github.com
Over the last couple months, I've been hacking with a friend on an email client for gmail that is similar to superhuman.
A little backstory, we think that superhuman, in it's current implementation is vim-like. We hope to mostly match the performance and usability there and expand it into something more vscode-like.
Looking for feedback and suggestions!
What does this mean? Superhuman has AI integration, an expensive subscription model, is built with Electron¹, is backed by VC money, and a bunch of other things to arguably dislike and actively avoid. It seems like the polar opposite of vim.
> and expand it into something more vscode-like.
Again, what does this mean? Are you going to add even more telemetry to something that’s supposed to be private?
I’m really struggling to see how the comparison applies. You do know vim isn’t dead? People still use and love it, and with good reason.
¹ If I recall correctly.
I think it means its focused on hands-on-keyboard interaction with your email. Everything is acceessible via keyboard shortcuts and there's no need to reach for your mouse with Superhuman.
> You do know vim isn’t dead? People still use and love it, and with good reason.
I interpret their sentiment as "if you prefer vscode to vim, you'll prefer us to superhuman". Whether that's true is another question, but it seems like that's what they're going for.
> Email has been around since 1971 (according to Google GPT).
Why state a fact, reference your potentially incorrect source, and then not fact-check it yourself to totally avoid the need to mention your source in the first place? That seems… silly?
Edit: read more comments and see OP has clarified this is a joke. The joke is easy to miss (according to ChatGPT)
Gmail absolutely hits that sweet spot of API capabilities and where the users are, so I can’t fault the project creators (or most every email client business these days) for building first (or exclusively) for it.
That said, seeing Outlook as coming soon on their login page is reassuring that they’re building in a way that won’t tie them to Gmail forever. And while few email providers outside of Fastmail are offering JMAP support, as an API it’s much closer to the degree of functionality expected by anyone building on top of Gmail’s API today. A great new client that gives a big section of the public a better way to “do email” might be what it takes for more services to start offering JMAP.
So hats off to y’all and fingers crossed on incorporating open standards.
But right on about Gmail, it's much easier for us to prototype and test than some of the other clients.
Also really appreciate the kind words! Means a lot to us at this early stage. Hopefully you do join the email list or discord so we can keep you posted on our progress!
Do join our discord or mailing list so that we can keep you posted about it if you're interested!
I've also never heard of Mutt sadly :') but couple of you mention it already so it's definitely on my list of things to try today! What is your experiences with Mutt so far? How does it stack up with other more mainstream clients?
Remember Sparrow? (acquired and killed by Google, turned into Inbox then killed again)
Remember Mailbox? (acquired and killed by Dropbox)
Tech incumbents actively stifling innovation in email. Meanwhile the actual email spec itself hasn't evolved for decades so you still have to write HTML like it's 1999.
The most modern email client in terms of HTML/CSS support — by miles — is Apple Mail (on both macOS and iOS), which seems to support almost everything that modern Safari supports [1]. But you have to target the lowest common denominator (Outlook/Gmail), as polyfilling or progressive enhancement in emails are near impossible. GMail was once the client that revolutionized email, but then they started chasing after stuff like AMP for email and acquiring+killing other clients instead of just keeping up with standards.
Email could be such a nice technology if Google and Microsoft evolved their email clients with the same ambition as they evolved their web browsers.
All that's required is a static subset of CSS that omits stuff like dynamic imports, the use of `url` in any attribute, animations and transitions, but allows for better layout options than tables and inline style tags.
Can you elaborate on what components and licenses these are?
So it is not comparable at all.
Thunderbird is an email client, this is an interface to proprietary email services.
Sadly it does not support either.
we're currently looking towards gmail(current) => outlook => protocol layer for now. However, will definitely keep note of it.
> How does this client compare to the leading open source email client, Thunderbird?
Took a shot at this here: https://github.com/curdinc/skylar-email/issues/61. I'd be glad to elaborate more as needed.
I'd love to know about your thunderbird experience.
I'm not really sure what makes skylar-email different than my current email client.
Perhaps create a walkthrough / demo with screenshots that highlight different features?
Also, can you explain the basic requirements? I assume an imap email server? Does it run on Windows / MacOS, or do I need to figure out how to host it?
Sounds good, will take note and add that in for future showcases!
> Also, can you explain the basic requirements? I assume an imap email server? Does it run on Windows / MacOS, or do I need to figure out how to host it?
Ya, so it turns out I might have been misleading when I mention email client which a couple others have pointed out. Going to update my post to be more accurate.
Right now it's more of a Gmail client. runs in a browser, and you can access it at curdinc.com/1
Thanks for pointing it out! Fix is on the way out!
I’d suggest focusing on your core requirements, and supporting plugins to delegate the hard work.
Gonna try this out!
I like to think that my 8 year old tortoise is fairly new.
But I also think that my 8 year old shirt is fairly old
And as several people pointed out: generic IMAP/SMTP support! Personally I don't use Outlook nor gmail, my mailbox is only accessible through IMAP.
Yeap, we hear you folks on the IMAP/SMTP support! Feel free to sign up on the email list or join our discord to keep up to date with developments!
