running an email client made by an individual developer unless you have a particular reason to distrust that person.
>as far as security goes MSFT isn’t fooling around
They have a proven track-record of security bugs for the past 20 years and longer.
> there is nothing wrong with Google or even MSFT for most people security wise
I wouldn't use them as my main email provider security-wise and trust my current email provider way more than those companies. (Not because I think they are less secure, but because I think they are attacked more often.) But of course your mileage may differ, nothing to object to that.
>There is nothing wrong with running an email client made by an individual developer unless you have a particular reason to distrust that person.
It's not that i distrust that person but it's that I know how unlikely it is for a single person to be able to validate the security of their product especially when it comes to something as complex as a product with a DOM parser and a layout engine, nor do I think they would be able to maintain it up to date when new attacks and vulnerabilities are discovered even they do use something like electron since electron isn't simplicity safe and plenty of electron based software even fairly well maintained one lags well behind it's update cycle including when security patches are concerned.
>They have a proven track-record of security bugs for the past 20 years and longer. They also have a proven track record of finding and fixing those bugs.
>I wouldn't use them as my main email provider security-wise and trust my current email provider way more than those companies. (Not because I think they are less secure, but because I think they are attacked more often.) But of course your mileage may differ, nothing to object to that.
There are potentially more secure providers but being attacked more often isn't a really good sole metric threat model unless you can effectively estimate resilience responsiveness and compare it to other options.
I used Hushmail as my primary email (still somewhat do) because it was fairly secure and had integrated PGP, I switched to Proton Mail now.
Please. How many times a day do you enter a password somewhere on your computer? Do you look at the source or ask for an audit for every one of those apps?
It's not how many time you put it in it's into what and then what that thing can do with it.
Not all passwords are equal and for most people their primary email is the domain admin/root credentials for of their life.
And it isn't relevant if I personally audit every application or not I can build a trust model based on my risk appetite and the threat models that are relevant to me and the situation and everyone does it even if they are not aware of it.
I can put my trust in a specific vendor based on their business model, their reputation, the resources they have available and my experience with them and the legal frameworks surrounding the service/product. I can put my trust in the community at large in the case of open source products because while individually neither myself nor most other user validate every line of code and every commit it is possible and the community at large does do that.
Let me ask you this I this wasn't and email client but say a thick client for your online banking would you still ask me the same question? bare in mind that having your email compromised today is considerably more damaging than someone logging into your online banking as it's much easier to sort the latter and there are also considerable mitigating security controls around it.
This seems an odd position to me.
Online clients are well known to be scanning your emails, necessarily involve giving access and control to third parties, are impossible to use while retaining control of private encryption keys, and so on.
Local clients might have some of those problems. If they're open source then in theory you could audit them and find out, but in practice even that gives a false sense of security because no-one has the resources and willingness to undertake that work every time they install a new version.
Ultimately software security is still all about who you trust, the same as always.
I wish this was the default assumption these days.
- Is this open-source? What is the license and where is the source-code?
- When can we expect a linux version?
ctrl+f on "price" or "cost" turns up nothing. Well then, what is your business model going to be?
(By the way, typo: "accessable" should be "accessible")
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-con...
It's the ultimate email management tool. And I hope you can add it fast.
By the way, when do you plan to release the beta?
I wonder when will we be ready to finally drop copying the entire fricking thread with each email, since all email clients automatically build the thread. If you need to forward it to someone, it’d be easier to replicate that functionality on the client side.
How sustainable is this project?
Which frameworks/libraries and languages did you use?
What were the main challenges you came across?
The biggest difference is that it's way easier to see where you're data is being sent in a browser, since it has built in tools. It's very hard to monitor native app traffic that is sent over SSL.
You, Your mail (provider) server.
Vs
You, the server hosting the web app, your mail (provider) server.
Unless you run uMatrix or uBlock Origin (same code in both as far as this feature is concerned), of course.
Possibly only to render the HTML in some emails (and why not, then, just open them in the user's existing browser window,) but otherwise, there seems (to me) to be little about email that requires the overhead of a browser engine and associated Node dependencies and whatnot.
A native app could be smaller, faster, and use less RAM.
What would be the reason to cram the mail client into the browser instead of making it a first-class application on the same level?
Thank you!
