
IMAP client for coders - fxtentacle
http://www.hajomail.com/
======
benatkin
> 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.

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.

~~~
ajross
It's ransomware, yeah. Historically this is never (I mean, literally never
AFAIK) been a good way to start a successful open source project. This might
fool a few people (who like source in principle, but who don't want to muck
with it themselves) into thinking it's "almost as good as open" and
contributing. But it's _deeply, deeply disrespectful_ to the community you
will actually need to build if you want this to succeeed. Basically the
funders end up being dupes; there's no community and probably never will be.

I agree it looks cute, and I'd love to try it if it were available. But I
certainly won't be funding it.

~~~
fxtentacle
That seems to be well-reasoned criticism.

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?

~~~
Vivtek
No. You don't need to polish it further. If it were free right now, I'd be
using it _today_ and helping you polish it. As it is, yeah, I feel
disrespected. You want my free help (or the free help of other somebodies like
me) but _you_ want to be paid for your work. Obviously.

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.

~~~
fxtentacle
"You want my free help" that makes me wonder. I thought of it more like this:
I'm selling the basic software once-off so that afterwards anyone can
customize it as he/she pleases. For my taste, it's good enough so that i can
use it :) so i'm not really asking for free help. I'm asking for money so that
i can share my toys with everyone ;)

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?

~~~
ajross
> _I'm asking for money so that i can share my toys with everyone ;)_

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.

------
AceJohnny2
Don't coders use Mutt ? :]

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(email_client)>

~~~
dfc
I always had trouble with the lack of a folder list in mutt. My friend is
close to convincing me to give the mutt-patched package in debian a chance.[1]
All I need to do is find a decent muttrc that is not super tweaked like my
friend's config and then stumble along until I figure out what I need to
change. For some reason I have always been confused/overwhelmed/putt-off by
the coloring schemes when I have used mutt in the past.

[1] Patch: <http://www.lunar-linux.org/mutt-sidebar/>

[2] Screenshot: [http://screenshots.debian.net/screenshots/m/mutt-
patched/456...](http://screenshots.debian.net/screenshots/m/mutt-
patched/456_large.png)

~~~
jason_slack
I have always wanted to run the mutt-patched on my osx machine but can never
get it configured correctly. Any chance there are binaries or better
instructions?

~~~
dfc
The HN link below contains a great walkthrough for osx and mutt-patched. It
even includes a keychain setup process. With homebrew its as easy as:

    
    
      brew install mutt --sidebar-patch
    
    

The link to the walkthrough is: <http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-
mutt/>

There are also some helpful comments in the hn discussion:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4597156>

------
zaius
Looks awesome! Nice work.

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.

~~~
fxtentacle
thanks :) the GUI is mostly Twitter Bootstrap + Font Awesome + GWT

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.

~~~
zaius
Definitely still do the kickstarter. What I meant was I think you'll have
better luck on the kickstarter if it's open source to begin with. I'd feel
uneasy giving money to a kickstarter project that could stay closed source.

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.

~~~
fxtentacle
Thank you for the explanation.

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.

~~~
Vivtek
You're presumably the best person to work on finishing it. Don't underestimate
that position and the respect it can earn you.

(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.

------
jamesaguilar
If gmail makes you sick, I'm afraid I don't have much faith that you know what
I might like in a mail editor.

~~~
Andrex
Nor good design. With a little tweaking, Gmail is absolute minimalist nirvana.

<http://i.minus.com/ib0I7hmj8fzm2b.png>

(User stylesheet here: <https://gist.github.com/4650448>)

~~~
zaius
How do you apply a custom stylesheet? Do I have to use greasemonkey?

~~~
jlogsdon
Stylish[1] would work.

[1]
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe)

------
jcoder
> I've been using it since november, which was three months ago. That's why i
> consider this mail system > battle-tested

A very small battle. More a skirmish, really.

~~~
fxtentacle
Correct. I'd wager that "skirmish-tested" doesn't sound as good, though ;)

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.

