Is there a build available which doesn't require users to sign up for a Nylas ID?
The support page states that "If you’re using N1 against our open source sync engine, you’ll still need to create a Nylas ID."
Given the privacy policy says that Nylas shares information with third parties and that they can "make a copy of the entire contents of the applicable email inbox, calendar, and contact book", it doesn't feel like a traditional email client to me.
Nylas Mail Basic does NOT store your mail data in the cloud. It still uses a cloud service for some features (like read receipts), but all the data is local on your disk and auth credentials stored in your native OS keychain.
Nylas Pro currently syncs in the cloud to enable some of the pro features not currently offered in Nylas Mail Basic and to provide a much easier to use modern API wrapper around mail data. The cloud syncing infrastructure is open source and you can run it yourself and inspect the code.
All editions (both Basic and Pro) need a Nylas ID. This lets us manage subscriptions for those who want to upgrade. The code is open source on GitHub (nylas/N1). You can fork & run yourself without a Nylas ID. You just won't get any cloud-enabled features.
We never send mail, contact, or calendar data to 3rd parties. We do, however, use 3rd parties for basic usage and performance statistics and self-host as much reporting infrastructure (like Sentry) as possible.
I understand the desire to have a seamless flow from free to paid, but you can easily move this flow later in the app (a la progressive disclosure). You can even build this into the existing flow where users currently go to upgrade, by prompting the user to create a Nylas ID at that point (if they haven't already).
There's a reason that e-commerce sites allow buyers to add items to a cart without sign up, and to "checkout as guest" instead of forcing users to sign up for a Staples (or whatever) login -- you get more conversions.
Even if you prefer the approach of trying to get the information up front, adding a "skip" option that allows users to use the app without cloud sync, etc., then allowing a user to "go pro" later on at least allows people to try the app without a commitment. It's not possible to convert someone who isn't a user because they got scared away by the registration requirement -- better imo, to have a non-registered user, than no user at all.
The only reason I could think of for not wanting to allow this is related to the third party data sharing -- perhaps you plan to sell (obfuscated) user data to data brokers. If that's not in the cards, and you do not plan to monetize your free tier (aside from up-selling to pro), I see no downside to allowing users to use the app without cloud sync in the free tier, with upgrades available within the app.
Updating the privacy policy to be explicit about what data is used for ("basic usage and performance statistics") would do a lot to allay the idea that this data is being sold to data brokers (and not simply to make the app better).
Thank you for making the sync engine work client-side! It's a huge step towards making Nylas a viable choice for privacy sensitive folks like myself.
The next step would be to make features like "read receipts" that necessitate signing into a cloud optional. Being able to use the app without having to sign into a cloud platform would be a much more valuable feature for me than any feature such a cloud platform could enable.
Aside: as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, tracking pixel based read receipts in particular, is overwhelmingly only used in spam and newsletters and I personally consider it to be a liability rather than a feature.
Do you still ship the open source engine with no authentication system at all? That was a massive problem last time I checked. Sure, you mentioned it, but many didn’t read that before setting it up.
OK, You will Need to Point this out in BIG BOLD 16 Fonts somewhere. Because I have skim read through Nylas multiple times and wherever it said it requires Nylas Cloud i just bypass it right away, thinking I have to store all my Keys and Important Data in yet another third party Cloud.
At first I thought "shares information with third parties and that they can [copy your email]" (emphasis mine) meant that the third parties can see & copy your email. I can't find anything like that language in Nylas' privacy policy (https://nylas.com/privacy-policy/) and so I guess your "they" meant "Nylas". Given their precise business model is making synchronized copies of your email inbox, that doesn't sound very unreasonable to me.
That's an integral part of how it works. Their sync servers download your email, then sync with your local client. You need that ID to log into their server and access your individual email accounts.
Hey – I'm an engineer at Nylas. This used to be true but Nylas Mail now uses a totally client-side sync engine.
If you're on the Basic edition, your emails never touch our servers. This was a huge undertaking (it's not easy to port a sync-engine written in Python and designed to run on servers to run efficiently on desktop machines) and is the major reason why we can now offer a freemium service. We're going to put out a blog post soon with more engineering details soon!
Not any more, per the post, the performance boost comes from using Gmail's, Exchange's, et al. APIs directly rather than remote IMAP sync + provide REST API for the client.
