
I've spent the last two years building a new email client - muszc-master
https://ivelope.com/invite/InviteHNv0914
======
salimmadjd
I put my name on the waitlist, but instantly lost interest and confidence by:
“Jump forward 5 steps in the line for every person you invite and get beta
access sooner.”

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

~~~
kemiller
You are not alone in this attitude, so don't take this personally, but I'm
going to reply to you because you're the top comment. This is an incredibly
destructive point of view. Promotion is essential to any software project,
even open source, and in the vast majority of cases, word of mouth is not
enough. This is an ethical, up-front, straightforward ask that costs you and
anyone you might contact very little and is optional in any case. He's a solo
developer. Cut him some slack.

~~~
untog
But what am I endorsing? I haven't tried the product myself yet. It's not
unethical, but it's also simply not something I'm prepared to do - I will not
recommend something to anyone without having been able to evaluate it myself
first.

~~~
lisper
This.

In a world where publishing is essentially free, reputation is an extremely
valuable commodity. The ask here is not trivial.

~~~
nobodyaccount
Yes, it is trivial. You have a warped perspective of importance if you think
giving the nod to a new mail app is some holy thing.

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.

~~~
mr_overalls
Recommending a product you haven't reviewed is a form of lying. Some of us
value our integrity.

~~~
eevilspock
Isn’t this true of all advertising, except in the rare cases where the
publisher only accepts ads for products they endorsed?

How can we ever expect a reliable, non-garbage-dominate internet when it is
funded by perverse incentives?

~~~
lgas
The distinction is that if I see a billboard (or magazine ad, or TV
commercial) advertising a product I don't think that I have a relationship
with the billboard and they know me pretty well and have my best interests at
heart... so I don't think that if this particular billboard that knows me so
well is promoting a product to me then it must be a pretty good product for me
(especially because this billboard doesn't usually go out of their way to
recommend products to me).

But if a friend of mine recommends a product to me, well, I do think all of
those things.

------
dhruvb14
I find it crazy that everyone is harping on Electron instead of the cool
features that this clearly has that most clients do not. Demo looked pretty
polished dude. Don't let the typical HN crowd rain on your parade. The fact
that you posted an actual product out to the public is more than most can say.

Also: If you can't spare Max 300MB ram and you are complaining on HN wtf
computer do you use?

~~~
tomc1985
My compute resources are not an all-you-can-eat buffet. I'm sick of
inconsiderate developers writing software in wasteful frameworks that waste my
electricity and time.

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.

~~~
misterbwong
I'm not grandparent but I tend to agree that it's NoBigDeal(TM). I'm no
electron apologist but I don't understand why using electron is considered
"inconsiderate". It seems like the developer(s) used the platform that they
felt was best for this app. If the platform's issues overshadow the product's
value, then that's a poor choice and the market will react by not using it.

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.

~~~
unt34teuotns
> I don't understand why using electron is considered "inconsiderate".

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.

~~~
mStreamTeam
I'm an developer who's been using electron since it came out. At it's core
electron is just a packaged NodeJS instance with a layer to access the OS API.
The chrome as a GUI part does not have to be used. This makes electron a great
way to distribute NodeJS apps. Instead of getting your users to install NodeJS
and use the command line, you can give them an electron version of the app
that works out of the box.

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](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.

------
ynniv
I don't think this puts enough emphasis on the fact that it is a local client
and not a web service. I see some people here griping about Electron, but the
privacy implications of being a local app are way more important than the
performance of the framework used.

~~~
neutronicus
My partner actually has the opposite pain-point:

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?

~~~
LeoPanthera
Apple Mail has this as a setting, works with any IMAP provider.

------
yaantc
Thanks for your interest in local email clients, more choice there is welcome!

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/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/thunderbird/addon/nostalgy/)

~~~
vanous
Claws mail had this by default. Thunderbird fortunately via the Nostalgy
extension. It's been a lifesaver since claws mail never implemented HTML mail,
forcing me to move to Thunderbird for 21st century text formatting ten years
ago.

------
SyneRyder
This looks pretty cool, I'm really pleased to see people writing new email
clients, and you've clearly worked very hard on this!

