Nylas N1 now has snooze, swipe actions, emoji, and more | Hacker News Reader

Nylas N1 now has snooze, swipe actions, emoji, and more

medium.com

90 pointseibrahim59 comments

Anyone interested in developing desktop apps with Github's Electron the folks at Nylas have done several presentations with lots of good information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIRXVGVPzn8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO9e8r6RQhE

Hi folks -- I work at Nylas and would be happy to answer questions about N1.

If you haven't seen it, the code for N1 and the sync engine are both open source available on our GitHub: https://github.com/nylas

I don't really have much of substance to add but I wanted to say that N1 is shaping up really well. The last two releases have introduced snoozing and unified inbox, which are both strong features. I've had a play around with writing an extension for N1 too and that experience was pretty sweet. So: thanks for your hard work, keep it up!

Glad to hear it-- thanks! :)

If I snooze on my desktop with N1, will it properly notify me on my phone if I subsequently shut down my laptop?

Yep!

Is that still true if I'm self hosting the sync engine on that laptop? Or is it the kind of service that should be run on a separate server?

Ah unfortunately not. Unsnoozing is essentially a cron job that needs to run on a different service.

Huh! Am I missing something? I didn't think Nylas had any kind of mobile support yet. How does this work?

Hi, I'm an engineer at Nylas. Basically we have a server side process which moves snoozed emails back to your IMAP/Exchange inbox when it's time to unsnooze them.

Are there plans to add Exchange support to the self-hosted version of the API?

You can actually sync Exchange mail using the open source sync engine if you enable IMAP/SMTP in the Exchange server settings. (We've had lots of students do this at universities.)

Oh, thank you. I might have been unclear in my understanding (or maybe it needs updated), on the open source sync engine page it says: "The open-source Nylas Sync Engine does not support Exchange, but the hosted version does." Is this out of date? Or just an undocumented feature?

It doesn't support ActiveSync, but it supports open protocols like IMAP, SMTP, ICS, etc.

Hi, how does the read tracking work. Does it mean that your users depend on some server-side code to get the ping-back ? If that is the case, what did you do to preserve the anonymity of your users ?

It's kind of like Bitly-- we have a redirect server that just keeps a count which is secured with your access token. This is infrastructure we're actually going to also open up to developers once we iron out the bugs. Stay tuned! :)

Glad to see you here. The first time I learned about Nylas (here on HN, can't find the link atm) someone complained rather loudly that the open-source version of the sync server doesn't support 'proper' authentication.

I never saw a reply to that. Do you understand that criticism? Do you understand what they might've been talking about? Looking at GitHub I guess they were talking about https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine#nylas-api-service and the need to pass the id via basic auth/as username.

Hm, I haven't heard about that being an issue. If you can dig up the thread, I'd be glad to take a look.

Rummaging a bit I came up with the two comments at the bottom of the post. As I said - this was the first time I read about Nylas. When I see something potentially shiny I tend to react the same way as if I'd view an Amazon product listing: Scroll down, look at negative reviews..

So - the threads below seem to complain that the sync server has no authentication schema whatsoever (seems to be true after skimming GH/the link above) and - this is what I'm really curious about - even claims that you wouldn't accept free contributions to implement that.

What I'm trying to ask, I guess:

1) Why no authentication for the sync server?

2) Are you really against any such contributions, if you don't intend to build those yourself?

3) Do you have any recipes/ideas/reports from happy users how you'd secure the sync-server in its current state, in a "let's play" deployment?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11061717 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11122802

I think these are actually two different questions. One is asking about new auth APIs so you don't need to run a script to connect accounts. We're working on that!

The second is about how to do API authentication, i.e. how API requests are secured. The sync engine just provides all API data as a service, namespaces by account ID. Developers need to "secure" this by either running it behind a VPN, adding a proxy layer like Nginx, wrapping API calls in their own application layer, or dozens of other solutions. Everyone does this differently so it doesn't make sense to include as part of the default sync engine.

The simplest version is probably to just block access to `/accounts` for external users and treat those account ids as authentication secrets. (They're just opaque long strings.)

