
Sunsetting Nylas Mail Development - sachinag
https://www.nylas.com/blog/sunsetting-nylas-mail-development
======
jasonkester
These guys need to work on their message. Here was my read of the article:

1\. Some company I've never heard of is shutting down. I'll go read about it.

2\. "Exciting Year", "Incredible Journey" They're shutting down their Mail
Thing. Raising prices for old users to keep the lights on until "sunset" date.
Ouch.

3\. I wonder what their "Mail Thing" was. I'll click the homepage.

4\. Strange. Looks like the rest of the company hasn't got the memo yet.
They're still talking about their mail thing on the homepage as though it
still exists. Looks like some Sync API for email providers. Shame. That might
have been useful.

5\. (later) Read discussion here. Evidently the thing they shut down was some
tiny side project and the company still exists. Did not get that at all from
the shutdown notice.

~~~
maxyme
It was my understanding that they made a desktop (electron based) mail client
to showcase their serverside features. But now they're saying they will only
sell the serverside features now and the desktop client is too expensive to
maintain.

Is this correct? I haven't kept up with Nylas, all I know is they stored all
your emails on their server at first, but then got rid of it because of server
load and people didn't like it.

~~~
AsyncAwait
Yeah, mostly correct, but Nylas Mail did no longer store your emails on their
servers, only the previous version, (Nylas N1) did.

------
0x00000
We originally piloted using Nylas's APIs in our product about a year and a
half ago. In that timespan, their pricing has changed significantly about 4
times and they do not seem like they have a particularly good grasp on their
business model. They also, despite advertising 10 free test accounts,
arbitrarily delete said accounts and then when you ask to get them reactivated
you get connected with a sales rep.

Their API sync-engine [0] either hasn't been updated since March, or hasn't
been kept open source--neither of which is a great sign. We're currently using
the open source Nylas sync engine in production as we were uncomfortable
trusting an important feature of our product in a company that doesn't seem to
have a firm idea of what they want to do. But with the seemingly abandoned
open source project, we are now working on building out our own syncing
applications to ditch it altogether.

I would strongly caution anyone considering using the sync APIs to think about
what they are getting into and the switching costs.

[0] [https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine](https://github.com/nylas/sync-
engine)

~~~
bengotow
This sounds bad, but I'd suggest an alternate interpretation:

1\. Company invests heavily in engineering and builds a sync engine. Progress
is visible on GitHub and rapid.

2\. Company launches and repeatedly adjusts pricing and business models.
Drives everybody crazy BUT:

3\. Company finds it's value prop and customer base and the changes stop.
Entire company shifts to building a sales team and keeping the wheels on the
bus while they make their first customers happy.

4\. Engineers switch from working on the core sync codebase to surrounding
services, infrastructure, and scale.*

* Last week's developer dashboard announcement: [https://www.nylas.com/blog/announcing-the-nylas-dashboard-2....](https://www.nylas.com/blog/announcing-the-nylas-dashboard-2.0)

And somewhere along the road: Company realizes customers that are willing to
go through the hassle of provisioning, deploying, and maintaining their own
version of the open source sync engine are not the customers to focus on. ;-)

~~~
0x00000
Perhaps customers wouldn't be willing to go through the hassle of
provisioning, deploying, and maintaining their own version of the open source
sync engine if they had more confidence that Nylas is someone they would trust
to do it. Doing all those things is a pain in the ass. I would LOVE for us to
pay someone to do it, but we've completely lost confidence that you are those
people.

------
chtfn
Open sourcing everything? More like sunrising! Thank you for doing that.

~~~
sachinag
You're very kind - and sunrising is a brilliant term.

------
bonaldi
As always with Nylas, I've got very little understanding of what's going on
here. The API business must be successful, but I wonder who is using it, other
than people making e-mail clients, and they all seem to have their own!

N1 was the first good desktop alternative to Outlook for Exchange in a loooong
time, so I was hopeful this would be a flier. Is it going to be possible at
all to use the new open source app (or any forks) with Exchange?

~~~
sachinag
N1 1.5.0 was the last version that supported Exchange, and that was via the
Nylas APIs. We never did ship Exchange support on Nylas Mail 2.0.x, but
there's no reason someone can't add it now that we've dumped all the code.

------
anoother
Was client-side Exchange sync ever released?

Tried N1/Nylas Mail a few times in hope of this killer feature... But was put
off first by having to give Nylas credentials, and then by the fact the new
local sync engine didn't support Exchange.

------
jacquesc
Glad the Nylas team is focusing. I really wanted to like the frontend client,
but I stopped using it about a year ago due to reliability issues.