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!

~~~
muszc-master
1\. It's an Electron app, but it is built to use as little RAM as possible,
when I run it on my old Macbook Air, it consumes only around 300mb of RAM
maximum, which is less than what Finder consumes, and I consider everything
over this limit to be a bug.

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

~~~
yani
300MB of ram sounds like a lot to me. What are you storing in memory that is
that large? If I dont use the app for 1 hour will it stop using the memory?

~~~
Lio
I'm sure that a client like Mutt would use much less but considering that many
emails have embed HTML and would ideally use a modern web view to render
correctly, how much overhead is there from from using Electron/chromium if
you're going to load all of that anyway?

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?

~~~
chrismorgan
For reference, when settled, Gmail in Firefox uses 200MB or a bit more, while
FastMail uses around 10MB.

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](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.

~~~
jsjohnst
> Gmail in Firefox uses 200MB or a bit more, while FastMail uses around 10MB.

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.

~~~
chrismorgan
I sought only to compare Gmail with FastMail, to indicate that Gmail is a poor
baseline for memory comparisons.

~~~
jsjohnst
Fair point, I agree there!

------
brongondwana
Of course I have to ask if you've looked at JMAP
([http://jmap.io/spec.html](http://jmap.io/spec.html)).

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!

~~~
muszc-master
Hi! I really like the initiative of JMAP, however I haven't been able to look
into it properly - I can give you a better answer once I've done that, my
email is in my profile

~~~
chrismorgan
One of the things we’re really hoping with JMAP is that, by drastically
lowering the barrier of entry (because doing IMAP/POP3/SMTP well is _hard_ ),
people will be able to experiment much more, making things like Ivelope,
because they can start making UI almost immediately rather than shaving IMAP
yaks first.

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!

~~~
mike-cardwell
I'm not convinced that JMAP existing will make it easier for people to develop
things like Ivelope. I don't know in this particular case, but if I were
writing Ivelope I wouldn't first write an IMAP library of my own. I'd use an
existing one. And all commonly used languages have pre-existing IMAP libraries
anyway.

I doubt the ability to do "var client = new JMAP()" instead of "var client =
new IMAP()" will lead to a flood of new clients.

~~~
chrismorgan
I perceive that you haven’t ever tried programming against IMAP or making a
MUA, or not seriously at least.

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](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.

~~~
mike-cardwell
"I perceive that you haven’t ever tried programming against IMAP or making a
MUA, or not seriously at least."

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...](https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/jmap/7dSQsqRBJ_YlZ7wF83i2ihi14XI)).
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.

~~~
brongondwana
\-- get the second page of top-level folders

["Mailbox/query", { "filter" : { "parentId" : null }, "limit" : 30, "position"
: 30 }, "R1"]

It's happened.

------
dri_ft
God bless you for working in a space—native email clients—which seems utterly
neglected nowadays.

~~~
collyw
I can kind of see why.

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.

~~~
tjoff
Gmail search is without doubt the worst search I've ever come across. It
doesn't even return all the results.

Why do you think it is good?

There is nothing that says that you can't have both web and native mail
clients.

~~~
collyw
It works for almost everything I try to find. It might take a few tries, but I
can usually find the mail I was looking for.

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.

~~~
tjoff
Well, it can't even find all instances of a single exact ID.

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.

------
abeiz
Looks great! I'm always curious what it means when people say they've worked x
years on something. Was this a full time project @ 40/h a week every week, or
more of a few hours on the weekends, or maybe something in the middle?

~~~
muszc-master
Hello! It has been full-time for the last 2 years!

~~~
_RedPanda
This probably means that the software is not going to be free, right?

~~~
discordance
I hope it's paid. This guy deserves to get paid for his awesome work, and I
will trust it more if I'm paying $.

~~~
Boulth
I agree! I'm frequently paying for software even if I won't use it after a
year just to test how well it works. Unpaid is not sustainable. But having
source code (Maybe GPL?) is also important.

------
dogma1138
No offense but unless it’s a 1st party client email clients are something that
is very hard to trust.

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.

~~~
porker
I've downvoted you for your sheer negativity.

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!

~~~
cronin101
He isn't trying to take away from the achievement, just highlighting some
legitimate security concerns.

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.