I really want a good, modern email client and I hope this can be it.
I have a lot of gmail filters for auto archive or auto forwarding. I like to keep them at that level so that changing clients doesnlt mean I lose my filters. Does make it a pain to make new filters though if I’m in a 3rd party client.
I'm not going to invite others if others can't use the software, or without trying it for myself first...
For testning the privacy when it comes to email rendering, have you tried this excellent service?
I don't send or receive a lot of emails - none of the features jumped out at me as doing something gmail or the default mac mail app is missing and I wish it had.
Then I've signed up nevertheless, because the need for a good modern email client is strong.
Also, what kind of software license does it use?
Is it open source?
is it free software?
Is it proprietary?
Once I sign up, how will my email address be used?
Will it be abused?
It did not ask for any permission nor I agreed to any terms. He seems to be from Sweden, doesn't he know about GDPR?
A question, is it a pure email client, or an email client behind a value added service (it relies on a server you run somewhere)? Thanks!
Neat!
Btw where are the electron haters?!
Hi! I'm here! ;)
I mentioned Electron in my comment, and Electron is a deal-breaker for me... but I would much rather encourage the work and effort that is going into this. If the product is successful and profitable, maybe it can be ported to native frameworks a few versions later. And considering the rumours about macOS, probably wise to avoid writing native Mac code just now.
What rumors?
It's all rumour & could be wrong. But there's some who feel macOS only has a couple of years left before being discontinued. In that climate, an Electron app is smart because it will be easy to port to iOS / newOS.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/apple-is-...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-20/apple-is-...
[3] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/05/01/scuttlebutt-regarding-app...
One thing I fear is that keyboard shortcuts, particular the F-keys, will become a thing of the past.
Seems difficult to make development choices today based on rumors, in any event.
Does the calendar sync up to the various calendar providers (Google, Apple, etc) as well?
I hope he's had better luck integrating spell check than the RamBox devs have ;)
edit: yes, I would love to test it and provide numbers rather than just snark - I just have to wait for the ~5,000 people ahead of me in the queue to have their software pressed to disk and posted to them before it's my turn o.0
As a hacker news link it does strike me as a form of clickbait (and it honestly winds me up); "Hey HN! come look at this thing I've built that I'm not letting you look at!"
Also, if it's bugs and the reporting of that you're worried about, maybe publish a proper bugtracker (github is both adequate and free) rather than just an email address?
* slashdot effect; as in taking a webserver down just with the amount of people viewing it. Or to put it another way, if you wanted lots of people viewing your project, let them. If you don't, then don't advertise it to them!
Best of luck with your client!
Consider crowd-sourcing an american voice-over actor, it might add a lot of value for very little cost.
I
adresses -> addresses
The fwd with attachment should be no 1 to fix though
Will you support PGP?
If you don't go the mutt/alpine route, there aren't much options. Basically Thunderbird and Evolution. Never really got Clawsemail and iscribe to work with my IMAP server settings.
To make things worse, people do understand email less and less. Often, all ports except 80 and 443 are blocked and you can't even use IMAP/SMTP. And if you complain they tell you "What are you talking about? Gmail works...."
Evolution somehow stores a cookie or can log in via webbrowser or something like that. Evolution will never get you logged out of your Gmail account (yes, I have one that I use for some things). I travel a lot and Thunderbird will always get blocked by Gmail (Please log-in via Webbrowser to confirm your identity).
I care... but the convenience of a webmail client accessible on any device is just so great. But there's no good way to really have secure end-to-end encryption in a webmail client. That's about the only thing that would make me seriously consider a desktop client.
Really, I'm not sure what the audience size is for email you can't see on your phone though.
Electron applications such as Slack, Discord, and VS Code have ballooned in popularity over the last year or two. Hacker News comments are not representative of the whole.
So the choice becomes use an Electron app or something else entirely.
But I agree, it's almost never a choice, but it's a hypothetical
So in some ways I’d probably prefer a good Electron app.
For other things I'm far less keen as Electron is often a sign of a needless memory hog - 100M pomodoro timers and such like.
All other things will never be equal.
My point is that given two apps that both have the features a user considers "must have", few, if any, would pick the Electron one over the native, precisely because of the extra burden in cpu/memory/speed of Electron.