Mining organization data from email seems like a great opportunity. Context.io
wasn't able to make it work, but Nylas looks a lot more capable.

~~~
zeromantic
(disclaimer: I'm the business guy at Nylas)

Unlike Context.io, the Nylas APIs don't mine email organization data at all!
We're not owned by a marketing parent company, and all our customer MSAs make
it very clear that we have no rights to any of the email data passing through
us.

Nylas is an infrastructure company, like Stripe or AWS, and we make money by
building tools and making our customer's lives and products better, not by
reselling user data.

~~~
jacquesc
Right, I meant organization data meaning who people are emailing, calendars,
etc for building CRMish software on top. Wasn't tryint to imply you share any
of that data. Just poorly worded on my part, sorry bout that.

------
chrismatheson
Maybe I'm just missing something here, but I really can't figure out what
Nylas (the api side) offers?

Am i right in understanding that its essentially a Mailserver? AD / Gmail
alternative kind of thing?

or is it an API facade interface over IMAP / SMTP, that i would use if i were
creating a product and wanted to access a third parties email, contact etc
which they would give me access to somehow?

~~~
chrismatheson
That sounded kind of negative. Which i didn't mean it to be, I'm just
confused.

The client i really like, and I'm happy that its being open sourced. I
recently tried to run it locally as a jump of point for a project i had in
mind, but fell down at the sign-up screen, so I'm happy to hear that that
has/will go :)

------
Lazare
As a user, I've been loving Nylas Mail/N1. I hope the project lives on in some
usable form - the blog post mentioned Nylas Mail Lives and Mailspring, which
I'll have to take a close look at.

(I came to Nylas after Dropbox finally killed off Mailbox. I seem to have a
good track record of falling in love with desktop email clients which then
die...)

~~~
bengotow
Hey thanks! I used to work on Nylas Mail at Nylas and I'm the author of the
Mailspring fork.

It's definitely sad to see this post, but Nylas has remained committed to open
source and I think they've done this right. Relicensing everything under MIT
ensures the product will have a bright future, even though Nylas has better
opportunities it needs to pursue for it's employees and investors.

Would love for you to check out Mailspring
([http://getmailspring.com](http://getmailspring.com)) when it launches this
month. We always struggled to implement performant, battery-friendly mail sync
in JavaScript, and Mailspring essentially "rebases" the entire JavaScript UI
on top of a new C++ sync engine built on mailcore2. You get the flexibility of
JavaScript + plugins + themes with a much lighter profile.

~~~
Lazare
Well, "like Nylas mail but better" is a strong value prop from my point of
view; I'm signed up for your mailing list and look forward to hearing more
with interest.

> Relicensing everything under MIT ensures the product will have a bright
> future

Absolutely. Very impressive move.

------
patrickbolle
Interesting. I used N1 for a while a really enjoyed it, but the Electron apps
were killing my laptop so I ditched it. Super interested in the Mailspring
fork :)

~~~
rmccue
It looks like Mailspring is still going to be an Electron app, but with
Mailcore2 [0] for the email behaviour rather than Nylas' sync engine (per the
repo's readme [1]).

[0]:
[https://github.com/MailCore/mailcore2](https://github.com/MailCore/mailcore2)

[1]: [https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring#high-level-
goals](https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring#high-level-goals)

------
fiatjaf
I don't understand, what exactly are you sunsetting? N1? Or the service that
synced mailboxes?

~~~
Lazare
My understanding is Nylas has two products: An email API you could use to
build applications on, and a mail client they built on top of that API.

The mail cient was originally called N1 (later Nylas Mail), and is the product
being sunsetted so they can focus on the API.

~~~
sachinag
This is correct. The APIs have extended to include calendar and contacts in
addition to the original email API, and that's where we've chosen to focus
going forward.

~~~
StavrosK
So I won't be able to use Mailspring unless I use you as my email provider?

~~~
sachinag
No, no, Mailspring and the Nylas Mail Lives forks are totally divorced from
our infra.

------
grandinj
Maybe the Thunderbird developers can take over, some of them were keen on a
rewrite using "modern" technologies, this would be a good bootstrap.

~~~
sachinag
We tried reaching out to them based on the blog post you reference, but got no
response. :/

------
stevewillows
I used N1 during the beta, but switched to Postbox once they moved to their
actual service.

For a main client, I really liked it. I'm looking forward to the forks.

For me, I find it odd how few strong email clients there are for OSX. Every
app seems to have several quirks, and few provide a menubar icon with an
unread count or proper theming.

Props to the team for releasing under MIT. The two forks listed look extremely
promising.

~~~
sachinag
Yeah, we're super excited about the forks ourselves! I'm personally using both
N1 and Nylas Mail for all my work email (and paying the $12 a month
subscription out of pocket) but I hope to move to one of the forks soon.

------
lasoandrade
unsurprising