Cloud now used for "much much much much less" [0] - just tracking and stuff. Sync-engine also (?) runs locally now, I'm not totally clear on how this works but there's apparently some currently closed source stuff to become open 'soon', so it should become clearer exactly what's going on.
There's also apparently some details to follow on their engineering blog [1].
I really wanted an Email client for Linux which isn't power hungry but unfortunately last I tried Nylas - it was always top app in `powertop`. An always running app has to be low on power consumption IMO, but because so many apps are being built on top of webkit/electron most of them pretty much suck when it comes to battery usage.
Another case in point is slack app. On Linux, it is probably the worst app. :(
Electron actually gives you quite a bit of free help for power consumption. The Chromium team goes through great lengths to save power and most of those efforts get reflected in Electron. For example, when it the app gets put in the background it will automatically reduce power usage.
When no javascript is running the app consumes effectively no power.
Now that being said there's nothing to stop developers from running lots of expensive code or being non-performant with rendering. This is true in any environment. However; having access to the type of flame-charts and profiling tools that come with Chrome / Electron go a really long way to addressing some of these issues.
I work at Nylas and we've been heavily focused on reducing the amount of power the app consumes. We've still got a lot of work to do, but at the end of the day processing a ton of email quickly is a fairly expensive operation.
In the long run it's possible to offload very expensive work to natively compiled modules. A lot of Electron projects do this and can use Node's native bindings to connect to processes that really need to be fast in native code.
I have done some benchmarking of Qt/C++ vs Eletron/node performance while I was working on rbkit-client (https://github.com/code-mancers/rbkit-client) and frankly performance gap is huge for stuff like parsing, processing and anything which is CPU bound.
So if Nylas is parsing imap messages then both parsing and rendering difference between a native and eletron app will be big. Fortunately browsers workaround some of this problem by consuming json and stuff - formats browsers can natively parse.
I don't know how I ever missed this one when I searched for email clients. That looks like such a breath of fresh air: the download is under 10MB and it even supports GPG.
I think the answer is Mutt. For me, the editor is what stops me from switching. Does it still require you to shell out to an external editor to send a mail?
There was an amazing mail client for (of all things) FidoNet back in the 90s called GoldEd that was amazing. It had threaded message display, a great editor, pleasant colors, etc. It was tailored to that network, however. Would love to find something like this for console-based email that has the built-in editor and isn't Pine.
I am a very loyal mutt user. Coupled with mbsync (for offline imap) and notmuch (for indexing, threading and address completion) I think it's a great MUA.
I obsessively measure wakeups/s in powertop for every application I use, and the above setup is very good.
If you want to try other things you can look into the mutt-kz fork (which replaces internal search commands with notmuch).
There is also a notmuch curses client, but I find mutt+notmuch superior.
Mu is a notmuch alternative worth considering. Their emacs client is excellent.
Finally, also if you use emacs, gnus is perhaps the most powerful email client ever. Steep learning curve, though. It's a bit different to everything else, as gnus has been built as a news reader. It treats mail as news, but this has some great advantages I think, as long as you can adapt your mindset. Also Org integration.
Gnus is the only thing that might make me switch away from mutt.
The trouble isn't electron/webkit, it's the tonne of JavaScript frameworks that are used to emulate what HTTP already does very efficiently (pages, links, requests, responses, etc.).
I still do not understand the fascination with JavaScript. SPAs, desktop apps like Electron, server-side stuff with Node, I just don't get it. JavaScript is the worst tool for the vast majority of these things. It brings us enough pain as the only practical client-side language on the web. Who deals with that and says "I need to write my server (or worse, desktop app) in this, and you know what, I'm going to now bastardize the entire web model with all this Angular cruft just for good measure"?
Every time I try to get someone to explain it to me I'm just met with a bunch of empty answers like "Yeah it just flows really well man". It seems like the JavaScript Everywhere fad came into being solely to fulfill the need of a lot of novices to feel smug and important against more reasonable people, who are just left with puzzled looks.
An app that doesn't do anything in the background won't use any resources, doesn't matter if it is built on webkit/electron. Unless you have a huge volume of email, then Nylas should not be power hungry. I for one am grateful for web apps and for webkit/electron desktop apps. Without these taking off, the Linux desktop would be dead for me.
I admit I do have tons of emails, but It would be hard to find a programmer who doesn't have tons of emails these days. What with bunch of github notifications, mailing lists - I am always sitting at more emails than I can possibly handle.