That's because, as the parent said, there are no good (e.g. equivalent) native alternatives.
If there was a native editor with feature parity with VS Code (including the number of plugins and dedicated MS resources speeding up its development, and free), nobody would be using it.
Is it possible that VS Code (for example) exists (in its feature specific incarnation ) only because Electron is a cost cutter in terms of portable development?
In other terms: Maybe the portable native full featured VS Code is the middle of the cheap-fast-good venn diagram.
It could -- though I doubt it.
But I was concerned with a more limited question: if there was a good VS Code alternative that's native, would many still prefer an Electron version?
I understood what you meant. I respect you disagreeing with my premise, but in the scenario where that premise is true, your question is not applicable.
Scenario: Would anyone choose MDF boards at IKEA if they could choose plywood or natural wood, or assemble their own furniture if given the choice (at the same price)? Barring a few applications, probably not. But IKEA wouldn't be IKEA if they were just another producer of wood furniture, meaning they got to market and stayed there because of the shortcuts and limitations they could justify when reaching a price.
Same thing here (IMHO). VS Code could have some cross-platform code and some platform specific code, but the cost would be higher and the output velocity would likely be lower. Assuming that is true, your question is misleading, albeit not on purpose.
There is sublime text.
A lot of it, yes. But VSCode also invests a lot in core functionality (in what in other platforms would be plugins). The Git integration is one such example -- or the ability to debug Chrome in it.
>That's because, as the parent said, there are no good (e.g. equivalent) native alternatives.
But that's not true. I use Sublime Edit and have happily used BBEdit and TextMate. Emacs is fine for many people, and I still use vim for fast edits in terminal mode all the time. There are plenty of other great native editors for just about all platforms.
Where is the corresponding "Ask HN: What requirements should I consider before writing a new email client?"
Oh boy. I've written a mail client [1] (two actually) and I've found that people have widely conflicting requirements.
Me? I wanted to replace mutt with something that was similarly console-based, and would use the same Maildir hierarchies.
Other people demand GUI access, sometimes with IMAP, sometimes with POP3, and sometimes (very rarely) with just local Maildirs.
If I were to begin again I'd probably abandon Maildirs, and instead just work via notmuch, or some other indexed-store. That would allow "virtual folders", and other neat things.
I don't think I've got the patience to start again though, as my current client is already the second version.
1. Which OS do you use use? I'd love to know if it's skewed to a particular OS to know which platform to prioritize a native client.
Edit: I realized this was worded very badly. I’m saying I wish this was written with a cross platform core, and native, platform specific UIs for each respective platform. For example, MS Office is written this way.
I would've said the same thing with joy!
From the title I was immediately hoping that this was not yet another bloated electron thing.
Electron and similar technologies are in my opinion not quite at the point where they can compete with the best that native platforms can offer. I'm sure that will change one day, but we're not there yet.
GTK integration on windows and mac is also less than perfect - I've been using geany on multiple platforms a lot recently and it's a great tool, but there's small annoyances like that the "swipe to scroll" speed varies massively between it and Notepad++.
Electron apps' installation process is just madness. It breaks every convention. You can't even choose the install path FFS!
I think of Electron apps as BonziBuddy for today's hipsters.
He is using his web skillset to make a product that runs everywhere. If anything, this shows some serious good qualities in the developer that he wants to get the product to multiple people and not ponder over perfection.
As for Microsoft, I think that have been invaded by JS devs on their way to re-invent and refresh the company's culture.
Regarding the OP, yes he should be appreciated by taking the effort of spending two years doing this software, it is just a pity that it yet another Electron app.
I think its a trade-off between productivity and performance. This skillset used to be non-hardcore just a few years back, just like programming using ASM used to be a non-hardcore skillset before that. The middle ground could be managed languages like C# or Java.
>So much so that even behemoths like Microsoft write electron apps to get work done.
But getting work done != release code. Sure, everyone writes ugly hacks to get stuff done, but usually its either an internal tool or a temporary stop-gap.
>If anything, this shows some serious good qualities in the developer that he wants to get the product to multiple people and not ponder over perfection.
If you're competing with other mail clients that already exist (not identical clones, but more or less similar) , would you want to release something that works or something amazing that takes time, but also has a high chance of not succeeding? Depends on your philosophy. Some people choose the latter.