IMAP client for coders
hajomail.com
hajomail.com
Who is it obvious to? This is the first time I've heard of you. For all I know you could afford to give it away for free. And often in the case of open source, you reap the benefits later.
Sounds like a great project, and the screenshots are promising.
I agree it looks cute, and I'd love to try it if it were available. But I certainly won't be funding it.
I think i would need to further polish it before people will invest time on their own accord into keeping the open source project alive. To achieve that, i need some money to pay to pay for work and design.
Giving software away for free and asking for donations doesn't seem to work well. At least i got like 500 support requests but no single donation yet for my last email project: http://tentacleworks.net/Site/Nostalgy_4_Mail.app.html
So i thought that the best way to make this work would be to ask interested users to pay for the development costs, like Light Table:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table
Do you have any experience / suggestions on how to launch this?
Sorry, I really don't mean to be That Guy, but you are not coming across as anything like sympathetic, and I am 100% your target audience.
Light Table is a darling of the community, but I get the same vibe there. Although, to be honest, he's got a huge (yet unspecified) vision and is asking to be "freed up" to work on it, whereas you've scratched your own itch and already have a working project but want to be paid before you'll let people use it.
If you want my advice (which is worth as much as it costs you) put it on Github now and offer a supported, shrinkwrapped version for sale. Then you get paid, at least more than you're paid now, while still having an open source project.
"But nobody will buy it if they can just download it," you say, and you may be right - or maybe not. It's worth a try. Sell a souped-up version, sell corporate bulk contracts with support, I don't know. There are lots of open source business models that have been applied with varying success.
But don't, for the love of God, sell your time to the open source community.
But you both make a very valid point for making it open source as soon as possible. And it seems as if you have a good overview of the ways to monetize open source. Do you know how companies any of those Open Source companies ensure that none of their competitors just downloads all the source code and sells their exact same product?
Basically, you need to choose your license carefully in order to make sure it reflects what you want to happen with your code. There is a lot of flexibility https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatible...
This is the part that I pointed out generally doesn't work. I mean, tough love time: everyone wants to be paid to work on their own open source project. No one wants to pay you to do that. No one. At best, people may want your project (as part of their product, for example) and be willing to pay you (perhaps indirectly) just to know that it's maintained. This is how Linus et. al. make a living. And that's very rare -- you have to have a project that is (1) already there and valuable and (2) meets some need of a party with deep pockets willing to pay for it.
The model in your head, where you get to have total control over your project and a paycheck from it is a utopia that doesn't exist, sorry. I don't begrudge you for wanting it, I want it too. I just don't see a path to get there.
It's thin gruel if you're operating on the "build a product, sell it to people" model. But you're not talking about building a business on this, are you? So sooner or later, you're going to wake up to the fact that nobody's going to pay you to share your toys, any more than a kid on the playground is going to get any love for wanting to play ball but also get paid rent for the glove he's providing.
Or you could keep it closed and ask for money and I would still consider buying it. I in no way feel disrespected by you saying that you'll make it open once you have hit some level of funding that you feel is appropriate, I can contribute or not at that point.
One anecdote deserves another I guess.
(And yes, there were all sorts of technical squabbles about the Blender release, like license choice and worries about whether the IP would turn out to be "pure". But everyone was pure of intent, and things worked out.)
I don't think it's "deeply, deeply disrespectful" to anyone. It's asking for money so someone can work on what they want to (and presumably some others want them to do the same). No one is forced to participate or contribute. The only way it is disrespectful is if the code doesn't get released or proves to be shoddy after the funding is raised.
Plus multipart mime makes it a lot less confusing for people who do not understand pgp signatures. Long gone are the days where you have to have a giant block of random characters appended to the body of your message.
[1] Patch: http://www.lunar-linux.org/mutt-sidebar/
[2] Screenshot: http://screenshots.debian.net/screenshots/m/mutt-patched/456...
brew install mutt --sidebar-patch
There are also some helpful comments in the hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4597156
I don't know how I feel about the closed source -> kickstarter -> open source model. Why not just put it on github now and get people using it?