~~~
ryandrake
Yea, I kind of feel the same way about it. "Great work but not my cup of tea
for reasons A, B, and C" should be valid feedback on a Show HN.

~~~
porker
Absolutely. But the OP forgot the "Great work but...". Had they, I wouldn't
have commented.

------
douglasheriot
> 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.

I wish this was the default assumption these days.

------
mike-cardwell
Has anyone tested this using
[https://www.emailprivacytester.com](https://www.emailprivacytester.com) yet?
If not, please do so and report back here. I would test myself but I'm stuck
in the queue for access.

------
muvek
This looks great. I have two questions:

\- Is this open-source? What is the license and where is the source-code?

\- When can we expect a linux version?

------
quakenul
Super cool!

ctrl+f on "price" or "cost" turns up nothing. Well then, what is your business
model going to be?

------
tempay
This looks very impressive. I'm currently looking for a new email app but my
biggest concern with email applications is their longevity, do you have any
plans for funding this? (I'm not so concerned what the model is, just that
there is one.)

~~~
muszc-master
Yes there is a plan, and I have on-going conversations with some interested
parties :)

~~~
electrichead
There is also the option of Patreon

------
Flimm
This looks amazing, I can't wait to try it out. My main problem with
Thunderbird is that it doesn't have a conversation-based UI, but this looks
like it does. Good stuff!

(By the way, typo: "accessable" should be "accessible")

~~~
newscracker
There is an extension for Thunderbird called Thunderbird Conversations [1] for
a conversation based UI that provides a look similar to Gmail (though it may
not look like chat, which is possible and would look nice only for those who
exchange short one or two sentence emails). As that addon says, "Don't forget
to hit View > Sort By > Threaded in the menus." to use it. Perhaps this
extension would help you.

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-
con...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-conversation-
view/)

~~~
XorNot
I consistently have performance problems with that extension.

------
speby
This is awesome. And very well done. It is clear that a lot of effort and time
went into building and polishing this, especially for a single person.
Impressive! I signed up for the list too. Looking fwd to trying it out.

~~~
muszc-master
Thank you!

------
zengid
Speaking of desktop, has anyone else seen Proton Native?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16978901](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16978901)

------
eigen-vector
The product looks great. Feed is a fantastic idea, love it. Good luck!

~~~
muszc-master
Thanks for your comment :)

~~~
vezycash
Are you familiar with outlook.com's sweep feature?

It's the ultimate email management tool. And I hope you can add it fast.

~~~
muszc-master
I will definitely look into this!

------
dvfjsdhgfv
It looks wonderful! Finally a good candidate for a successor of Thunderbird! I
just hope you'll manage to finish your project.

By the way, when do you plan to release the beta?

~~~
muszc-master
Thank you! Version 0.9 is out right now, and I have released it to a few
people in the waiting list, I'm fixing bugs and iterating, so expect to get a
download link pretty soon

------
therealidiot
Does this do any kind of telemetry at all? Looks nice, would be interested to
take a look if/when a Linux build was available

------
y_molodtsov
Will definitely try it out, it’s really hard to find a perfect client.

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.

~~~
muszc-master
Thank you! This is one of the problems I'm trying to solve - although not
fully implemented yet in the beta

------
cdnsteve
Whats the business model around this or funding plans? Freemuim, paid
software, ads, selling data?

How sustainable is this project?

------
raimue
What would be the reason to limit access to the beta with a waiting queue? I
can see reasons to use this approach for a web app, for which you have to
ensure that it scales with the number of users. There is no such problem for a
standalone desktop app, though.

~~~
muszc-master
You are right in this respect, the reason for limiting access right now is
that I don't want hundreds of people to experience and report the same bug, if
I let a few users at a time try it, I can fix the bugs they report so the
users in the next batch won't experience these bugs.

------
joakleaf
It looks really great!

Which frameworks/libraries and languages did you use?

What were the main challenges you came across?

~~~
muszc-master
Thank you! This is built using Electron, so it is basically JavaScript. Given
the interest of this post I'll try to make a blog post later on all the
challenges and lessons learned

------
jrochkind1
Wow, people really feel personally attacked by an app released using Electron.
Weird.

------
EdSeegar
It's funny how everyone has a extremely specific set of requirements, most of
time for technical reasons. Does say something about e-mail in 2018 I guess.

------
geekuillaume
What is the reason to build it as a native software instead of a webapp? Seems
like a lot of email clients are now webapps and I can see the arguments why.