Out of curiosity, What client do you use today? How's the experience been for the workflow that you use it for?
I'm an IMAP/Fastmail user.
What do you love most about hey.com? Maybe we could steal you over ;)
https://github.com/curdinc/skylar-email/blob/main/CONTRIBUTI...
should point you in the right direction. Feel free to ping back here, on github, or on Discord.
So now LLMs are considered trustworthy references? Is it really that hard to read something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#History?
Spoiler: it seems wrong.
Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but when I was in school Wiki sources were forbidden across the board.
However, I see a big difference. First, Wikipedia generally lists its sources (LLMs don't, or not always, or just completely invent references). And then if I give Wikipedia as a source, first I chose that it was good enough in this case (I am not doing a PhD in the history of email), and I assume that you can think critically about the fact that it comes from Wikipedia (probably you will agree that it is good enough in this case).
Referencing an LLM is the exact equivalent to saying "a friend who I know routinely tells me complete bullshit told me this". I honestly don't see how this can get better than e.g. Wikipedia. Well at least before LLMs are used to populate Wikipedia and destroy it, I mean.
I want it to be great, and have given it a couple chances, but it never has paid off for me. Having conversation view for email be mandatory is one of several examples that make me thing it's just not a serious thing.
But all these tools suffer I think from being too opinionated. Like I get why they do that, and to some extent that's the right approach, but you need to add enough configuration options so that you don't end up with one thing that's a deal breaker.
For me it's conversation view. Emails don't come in conversations, it's totally outside the protocol and not supported within the information available (all such "threads" are by definition a guess as to what's happening) and I don't understand how any power user puts up with it.
Am I really the only one who has threads with the same subject line that branch into private conversations between specific people and/or change topic a few times?
How can an email client claim to be serious if it can't literally just show me list of the fucking emails I have received in the order I received them. Like how can this still be a thing?
And why can't I always just sort by attribute, like an XL sheet, sort by sender, by date, by subject, by whatever I want. Like this is the most basic function for any kind of table with rows. And yet...
Is the conversation view you are referring to like this screenshot? https://github.com/curdinc/skylar-email/assets/44563205/444f...
^ I just tried replying to the same email twice.
Totally get that an email client should really focus on letting you do what you want. What are you using today? And what's keeping on that client?
I fucking hate it, passionately. Each email is its own communication and needs to be reviewed and addressed individually.
In like a personal conversation it's sort of tolerable but in a business context I can't stand it, it's insane that there are clients that don't let you turn it off.
As for me I use the gmail/workspace web interface for the most part, and no I don't like it but it's workable. For my main work email I also keep open a window to a client called "Mailstrom" which is stone cold simple and works great for the one thing I can't live with out, which is the ability to very quickly just see all emails from a sender, or with a certain subject.
When I get behind and have 200 emails to get through in an hour that ability to limit/sort is invaluable and I don't understand why gmail still can't do that.
The other email I subscribe to is Clean Email, which is basically OK but is the best one I've seen for unsubscribing to stuff and seeing which mailing lists I'm on and so forth. I log in to that one every week or so and use it to get out of mailing cadences I've found myself involved in.
Apart from pricing, I'd love to know - what problems have you faced while using superhuman? Any features that you miss from native gmail?
> Hijacking this thread (sorry) but does anyone really love Superhuman these days? Not a huge fan, used it one, apart from the cost - it does have some nice features - keyboard first, super responsive, and sleek (although dark mode could use some love). Which led us to building the client - TLDR: create a customizable, tabular client with connectors to Gmail(current)/Outlook/Native.
> I want it to be great, and have given it a couple chances, but it never has paid off for me. Having conversation view for email be mandatory is one of several examples that make me thing it's just not a serious thing. Curious about learning more about your experience - always open to ideas... What were you looking for and how did it disappoint?
Would love to pick your brain on what would make for a great email client
IMO it's misleading to call it an email client when it does not do actual email. Making your Gmail client also-an-Outlook-client does not make it an email client.
I have a fairly non standard use of email, so I'm a bad target for brain picking. I can give a summary, though.
I work generally using a simplified GTD. Important features which I already have are good integration with my calendar and todoist as well as keyboard only navigation. Email analysis features I'd like to have are classification of:
- messages where my action is required;
- message classification by project;
- how long will it take me to handle this message (i.e. do it now vs add to todoist)
Thanks!
do you use it? What do you use it most for?
Email client are a lot like pokemons, trying to collect them all!
What do you use today? And how do you find it?
Being able to do things on a headless VM over SSH is very useful to me. At one point I even dispensed with a graphical environment on my Linux machine, and just used tmux and a pseudo terminal!
Given my use case, I don't think the command line aspect is worth targeting for you in any way, but the keyboard only definitely would be! That doesn't mean it can't support a mouse, but if it can be completely driven with just the keyboard, that is a massive selling point to me.
Awesome work by the way! Really cool to see someone building an open source Superhuman!
Do you daily drive Aerc? How's the experience been?
If you're looking for something more graphical/visual, Asteroid's worth a try, too.