Unrelated to the product, but I'd change your highlighting on the site to something other than blue - ux wise it makes me think it's going to be a link.
I was also not so sure about using Kickstarter for source code, but then i stumbled upon Light Table, which is a coding tool sold there.
I'd really like to continue working on it to make it more polished and for that i need some way to get money out of it. I could, of course, try to sell it as a SaaS project, but that would block people from hacking it.
I think you should also offer it as a SaaS once you get it up and running. Being open source doesn't stop you from doing that. Then you get the best of both worlds.
Yes, paying for a project which then fails would suck.
I'll send the binaries around and upload them once i get around to packaging them (probably tomorrow).
For the kickstarter i was planning on making the current state of the project open source as soon as the funding is reached. Do you think that would also work?
I mean if i open source the whole thing beforehand, why should someone participate in the kickstarter when they can get also get it for free (although unfinished) right away?
As for SaaS, i'd say that the client should run on the user's computer in any case, just to make stuff really fast :) Hosting the IMAP-Synchronization-Gateway might work, though.
(edit) I guess, emotionally speaking, I'm in the position that if it were already on Github, I would actually fund your Kickstarter. I mean, right now. As it is, no, I'm not going to, for the reasons I explained in my comment upthread.
http://i.minus.com/ib0I7hmj8fzm2b.png
(User stylesheet here: https://gist.github.com/4650448)
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...
I really like the GMail editor and their table view. That's why my inbox view looks so much alike :)
What i, however, honestly dislike is their overall sluggishness. GMail seems pretty slow and last time i tried, their offline mode didn't work well enough so that i could use it to work on a train.
So i try to use the good GMail editor and combine it with the somewhat OK Outlook offline mode. But as a complete package, i hate working with both of those.
A very small battle. More a skirmish, really.
What i mean to say is that i'm very confident that it works good enough for a more-or-less public beta. Of course, much work still remains to make it compatible with every IMAP server out there, but as a single person i won't have the time nor the resources to get there.
Medium to large companies, they need some sort of calendaring and meeting room booking system. This is where outlook (more importantly exchange) comes into the picture. I don't think it's the best solution out there, but it's a solution that works reasonably well.
I also don't really like that email and calendaring are tied together, I'd love to see a robust solution that works across Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Yishan Wong wrote about this a few years ago.[1]
So, this would work great for personal email and small companies, but I don't see it replacing the email client of the larger ones. I'd love to see gmail and microsoft give some of these search/indexing features.
[1] http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/great-unsolved-problems-in-com...
Drop me a line if you want to chat danny (@) outlook.com.
Before i started my work on this client, i used Outlook 2011 and i'm still paying for hosted Exchange so yes, i think they are both reasonably designed products.
It's just that Outlook doesn't suit my workflow of dealing with email. And it can be pretty slow at times. And it sometimes doesn't sync well after offline mode.
mail at hajo (dot) me
I still cannot successfully MIME-parse all of my emails, but the ones that fail are spam (and also don't work in Outlook 2011) so i'd say it's the email's fault.
I can recommend Google Go for tasks such as IMAP because of its concurrency model. You can run a go-routine for each IMAP connection and their idea of agents communicating through channels worked really well for my IMAP client.
So syncing between my mail client and mail clients from other people will be as frickle as ever. What this project aims to do right is offline mode and syncing between multiple instances of my mail client.
I'd like to keep my front-end as absolutely light as possible, so I'm foregoing gwt/bootstrap and going with mostly just handwritten jquery.
This project is also written in Go. I have IMAP go-routines which will send changes on the IMAP server to a gateway multiplexer which stores those changes in a synchronize-able DB. The Webgui will listen for changes from the DB and present them to the user. I chose to go this route such that i can run the gateway and the webgui on different computers both with a local copy of the DB and have them synchronize when network connectivity is present.
I've opted for GWT because i like static typing. From a performance perspective, i've never really found much difference between GWT and hand-written JS.