Heck even my company-id has lots and lots of emails. Jenkins integrations notifications, travis, cron job failures and what not.
I naturally filter both my person and company accounts - so my Inbox is neat and tidy but I think we have reached a point where programmers/system devs/devops people will have to deal with tons of emails.
And yeah - I wish Nylas was better at dealing with this.
Is your usage IMAP-centered ? Then I can only recommend Trojita (http://trojita.flaska.net/). There are a few quirks here and there, but it's pretty much the one application that is started when my computer starts and closed only when it is shut down. Its smart usage of IMAP makes it extremely efficient (doesn't download all of your emails just to display one, doesn't download the entirety of a single mail just to display its subject, ...). The only downside is that your usage has to be pretty close to IMAP for trojita to work best for you.
Never really compared their resource usage since I'm only in one Slack team 99% of the time and even the official app isn't that horrendous in that use case.
I use Mail.app, Outlook and Nylas on OSX and Nylas is way faster for me. Problem is that it doesn't have an easy way to encrypt/sign mails with PGP. Well the new MacOS Mail.app neither...
As much as I like the features, Gmail is horrible when it comes to performance. On my chromebook, GMail is the only page that significantly slows down the whole computer. Don't know how they do that, but no other page is able to slow the system down so much as Gmail.
Which is somehow funny, since the whole supply chain is controlled by them (App, Browser, OS).
After signing up for Nylas Mail, I started getting daily "marketing email" (spam) from them. It really added insult to the injury already caused by the Linux app being horribly slow, buggy, and power-hungry.
I sent them a scathing email about Nylas violating EU privacy laws years ago, and they only responded to them after I spoke up against the product here on HN. They still haven't told me what data they collected about me, which they are required to by law.
It's nice to see that Nylas has learned nothing at all and keeps violating their users' rights.
I open the page and have no idea what Nylas is. I click on the logo and I'm taken to the blog home page, where 60% of the screen is the Nylas logo with no subheader telling me what it is. I click on it again and it just refreshes the blog index. No link to nylas.com. How do so many people make the same mistake?
I had the exact same experience. I see this sort of issue commonly. Surprising companies don't just link you back to their homepage when they promote their product with a blog. Seems like an obvious thing to do.
It looks nice. I don't have a mac so I can't test until you finish your release for the other platforms, but my question is about your marketing copy. I almost hate to badger you about this since the product looks nice, but I've got to ask about this line, "...the most powerful email client ever built"? That's a pretty bold claim and it makes my baloney detector go off. My suspicion is that it almost certainly isn't true, expect perhaps in specific areas, but not in the general. (If the suspicion is born out after testing, that makes me trust you less rather than more since it was a broad claim). Do you care to back up that claim in the general sense it seems to be offered? Or, if not, maybe change the copy?
Nylas Mail is the first email client built from the ground-up to be extensible. It's kind of like emacs in that way– you can create new plugins that add any sort of new functionality, whether that means connecting it to GitHub, Quickbooks, your CRM, etc.
First of all thank you for making Nylas Mail, keeping it both free and open source. It takes courage to have such a free client competing with your commercial product. Also, thanks for developing the backend within Nylas Mail so a user can easily run the client without depending on a backend with SMTP/IMAP credentials hosted within the USA.
Have you considered an iOS or Android version client? Why?
Is the backend within Nylas Mail still in Python? Isn't this inefficient, performance wise?
Yep, we've considered building an iOS and Android version. But that means we need to make more money and hire more people. Our team is very small right now.
The new sync engine is written in Javascript, which is faster than Python, but the main performance improvements came from changing the architecture.
> I used Nylas for a while and really liked it, until they they forced everyone to pay $7 per month to use it.
Sorry, but that isn't a fair way of describing what occurred.
Nylas is a startup, trying to figure out a business model which works for them.
You're not yet forced to pay. If you had a Nylas ID back when Pro was announced you got a gratis year of subscription. Now, they released a gratis version once more, called Nylas Mail, which is also open source. The backend is also open source.
What this means is that they've adopted a freemium model, and you got approx half a year to still enjoy your Pro license.
I haven't done a feature comparison between Mozilla Thunderbird (which I know is not everyone's preference but was my previous cross platform e-mail client), Nylas Mail, and Nylas Pro. If anyone knows one, please share.
My main concern is the backend being hosted in US by a US corporation. I don't like my data being hosted by US corporations, on US soil, and I recommend non US-citizens/residents to care about this.