~~~
muszc-master
Because of Privacy concerns! The thinking is that few people would enter their
email and email password on a 3rd-party website, having it as a downloadable
software ensures the privacy of users

~~~
gerardnll
Although, in reality, that doesn't make it more secure.

~~~
qz3
On a desktop app, you can see what kind of request the program makes and which
servers it contacts. With a webapp, you'll never know what the app does.

~~~
alimbada
You can do the same in your browser by opening the developer tools and in fact
it comes built in to the browser whereas on a desktop you'd have to install
another app like Wireshark/Fiddler to see those requests.

~~~
stephenr
That only tells you what your browser sends to their server. It doesn't tell
you what connections their server makes.

~~~
crystaln
Nothing will. The vulnerability of what happens to your data after it is sent
to a third party is the same for any app, web or native.

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.

~~~
stephenr
When the app is native there no requirement for a third party server.

You, Your mail (provider) server.

Vs

You, the server hosting the web app, your mail (provider) server.

------
mike-cardwell
Does this have support for OpenPGP? If not, you might want to take a look at
[https://github.com/openpgpjs/openpgpjs](https://github.com/openpgpjs/openpgpjs)
which does all the heavily lifting for you. Although it would also be useful
if it could talk to a locally running gpg-agent so it would work with
smartcards/yubikeys etc.

~~~
muszc-master
Doesn't support it as of yet, however it has been requested by many and is on
my todolist.

~~~
Boulth
Is there a public tracker for these requests? I'd be happy to be informed when
OpenPGP support is available. Enigmail started to behave really weird since
version 2 and your client looks incredible!

------
mmargerum
I always thought it would be nice if the major os vendors provided some way of
building these types of local run web app using a shared engine the os
provided. Not just a web view, but a way to build the ui using web tech but
also exposing the file system and other things. I guess it would be hard to
secure but it’s not any worse than running unsigned eclectron apps.

------
kimusan
looks nice - too bad it is not available for Linux.

~~~
muszc-master
I've been getting a few requests to release it for Linux, and as the other
commenter here, since it is Electron, it will not be very long before it can
be released on Linux (compared to if it were a 100% native app)

------
rqs
Maybe sounds weird, but does it it support Usenet (NNTP) protocol? Or maybe
make it support plugins so people can add features they want.

Thank you!

------
danmg
Would be nice to see a feature comparison with Thunderbird. What exactly can
this do that Thunderbird can't?

~~~
muszc-master
To give some examples: quick-move folders, conversation view, feed view, one
click filter-creation and newsletter/promo filter

~~~
danmg
Seems like a lot of these are covered by Thunderbird plug-ins with the added
advantage of having a native application.

------
rerx
This looks very neat! Does it have quick to use keyboard shortcuts like the
Fastmail or Gmail web interfaces?

~~~
muszc-master
Yes it does!

------
phnofive
Looks very interesting. I personally would appreciate knowing I am entering my
email into a waiting list rather than getting access. Also, why does there
need to be a waiting list - to help stem the flow of analytics? Honestly
curious.

I really want a good, modern email client and I hope this can be it.

~~~
muszc-master
The reason for having a waiting list is so that I can release it to a few
people at a time. I don't want to release it to everyone at once, because if
there is a large or annoying bug I haven't found. If I release it to a few
people, let's say 50, only they will experience this possible bug and not
everyone at once

------
graeme
Can the filters be exported for import into gmail, etc?

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.

------
tobyhinloopen
This is just advertising... showing a product on HN, but requiring you to
"invite" others? Too bad, I was actually willing to try the software.

I'm not going to invite others if others can't use the software, or without
trying it for myself first...

~~~
muszc-master
I'm sorry if it came across as advertising, let me clarify: you NEVER have to
invite others to get access, however if you do, you have the chance to get
access sooner - I think this is fair. I definitely understand your concern of
not sharing it and you do not have to share it to get access.

~~~
mcintyre1994
That sounds reasonable enough, but how fast is your queue moving? I'm 3,800
something - will I remember this show HN when I get access? :)

------
sslalready
Looks great. Would love to try it out when it goes out of beta.

For testning the privacy when it comes to email rendering, have you tried this
excellent service?

[https://www.emailprivacytester.com](https://www.emailprivacytester.com)

~~~
muszc-master
Yes I have and in the latest release which I'm working on, I've included
features trying with the goal of fully complying with this tool.