------
patangay
Looks great! But, here is the problem.

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...](http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/great-unsolved-problems-in-computer-
science.html)

~~~
fxtentacle
Yes, Outlook is great for time planning .. if all of your team uses it.
However, most people that send me emails use GMail or other web mailers and
thus Exchange is not really a benefit in that regard.

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.

------
fxtentacle
If you're also working on IMAP / mail clients and want to discuss the
technicalities, feel free to drop me a line at

mail at hajo (dot) me

~~~
julian37
Hi Hajo, this looks great! I'm an Emacs addict though, and the main reason I'm
not using Gnus anymore is that I haven't found a IMAP syncing solution that
"just works" (last time I've checked). Since it sounds like you've solved this
problem, is there any chance the syncing module can be run standalone? If so
I'll most definitely chip in on your Kickstarter.

~~~
BCM43
I'm currently using offlineimap and notmuch. Have you tried that?

~~~
julian37
I think that used to be my setup, except with mairix. It's a while ago and I
don't recall now why I was unhappy with it. But seeing that offlineimap is
still actively maintained and has seen plenty of updates in the meantime,
maybe I should try again. Thanks for the heads up!

------
evoxed
If you offered a license for web hosts to use this, I think I know a whole
bunch of coders and designers who would gladly pay for a hackable IMAP client.
Kickstarter isn't a bad idea, but you should also try polling people to find
out if you could set up SaaS at the same time or some other scheme. There are
many possibilities...

~~~
fxtentacle
The program is structured in a way that you can use it both as a hosted
webmail AND as a locally running client. I needed that so i can use the web
version from my iphone and sync my laptops for offline use.

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.

~~~
evoxed
Sorry, I realized after posting that my phrasing was pretty bad. The current
setup looks good for the sort of thing I do– I would pay for it (one time
probably)– but if you then made it super easy to set up for multiple users,
even if it was a simple shell script or _some_ kind of interface, you could do
some sort of tool-subscription (pay once or subscribe for updates). By
webhosts I was thinking primarily of people like me who manage a couple
servers and do everything server-side for our clients except plug in the
fiber...

------
zoidb
> I obviously can't afford to give my work away for free

Why is that obvious?

~~~
acchow
He seems to be confused seeing as he also built it with FOSS like bootstrap
and GWT.

~~~
fxtentacle
The main difference here is that the people who wrote Bootstrap and GWT were
employees and they were PAID to work on those open source projects.

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.

~~~
niggler
Bootstrap was done on off-hours (even though they were employed with twitter,
if you read their history it was done outside of work and there was zero
compensation)

------
p4bl0
IMAP client for coders? Let me review: not open source, web based, html
emails, no PGP support, IMAP client tied to MUA, no mention of keybindings…

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.

~~~
fxtentacle
"not open source" This post is here to discuss options for changing that.

"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.

------
tillk
Quote from the page:

> 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

~~~
fxtentacle
I honestly wonder how they do it.

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.

~~~
tillk
> I honestly wonder how they do it.

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.

------
cies
i think this with good indexing/search capabilities, and tagging (like gmail)
and PGP support with a clean web-UI that supports multiple screen sizes
(devices) is an ABSOLUTE HIT!

run one on my phone! and/or over https on _MY_ server. then build calendar-
chat-etc in.

wow..

------
tonybaroneee
What HTML editor do you use for email composition? (e.g. TinyMCE, CKEditor)

~~~
fxtentacle
I wrote my own simple editor which is based around content blocks. So for
example every headline is a Text-block with style "Headline".

<https://github.com/fxtentacle/hajo-page-editor>

~~~
tonybaroneee
Interesting, I'll check this out some more!

------
antifuchs
Fascinating. What do you use to sync emails to the offline mirror? (-:

~~~
ante_annum
This is an imap client + local database + web interface to local database

------
javert
claws-mail is really nice. Highly recommended if you don't mind fiddling to
get things set up the way you want.