> If you had a Nylas ID back when Pro was announced you got a gratis year of subscription.
Well, uh.. that didn't quite go that way for me.
The Pro 'transition' was a miserable experience that made me stop using it altogether* - it literally popped up asking me if I wanted to subscribe to Pro, and if I said 'no' (thinking I'll just continue non-Pro) the whole app quit.
* Coincidentally I tried it out again (seemed to get a 14day trial even though I'd used it before) a few days ago. There's still lots I like; the Basic tier is exactly what I needed really - last year when it suddenly held my emails hostage (slight hyperbole of course, there were still copies on the server).
Hey – I'm an engineer at Nylas. To add to what you said, the newly released Basic edition does all email syncing client-side, and uses our servers for minimal things (i.e: auth).
Nylas Mail Basic was designed exactly with this in mind. It's a free client, syncs locally, and does not include a lot of the Pro features that power users save a lot of time with.
On the flip side, we've designed Nylas Pro (and its price point) for users who are coming from the productivity world of ToutApp or YesWare. The goal with Pro isn't to merely be another Thunderbird or Mac Mail. We're focused on building new powerful workflows for people who live all day in their mailbox, calendar, and address book.
I used Nylas back when it was free, and it is a good email client, but it just wasn't worth $7 a month to me, and certainly not $12, especially when I consider that Office 365 Business Premium is only $12.50 a month, and includes Outlook, Word, Excel, etc. I would never use Office 365 personally, but when I consider the value offered by Office 365 Premium vs. Nylas, for about the same price, it makes Nylas Email look grossly overpriced.
It seems to me that Nylas could make a lot more money by charging $1 a month, since there are likely many, many more people willing to pay $1 vs. $12. Probably more than the 12 to 1 ratio required to break even.
I like Nylas, and think it is a good email client, but their pricing suggests they haven't done the market research and competitor analysis required to price themselves strategically and to be successful.
> It seems to me that Nylas could make a lot more money by charging $1 a month, since there are likely many, many more people willing to pay $1 vs. $12. Probably more than the 12 to 1 ratio required to break even.
Do you have any data on this? Would love to see it to help inform the research we already did when pricing the Pro edition of Nylas Mail.
Not for Nylas, since spending the time to do that research wouldn't benefit me. I'm happy to do it for a salary though.
Having said that, I can offer you this isolated anecdote (as worthless as that is): The last company I worked for used to use Nylas, before the pricing was set to $7 a month. When your company started charging for Nylas, we all stopped using it, both personally and professionally, and the general consensus during the transition away from your product was basically, "I'd continue to use it if it were around a buck." We understood the need for your company to make money, but $7 a month seemed too steep to us, so we went elsewhere.
I think it is great if you're able to succeed at $12 a month. I certainly won't begrudge your success. It just seems to me that at the $12-price-point, your competitors are offering much, much more. There are also free options, like Boxer, that work satisfactorily and are still free.
I'm not knocking your product. I liked it when I was using it, and I think you're trying to succeed in a difficult market, so kudos for making the attempt. I just don't personally value Nylas Mail at $7 (or $12) a month, and reading through this thread, it seems there are others who feel the same way; which I would think you'd want to consider as you fine-tune your business model.
Anyway, best of luck to you. I wish you all the success you deserve.
How is this different than Mail and every other email client in existence?
Don't get me wrong, it looks extremely good.
However, I visited the site and immediately clicked on the back button.
I've been using Google Inbox for a few months, and it radically changed how I handle my many mailboxes. It's not rare now that I actually achieve inbox zero.
I would love to see the same amount of innovation that was put into Google Inbox (I think they might have acquired it, though?) in another email client, as I'm always looking to try things out.
In Nylas, I see the same things that make dealing with email a pain: folders, the trash and spam being given the same importance as the inbox, etc.
It's set up to make it a job to keep your emails organized, while you shouldn't keep them organized, because it's just doesn't matter: just reply and mark as done, snooze until you can reply and mark as done, or discard/mark multiple emails at the same time and go on with your life.
Nylas Mail Basic and Nylas Pro are all built on an open source, highly extensible, modern platform. This lets us deliver a very familiar clean experience out of the box while supporting the ability to add an enormous number of very powerful features very quickly.
Everyone uses email slightly differently. The plugins allow us to build Salesforce integration, tracking, templates, and mail merge for sales people, while offering an entirely different targeted set for other users.
