
Canary Mail – Smart Email Client for Mac and iOS with PGP Support - lorenz_li
https://canarymail.io/?mwr=1593-66a46e38
======
throwaway2016a
This looks like a decent mail client and making PGP more accessible I think is
an admirable goal but I wish designers would stop patting themselves on the
back...

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
throwaway2016a
> I don't think the comparison works. Choosing the words Simple. Secure.
> Stunning may or may not accurately describe what the application may be, but
> it clearly describes the priorities of the designers of the application.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choose any of the other sub-pages (from PRIVACY | AI | TRACKING | SANITIZER |
SNOOZE | SEARCH) and you see other screenshots.

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

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

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

Perhaps information on a third party auditor?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gah! What an anti-pattern!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
bradknowles
Mutt?

------
sneak
Exciting. Where's the source?

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

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

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

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

~~~
zomg
i miss sparrow! :/

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

~~~
jlawer
Making an assumption from the FAQ.

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

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

------
arrty88
Does it work offline, like when I'm on the subway or a plane?

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

------
albertini_89
and like always , everything is for iOS , like other OS doesnt exists... great

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