------
alexashka
Forgive my ignorance - can someone do a very short explanation of the killer
features here?

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.

------
ComodoHacker
I've searched the page for the word "offline", was disappointed. Searched this
thread for the word "electron", was disappointed again.

Then I've signed up nevertheless, because the need for a good modern email
client is strong.

------
znpy
Another browser running on my computer ? Thanks but no.

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?

------
christopheraue
This looks interesting. One can see the two years of work that went into this.
Is there a way to follow the development as a bystander? Something like a
newsletter, blog, twitter or any other kind of feed?

~~~
muszc-master
Thank you for your feedback! If you sign up for an invite, I'll let you know
once something like this is up and running.

------
davidcollantes
I love the implementation, I can't wait to play with it, and even use it!

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!

~~~
muszc-master
It's a pure email client! We do not have a third party server processing your
emails, your data goes only directly between your computer and your email
server.

~~~
davidcollantes
Excellent, thank you much! In queue. :-)

------
vijaybritto
This looks fantastic, I was just thinking about so many of these features
being released in gmail. Like the chat bubble. Those things really speed up
reading information. Kudos!!

Btw where are the electron haters?!

~~~
SyneRyder
_> 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.

~~~
apta
> And considering the rumours about macOS, probably wise to avoid writing
> native Mac code just now.

What rumors?

~~~
SyneRyder
Apple is dropping Intel chips & replacing them with their own CPUs in Macs in
2020 [1], and working on a unified development API where you'll develop one
app for iPhone & iPad that will also run on the Mac, so you won't need to
write Mac specific apps anymore [2] [3].

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-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/apple-is-said-to-
plan-move-from-intel-to-own-mac-chips-from-2020)

[2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-20/apple-
is-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-20/apple-is-said-to-
have-plan-to-combine-iphone-ipad-and-mac-apps)

[3] [https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/05/01/scuttlebutt-regarding-
app...](https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/05/01/scuttlebutt-regarding-apples-cross-
platform-ui-project/)

~~~
red_admiral
I wish them luck, but Microsoft tried this already (Universal Windows
Platform).

One thing I fear is that keyboard shortcuts, particular the F-keys, will
become a thing of the past.

------
epx
Quite a challenge you chose for yourself, I respect that! There are very, very
few _passable_ email clients in this world: Thunderbird, Mail.app (macOS and
iOS) and GMail Web client.

~~~
muszc-master
Indeed it was and is. My goal is to put Ivelope on that list

------
brightball
Nice! This has a ton of potential and I really like the way that you've
approached things here.

Does the calendar sync up to the various calendar providers (Google, Apple,
etc) as well?

~~~
muszc-master
It will very soon, that's one of the most requested features by my current
beta users

------
shaaaaawn
Love the work you put into this and the detail put into describing the
features. One thing missing from the site. Why did you make it?

~~~
muszc-master
I felt that email clients hasn't changed much in the last 20 years and that
there is a lot of improvements that can be done in this space, please note,
the features that exists now in Ivelope consists of just a small percentage of
what will come...

------
ircshotty
Looks fantastic - a long queue for the beta, but would like to give it a try.
Early yet - but any plans to support plugins?

------
marek995
Can't wait to try out the Linux version!

~~~
purple-again
Its made with Electron so my understanding is it should work on
Windows/Linux/Mac out of the box!

~~~
BuildTheRobots
Electron? The obvious snarky comment has to then be "oh and it should manage
to be slower than Thunderbird out of the box, too!"

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

~~~
muszc-master
Haha "pressed to disk and posted" that was a fun remark :)

~~~
BuildTheRobots
I'm baffled as to why I have to queue for something that's neither a physical
product nor a service platform. Doubly so when the link posted seems to just
bump someone else up the queue.

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!"

~~~
muszc-master
Since I am only one developer currently, and there will probably be bugs, I
don't want thousands of people having the same bug, this is the reason I'm not
releasing it right away.

~~~
BuildTheRobots
This seems like a totally legitimate reason - but in that case maybe the
announcement on HN (the tech website keeping the slashdot* effect alive)
should have come once there was a public RC.

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!

------
matt4077
Not a fan of the logo in the top bar. It looks like one of those tacky
“gaming” keyboards with a logo on the space bar.

------
analreceiver
The demo looks great!