We intentionally "don't move the cheese to far" from existing clients to ease transition. There are a lot of grand ideas for radically different email experiences that fall flat due to their deviation from the core experiences most people expect and need. We instead believe that a handful of targeted features to a targeted group gradually develop into a very different way to interact with email for a very specific use case.
Your goals seem to be different than mine (and there's nothing wrong with that).
I'd rather lose Salesforce integration, tracking, templates etc. and get the basics right: going through the dozens of emails we get every day.
When we reply to emails we feel like we're being productive, but we're just taking time away from our actual job. If there's no easy way to easily differentiate between low priority and important emails—which Google Inbox does automatically by grouping them and letting you dismiss them all at once—you're not helping me.
Again, the product looks awesome, this is just my point of view I thought I'd share.
I suspect the parent is thinking of the Sparrow acquisition by Google, but Sparrow was a native app for OS X/iOS; thus it stands to reason that the acquisition was more of an acqui-hire for creating/refining Inbox. [1]
I love Google Inbox as well. The one downside that bothers me is its performance. It can be very slow and tends to gobble up resources the longer you have the tab open. I'm constantly on the lookout for a native desktop app that matches its features and ease of use.
Readit News
The support page states that "If you’re using N1 against our open source sync engine, you’ll still need to create a Nylas ID."
Given the privacy policy says that Nylas shares information with third parties and that they can "make a copy of the entire contents of the applicable email inbox, calendar, and contact book", it doesn't feel like a traditional email client to me.
https://support.nylas.com/hc/en-us/articles/220974588-How-is...
Nylas Pro currently syncs in the cloud to enable some of the pro features not currently offered in Nylas Mail Basic and to provide a much easier to use modern API wrapper around mail data. The cloud syncing infrastructure is open source and you can run it yourself and inspect the code.
All editions (both Basic and Pro) need a Nylas ID. This lets us manage subscriptions for those who want to upgrade. The code is open source on GitHub (nylas/N1). You can fork & run yourself without a Nylas ID. You just won't get any cloud-enabled features.
We never send mail, contact, or calendar data to 3rd parties. We do, however, use 3rd parties for basic usage and performance statistics and self-host as much reporting infrastructure (like Sentry) as possible.
(I build Nylas Mail)
There's a reason that e-commerce sites allow buyers to add items to a cart without sign up, and to "checkout as guest" instead of forcing users to sign up for a Staples (or whatever) login -- you get more conversions.
Even if you prefer the approach of trying to get the information up front, adding a "skip" option that allows users to use the app without cloud sync, etc., then allowing a user to "go pro" later on at least allows people to try the app without a commitment. It's not possible to convert someone who isn't a user because they got scared away by the registration requirement -- better imo, to have a non-registered user, than no user at all.
The only reason I could think of for not wanting to allow this is related to the third party data sharing -- perhaps you plan to sell (obfuscated) user data to data brokers. If that's not in the cards, and you do not plan to monetize your free tier (aside from up-selling to pro), I see no downside to allowing users to use the app without cloud sync in the free tier, with upgrades available within the app.
Updating the privacy policy to be explicit about what data is used for ("basic usage and performance statistics") would do a lot to allay the idea that this data is being sold to data brokers (and not simply to make the app better).
The next step would be to make features like "read receipts" that necessitate signing into a cloud optional. Being able to use the app without having to sign into a cloud platform would be a much more valuable feature for me than any feature such a cloud platform could enable.
Aside: as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, tracking pixel based read receipts in particular, is overwhelmingly only used in spam and newsletters and I personally consider it to be a liability rather than a feature.
(puts Stallman's hat on) This is not free as in freedom.
Dead Comment
https://github.com/nylas/N1/blob/master/CONFIGURATION.md
https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine
Edit: Not sure what the latest update changes yet (much of the sync engine is local now?), but this thread looks like it has the latest info so far.
https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/3166
If you're on the Basic edition, your emails never touch our servers. This was a huge undertaking (it's not easy to port a sync-engine written in Python and designed to run on servers to run efficiently on desktop machines) and is the major reason why we can now offer a freemium service. We're going to put out a blog post soon with more engineering details soon!
Cloud now used for "much much much much less" [0] - just tracking and stuff. Sync-engine also (?) runs locally now, I'm not totally clear on how this works but there's apparently some currently closed source stuff to become open 'soon', so it should become clearer exactly what's going on.
There's also apparently some details to follow on their engineering blog [1].
