
Ask HN: What might be the future of open-source offline-first email apps? - mwcampbell
Most people are happy to leave email to the big players, most notably Gmail. But many of us would like this aspect of the Internet to remain meaningfully decentralized, as it was in the beginning. And some of us would prefer not to rely on proprietary software for this crucial task.<p>Probably the most well-known open-source email application is Thunderbird. But it&#x27;s clearly on life support, and at least in my experience, it has never been very robust. Plus, it&#x27;s an old-school desktop application, and while some of us (myself currently included) prefer that, most people prefer to do email in a web browser and on a mobile device.<p>There are open-source webmail applications like Roundcube, but at least last time I looked, they required frequent round trips to the server, albeit with some JavaScript enhancement. In modern parlance, they&#x27;re not offline-first.<p>So is there already a good open-source, offline-first email application that can run on multiple platforms (i.e. not something like K9Mail for Android)? If not, what might be the best way to go about developing one? I&#x27;m guessing the best starting point would be the email application from Gaia [1], part of the now abandoned Firefox OS.<p>[1]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mozilla-b2g&#x2F;gaia
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gcr
I've found CLI clients built upon Notmuch are quite nice.

Notmuch is an email indexing system. It provides the "full-text search" part.
It has an emacs interface and a CLI interface similar to Mutt. If you prefer,
it can also integrate with Mutt.

To get emails into your machine, use offlineimap or mbsync, which integrate
with the above.

To send emails, use msmtp, which integrates with the above.

This setup has worked well for me for years. Millions of emails can be indexed
and searched offline as fast as GMail's search.

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LeoPanthera
Mutt. [http://www.mutt.org](http://www.mutt.org)

"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."

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neospice
I always felt that mutt was needlessly difficult to configure.

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LeoPanthera
With great power comes great configurability.

You only have to do it once.

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bengotow
I'd highly recommend checking out Nylas N1
([https://github.com/Nylas/N1](https://github.com/Nylas/N1)). It's beautiful,
cross platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) and extensible via a plugin architecture
borrowed from Atom. Nylas is currently working on a version that doesn't
require the backend "Nylas Cloud" APIs and will connect to IMAP / Exchange
directly.

(disclosure: I was the Nylas N1 team lead from 2014-Dec 2016.)

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Elizzy
This was a post about offline-first clients, and N1 requires the sync engine
to function (which I suppose can be run locally if wanted but you lose some
features. )

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j45
As a long time user of Thunderbird, I'm also I'm a big fan of Aquamail. It's
probably the richest feature mail client I've found on Android. The developer
is incredibly responsible, and it is very performant to the point that I
prefer it even on a tablet over anything else.

If it could be available to run on a desktop easily, there might be something
to hold me over.

Thunderbird has one piece of robustness that most desktop email apps do not -
you can transfer email between laptops and versions of their software. I used
apple mail pretty happily for a while until I discovered the dreaded
incompatible databases.

If I was to look forward, People are going to start to have more and more
email like many of us do already. I'd probably want a tool that uses the best
of the established back end mail tech and something multi platform and one
code base.

If there's a tool that uses standard java or python libraries that are
pressure tested already for backend, and perhaps a front end built in
something like electron I'd be seriously interested. As much as I feel I have
no other option to use other than Thunderbird as a desktop client across my
accounts (google, exchange, etc)

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tombrossman
I had high hopes for Geary but it was underfunded and lacks the feature set I
need to replace Thunderbird.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geary_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geary_\(software\))

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marcosdumay
Why does it need to run on multiple platforms?

I kinda of gave up on desktop email readers since all of the ones I knew
started to suck. I use open source webmail now on my desktops, and K9Mail on
Android. Those several round trips to the server aren't a problem, but those
webmail servers really aren't as sleek as the desktop clients used to be - the
filters don't work ass well, it's hard to integrate with spam filtering, there
are many less options for converting text, autoanswering, ordering...

On where to go, well, I do have plans of writing a mail client. But right now
I'm focusing on finishing my mail server.

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emilsedgh
I've been using Kmail and I'm really happy with it. I have Gmail/Inbox on my
phone and sometimes I use them on the web but Kmail is still my favorite.

It was quite unstable for a few years, but it's solid these days.

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Animats
Android's standard mail application talks IMAP to mail servers just fine. It
doesn't do much, but it does work well.

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fabrice_d
asuth started to work on a web based version that is kind of the descendant of
Thunderbird and Gaia's email client:
[https://github.com/asutherland/glodastrophe](https://github.com/asutherland/glodastrophe)

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jrockway
Use offlineimap to synchronize your mail. Then use whatever client (webmail or
otherwise) running on your local machine.

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Ar-Curunir
Offlineimap is slow and buggy; use mbsync instead.