We're not against contributions, and nobody has actually built an auth system and submitted a PR.

Is there any way to make Nylas NOT store every email in your account?

I've got a google account with a few gigs of emails, but I don't need emails from 2004 on a daily basis. It would be awesome if it would only download (and have available) files from the last year or so.

In Gmail, under IMAP Settings, set Folder Size Limits to number of emails you want it to sync. By default, its set to no limit. Then you can control by number how many emails to store in the email client.

How do you fetch user information to be displayed on the sidebar? I've noticed some are not up to date (like Twitter bio and Gravatar images).

It comes from FullContact right now. We're investigating alternatives since the data isn't great.

I'm not sure but Clearbit might be a good option: https://clearbit.com

Thanks for the mention Rafael! Would be happy to see if we can help grinich. Just shot you an email if you'd like to run a data test.

Could Nylas be a substitute of gmail + evernote? Aka mail + notes in the same app.

Just realised that Nylas business model is exactly based on this (developing specific use cases for businesses).

Another question - this one only by curiosity - are you ditching coffeescript for es6?

Edit - the answer is here: https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/9

Help us migrate! :)

Are there plans to work on integrating PGP encryption? N1 really looks nice but there are many people, like me, who can't move over until it gets e-mail encryption support.

Yep! https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/96

Why swipe? Isn't swiping kind of an odd interaction w/ a mouse and keyboard?

It works great on a trackpad, and lots of folks have touch screens these days.

We also have keyboard shortcuts, fully customizable in the preferences window.

Did they get rid of the extra middle server yet or integrate it at least? Seems really annoying when IMAP satisfies basically everything already... makes me think the whole thing is just a ploy to collect as many people's email as possible to be honest.

Additionally what does this have that thunderbird doesn't?

Just a pretty UI - although it's node-webkit or electron based I think.

    - Support
    - Nice design
    - Chance to make an impact because it's fresh
    - Pretty much everything stated in this blog post (including, but not limited to, swipe, snooze, emoji support, opportunity to schedule a reply)

Don't get me wrong, I am using Thunderbird currently, but this thing really shines in some of the areas where Thunderbird does not. But, I'm going to have to wait until the PGP support is finished before I even consider moving to it.

It's not a ploy-- just a design choice. The cloud sync engine does a lot of heavy lifting so N1 is faster and efficient. It's also open source free software so you can run it yourself! https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine

(I work at Nylas.)

What sort of "heavy lifting" does this do that Thunderbird or Outlook don't? Certainly they're both performant enough. And more importantly, is there any compelling reason to introduce a 3rd party server to do this instead of doing it locally for better user privacy?

I understand I can run it myself, however I have to question the design and motivations of the developers.

Probably the biggest thing is that it translates a traditional document-based data structure (mailboxes via IMAP) into a stateless, streaming transactional data structure. This allows N1 to be way more efficient and faster, and only load about 2% of the total data in your mailbox.

The sync engine is essentially an abstraction layer for IMAP/SMTP/MIME/etc. This architecture has become pretty common in the past few years: Mailbox, Outlook Mobile (Acompli), Spark, Cloud Magic, Gmailify, and many more run similar systems. Although as far as I know, we're the only one who has open sourced our backend.:https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine

We actually released the API layer before N1, and lots of developers use it for their own apps and pay us to run the infrastructure. If you're curious, the full docs here: nylas.com/docs/platform

You can pretty easily set up the sync engine and run it yourself, either locally or on a VPC, and connect N1 to that instance. We do this ourselves when developing, and it's the best way to have 100% control over the entire stack. More info here: https://github.com/nylas/N1/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#runn...

There's a bunch of community developers than hang out in our chat room and can also give you some tips for getting started. You can join that here: http://slack-invite.nylas.com/

> Probably the biggest thing is that it translates a traditional document-based data structure (mailboxes via IMAP) into a stateless, streaming transactional data structure.

So why can't this be done on the client side? Are you telling me that to avoid storing more data on the clients, they should give up their privacy to whoever operates the server? Not like Outlook or Thunderbird take a substantial amount of time to do most operations. Is this a good tradeoff for them?