[0] - https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/3166 [1] - https://nylas.com/blog
Another case in point is slack app. On Linux, it is probably the worst app. :(
When no javascript is running the app consumes effectively no power.
Now that being said there's nothing to stop developers from running lots of expensive code or being non-performant with rendering. This is true in any environment. However; having access to the type of flame-charts and profiling tools that come with Chrome / Electron go a really long way to addressing some of these issues.
I work at Nylas and we've been heavily focused on reducing the amount of power the app consumes. We've still got a lot of work to do, but at the end of the day processing a ton of email quickly is a fairly expensive operation.
In the long run it's possible to offload very expensive work to natively compiled modules. A lot of Electron projects do this and can use Node's native bindings to connect to processes that really need to be fast in native code.
So if Nylas is parsing imap messages then both parsing and rendering difference between a native and eletron app will be big. Fortunately browsers workaround some of this problem by consuming json and stuff - formats browsers can natively parse.
Citation needed. Battery life with Safari on Mac or IE/Edge on Windows is easily twice that of Chrome/Chromium with the same tabs open.
Note: I'm not disputing that the Chrome team has put in significant effort, but rather that the results are anything above mediocre at best.
I guess I found a replacement for Thunderbird.
There was an amazing mail client for (of all things) FidoNet back in the 90s called GoldEd that was amazing. It had threaded message display, a great editor, pleasant colors, etc. It was tailored to that network, however. Would love to find something like this for console-based email that has the built-in editor and isn't Pine.
I obsessively measure wakeups/s in powertop for every application I use, and the above setup is very good.
If you want to try other things you can look into the mutt-kz fork (which replaces internal search commands with notmuch).
There is also a notmuch curses client, but I find mutt+notmuch superior.
Mu is a notmuch alternative worth considering. Their emacs client is excellent.
Finally, also if you use emacs, gnus is perhaps the most powerful email client ever. Steep learning curve, though. It's a bit different to everything else, as gnus has been built as a news reader. It treats mail as news, but this has some great advantages I think, as long as you can adapt your mindset. Also Org integration.
Gnus is the only thing that might make me switch away from mutt.
One day someone will build a good Electron app.
Every time I try to get someone to explain it to me I'm just met with a bunch of empty answers like "Yeah it just flows really well man". It seems like the JavaScript Everywhere fad came into being solely to fulfill the need of a lot of novices to feel smug and important against more reasonable people, who are just left with puzzled looks.
Visual Studio Code is very good in my opinion. It can be done.
Heck even my company-id has lots and lots of emails. Jenkins integrations notifications, travis, cron job failures and what not.
I naturally filter both my person and company accounts - so my Inbox is neat and tidy but I think we have reached a point where programmers/system devs/devops people will have to deal with tons of emails.
And yeah - I wish Nylas was better at dealing with this.
Never really compared their resource usage since I'm only in one Slack team 99% of the time and even the official app isn't that horrendous in that use case.
Which is somehow funny, since the whole supply chain is controlled by them (App, Browser, OS).
Dead Comment
It's nice to see that Nylas has learned nothing at all and keeps violating their users' rights.
Maybe I should finally sue them.
Dead Comment
(I work at Nylas.)
We are a very small team building this app. Hopefully you can focus on what's new/good and not what is left to do! :)
If you find bugs, please post them here: https://github.com/nylas/n1/issues/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUPDRnUWeBA
Have you considered an iOS or Android version client? Why?
Is the backend within Nylas Mail still in Python? Isn't this inefficient, performance wise?
The new sync engine is written in Javascript, which is faster than Python, but the main performance improvements came from changing the architecture.
Here's the original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11553738
Sorry, but that isn't a fair way of describing what occurred.
Nylas is a startup, trying to figure out a business model which works for them.
You're not yet forced to pay. If you had a Nylas ID back when Pro was announced you got a gratis year of subscription. Now, they released a gratis version once more, called Nylas Mail, which is also open source. The backend is also open source.
What this means is that they've adopted a freemium model, and you got approx half a year to still enjoy your Pro license.
I haven't done a feature comparison between Mozilla Thunderbird (which I know is not everyone's preference but was my previous cross platform e-mail client), Nylas Mail, and Nylas Pro. If anyone knows one, please share.
My main concern is the backend being hosted in US by a US corporation. I don't like my data being hosted by US corporations, on US soil, and I recommend non US-citizens/residents to care about this.