Consider crowd-sourcing an american voice-over actor, it might add a lot of
value for very little cost.

------
newsat13
Is there any pricing information?

------
parliament32
No Linux version (yet?), unfortunately. Looks nice though from the
screenshots!

------
sametmax
The field really needs this so good luck. I'll test the first release that
works on my os.

I

------
Rjevski
Electron = no thanks. I might as well use my provider’s web interface then.

------
tedeh
I see you have registered a company. How do you plan to monetize?

~~~
draugadrotten
Just a guess after reading on LinkedIn what projects he has been working on
previosly, he might monetize by in-app purchases to unlock features.

~~~
zerr
What about default search engine integration? How one makes such deal with
Bing or Google?

------
samstave
Hope @pg will see this - as he called for better email years ago

------
samueldavid
how did you sustain yourself working on this fulk time for free?

~~~
muszc-master
Noodles and savings

------
jscholes
> Use Ivelope with your current email adresses.

adresses -> addresses

~~~
muszc-master
Oops, second typo found. (I'm not a native speaker if that's an excuse :P)

------
gwbennett
Congrats on working hard and shipping an app!

------
samstave
I love it.

The fwd with attachment should be no 1 to fix though

~~~
muszc-master
Thanks for the feedback, fwd attachment priority noted

------
fouc
The chat-like interface looks great! kudos!

~~~
muszc-master
Thanks!

~~~
flas9sd
having recently heard of autocrypt and delta.chat, I thought time is ripe for
somebody to use this view in a regular email client. The demo video seemed to
have exactly implemented this, I'm impressed.

------
stratosmacker
Sweet!!

Will you support PGP?

------
fourseventy
+1 for the Office Space references

------
ramijames
Fuck man, just let me use it.

~~~
muszc-master
What's the features you're mostly looking forward to? I'll see what I can do
:P

------
jk2323
Well, I am curious. Seems so hard to get an email client right. I would not
mind paying (GPG integration is a must).

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...."

~~~
muszc-master
During development of this client, I fully understand why there aren't more
email clients out there. GPG is coming!

~~~
jk2323
Also, Gmails search function is a blast. Much worse in Thunderbird, annoying
in Evolution.

~~~
billfruit
Gmail searching isn't really that great, it doesn't do stemming while
searching, offline clients should be able to do better than that.

------
yani
You are not weird. More and more people think that Electron is bad

~~~
SquareWheel
This is an "all my friends voted for..." argument.

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.

~~~
yani
It is not about popularity, it is about the resources Electron apps use vs
native. The apps that you mentioned do not have good native alternatives. I
cannot see anyone preferring a native app over Electron app if both offer the
same features.

~~~
brandonwamboldt
I prefer VS Code over native alternatives. Don't conflate your anecdotal
evidence with facts. Many users don't know much RAM a process consumes or what
an Electron app is, they just care about what the app can do, how fast it is,
etc.

~~~
coldtea
> _I prefer VS Code over native alternatives._

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.

~~~
croon
> 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.

~~~
coldtea
> _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?_

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?

~~~
croon
> 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.

------
amelius
> Show HN: I've spent the last 2 years building a new email client

Where is the corresponding "Ask HN: What requirements should I consider before
writing a new email client?"

~~~
stevekemp
> "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 - [https://lumail.org/](https://lumail.org/)

------
toto007
Why do you spend 2 year of your live to build a new email client? Aren't there
enought software for this scope?

------
sbr464
I have a side question for those who dislike electron apps (or prefer native):

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.

------
jakeogh
It's not a client, when gmail changed it's TOS to use your messages, I wrote
gpgmda. Found sup!? alot? notmuch.

[https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda](https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda)

------
toto007
Why do you spent 2 year of your live to build a new email client? Aren't there
quite software per this scope?

------
blkhp19
It's unfortunate that this wasn't build with a cross-platform core, but
native, first class UIs for each respective platform.

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.

~~~
red_admiral
I'd personally think "amazing" is a better adjective than "unfortunate" here -
the value of an e-mail client, at least to me, lies almost entirely in its
user interface. If using a native stack can squeeze out a few more tidbits of
usability here and there, that's a good job well done. There's still a lot of
value in native if it's done properly.

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++.

~~~
blkhp19
Whoops, see my edit. We’re totally advocating for the same thing - my wording
was just very very bad :(