But for web hosts i think they would prefer a solution for multiple users. This is designed for one person with multiple email accounts, so they would need to start the webgui program multiple times to host multiple users.
As for SaaS i'd rather have the users host their own version on Heroku or EC2 than having to manage all those clients.
Why is that obvious?
I'm not employed for working on OS software. I did less contract work (and thus now have less money) so that i could spend my time on preparing a solution which works well for me.
However, if i need to spend more time to make it work well for other people, that would be a stupid decision for me if it means that i lose more money.
But if you look above, i'm not set in stone about the OS / not-OS debate. I'm just wondering if people would be willing pay me for polishing it if the source is already available.
If not, this could very quickly turn into one of those highly ambitious, yet dead, open source projects as soon as i'm forced to work on other projects.
The usual case is that people have to be paid for their work. If that’s sometimes not the case then that’s a bonus, not something you can expect and be angry if it doesn’t happen.
You don’t want to pay for it? Fine, that’s great. You are free not to. It’s also not appealing for me personally. But complaining about someone wanting money for work? Sorry, that’s wretched.
I'm a freelancer and as such i don't have an employer paying me to contribute to open source projects. This means that i need money to be able to afford to spend more time on this project.
Nope. Not for coders. Even less for "hackers" as the webpage say.
And that's just technicalities, but as others already said, "I obviously can't afford to give my work away for free"… well, sigh.
I'm not saying everyone should use Mutt or read their email in Emacs, but I'm a little sad that this link got so much upvotes.
"web based" I'd say that is a plus, because you can have the same GUI running locally (and fast) on your computer and running remotely (and slow) on your web server. I know that WebKit has a huge overhead compared to emacs or mutt, but since about every second email that i receive is HTML anyway, i won't be able to avoid WebKit / Gecko.
"html emails" I have to write email to normal people too. I know it's sad, but most of my friends prefer HTML emails with pictures. That said, some of my existing beta testers are using it to send around HTML newsletters.
"no PGP support" correct. I've never used it and (see below) the PGP signatures seem to irritate some people.
"IMAP client tied to MUA" correct. I chose to go this way to finally have fast and working offline mode with synchronization
"no mention of keybindings" I implemented CMD+I for INBOX and CMD+S for search. Since i didn't miss anything else, i didn't implement them.
I consider myself a coder/hacker and i built this to suit my workflow, so i thought that description to be accurate.
"I'm a little sad that this link got so much upvotes" I'd say this is a good thing because it gives us the possibility to discuss what you dislike about my email client or email in general.
BTW, i'd be interested in what solution you currently use. Maybe that'll also help others that drift here to find their new perfect mail client.
> I obviously can't afford to give my work away for free, but for you to get maximum benefit out of it, it needs to be open source.
Meet others who can afford to give away their work for free:
http://squirrelmail.org/ http://roundcube.net/ http://www.xuheki.com/ http://www.horde.org/apps/imp
And there is more — google: webmail client open source
I'm a freelancer and if i work for free, i do not have any money. So for me to be able to develop and share this freely, i would probably need some big corporation that is willing to pay me for working on it.
I'd also be interested in how those projects come up with the money to pay a professional designer. Roundcube looks very sleek, as if it was designed professionally.
BTW, what i'm developing isn't exactly a webmail client. It is an server-side IMAP gateway and a client so that you can use it completely offline.
Have you ever heard of open source? :)
I've contributed to this project and various others and I frequently had people either hire me to add features to a certain project I worked on/released or bought me a book or so off my Amazon wishlist.
Though one time a company actually paid me to work on open source, this is nothing that pays my rent (currently) and also not my motivation to work on open source in the first place. My main driver is that I use open source and I decided to give back. It also helps my resume though I never really needed that either.
As for RoundCube's design — thank you. I am not a 100% sure right now if "money" went towards the design, but feel free to drop us a line at hello~at~roundcube~dot~net.
run one on my phone! and/or over https on _MY_ server. then build calendar-chat-etc in.
wow..