Well, uh.. that didn't quite go that way for me.
The Pro 'transition' was a miserable experience that made me stop using it altogether* - it literally popped up asking me if I wanted to subscribe to Pro, and if I said 'no' (thinking I'll just continue non-Pro) the whole app quit.
* Coincidentally I tried it out again (seemed to get a 14day trial even though I'd used it before) a few days ago. There's still lots I like; the Basic tier is exactly what I needed really - last year when it suddenly held my emails hostage (slight hyperbole of course, there were still copies on the server).
If you didn't, you had to pay.
Nylas Mail Basic was designed exactly with this in mind. It's a free client, syncs locally, and does not include a lot of the Pro features that power users save a lot of time with.
On the flip side, we've designed Nylas Pro (and its price point) for users who are coming from the productivity world of ToutApp or YesWare. The goal with Pro isn't to merely be another Thunderbird or Mac Mail. We're focused on building new powerful workflows for people who live all day in their mailbox, calendar, and address book.
(I build Nylas Mail)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylas_N1
https://github.com/nylas/N1
It seems to me that Nylas could make a lot more money by charging $1 a month, since there are likely many, many more people willing to pay $1 vs. $12. Probably more than the 12 to 1 ratio required to break even.
I like Nylas, and think it is a good email client, but their pricing suggests they haven't done the market research and competitor analysis required to price themselves strategically and to be successful.
Do you have any data on this? Would love to see it to help inform the research we already did when pricing the Pro edition of Nylas Mail.
Having said that, I can offer you this isolated anecdote (as worthless as that is): The last company I worked for used to use Nylas, before the pricing was set to $7 a month. When your company started charging for Nylas, we all stopped using it, both personally and professionally, and the general consensus during the transition away from your product was basically, "I'd continue to use it if it were around a buck." We understood the need for your company to make money, but $7 a month seemed too steep to us, so we went elsewhere.
I think it is great if you're able to succeed at $12 a month. I certainly won't begrudge your success. It just seems to me that at the $12-price-point, your competitors are offering much, much more. There are also free options, like Boxer, that work satisfactorily and are still free.
I'm not knocking your product. I liked it when I was using it, and I think you're trying to succeed in a difficult market, so kudos for making the attempt. I just don't personally value Nylas Mail at $7 (or $12) a month, and reading through this thread, it seems there are others who feel the same way; which I would think you'd want to consider as you fine-tune your business model.
Anyway, best of luck to you. I wish you all the success you deserve.
Don't get me wrong, it looks extremely good.
However, I visited the site and immediately clicked on the back button.
I've been using Google Inbox for a few months, and it radically changed how I handle my many mailboxes. It's not rare now that I actually achieve inbox zero.
I would love to see the same amount of innovation that was put into Google Inbox (I think they might have acquired it, though?) in another email client, as I'm always looking to try things out.
In Nylas, I see the same things that make dealing with email a pain: folders, the trash and spam being given the same importance as the inbox, etc.
It's set up to make it a job to keep your emails organized, while you shouldn't keep them organized, because it's just doesn't matter: just reply and mark as done, snooze until you can reply and mark as done, or discard/mark multiple emails at the same time and go on with your life.
Everyone uses email slightly differently. The plugins allow us to build Salesforce integration, tracking, templates, and mail merge for sales people, while offering an entirely different targeted set for other users.
We intentionally "don't move the cheese to far" from existing clients to ease transition. There are a lot of grand ideas for radically different email experiences that fall flat due to their deviation from the core experiences most people expect and need. We instead believe that a handful of targeted features to a targeted group gradually develop into a very different way to interact with email for a very specific use case.
(I'm an engineer at Nylas)
I'd rather lose Salesforce integration, tracking, templates etc. and get the basics right: going through the dozens of emails we get every day.
When we reply to emails we feel like we're being productive, but we're just taking time away from our actual job. If there's no easy way to easily differentiate between low priority and important emails—which Google Inbox does automatically by grouping them and letting you dismiss them all at once—you're not helping me.
Again, the product looks awesome, this is just my point of view I thought I'd share.
Inbox is homegrown, not an acquisition.
(work at Google)
[1] https://twitter.com/jmdenisme/status/524968589489479680
It's what I use, and I've notices a good improvement over the web version (besides the fact that it's in the Dock, with unread count).
There's a helper that takes up about 300MB of memory, but it's stable at 300, never goes up.