I understand, yes, technically adept users can run the server, but there's still many who won't, who will use your server or someone else's server and be required to make this tradeoff.

Of the products you mention - yes, yours is the only one I'd consider and for this very reason, I can run the middle server myself. I just have to think about those people who won't do it though.

Haven't such users already "given up" their privacy by having their email hosted by a third party?

For some, it's adding another party, for others it's introducing a 3rd party at all. Still a problem either way.

>I understand, yes, technically adept users can run the server, but there's still many who won't, who will use your server or someone else's server and be required to make this tradeoff.

So? How's that different (if anything it's much better) than using Gmail or Outlook on the cloud?

Besides, nobody is "required" to do anything. You can always run some Thunderbird or any other desktop client without a cloud component.

I'm also a big fan of IMAP and would love to see everyone keep to it. At the moment I haven't found an IMAP client better than trojita (http://trojita.flaska.net/) which actually uses IMAP the way it was designed to and not as a poor man's sync mechanism.

However, there are things that IMAP can't do:

* Search has to be mailbox by mailbox. So if you have a huge number of mailboxes it's going to take a long time. There is, of course, an extension for multi-mailbox search, but its very low adoption hasn't made the thing practical

* Read notification just can't be done with the traditional email system, short of replying with a specifically-formatted email and introducing some kind of RPC

* Send Later while offline can't be done with the traditional email system. There's just nothing you can do for that.

>I'm also a big fan of IMAP and would love to see everyone keep to it.

Probably because you've never read the spec or tried to implement it.

Or, more probably, because I've actually read the spec and understood what IMAP really tries to do, saw how widespread its usage was in so many languages, and imagined what could be possible with a protocol we already have. I have toyed with it in the past already, and intend to do in the future because just everybody has it, with or without their knowledge, and can use its power.

Yes, IMAP is messy and inconsistent and hard to parse, if you blindly read examples and try to build a naive parser out of that. When you're trying to do as much as IMAP tries to do starting from scratch, that's barely surprising. Still, IMAP already has many tools, libraries and software that can be re-used.

>Still, IMAP already has many tools, libraries and software that can be re-used.

That's the problem though, those tools and libraries only give you IMAP-like behavior, and modern mail clients want to go beyond that -- from tagging to snoozing and lots more besides.

And IMAP makes it a hell to have something more intelligent on top.

No, they give you IMAP capabilities; it's up to the client to build something more intelligent on top of that -- tagging and snoozing are totally compatible with IMAP as long as the client does something intelligent (it doesn't even have to be extremely non-standard; IMAP keywords and mailboxes can do the job perfectly here). Your mail client doesn't have to be a 1-1 mapping to IMAP commands, like pretty much all mail clients are.

This problem is the same as GPG. Why is GPG not more widespread ? It is widely accepted that the technical parts may be old but are still solid, the real problem is the UI. It is still immensely difficult to create your own keychain and share your keys with someone else. Only in the latest versions does gpg introduce TOFU. It has always been a UI problem, and will remain this way until someone wants to tackle it... or replaces gpg.

>I understand I can run it myself, however I have to question the design and motivations of the developers.

What exactly do you feel like you "have to question"? You understand that Gmail and Outlook (the online versions) are hosting hundreds of millions of email accounts and store everything on the cloud too, right?

Yes, but Gmail and Outlook are "original" providers. I feel very uneasy, and find it unreliable and untrustworthy to allow another company access to my emails and contacts.

An email client for me is one that runs on my desktop, and talks to my "original" provider, nothing else.

Thanks for a great product. I like how you guys timed the release with the even of the Mailbox shutdown. I continue to document issues on Github and really appreciate the responsiveness.

One thing I'm afraid of is that N1 is developing new features and immediately pushing them too strongly in the UI. Despite all these new features recently, the app's Preferences haven't changed much. Before continuing to push hard on even more new features, it would be great to focus more on the experience: bugs, customizability, design, and extensibility.

Bugs: https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues It's hard to quantify but there seem to be pending issues that have been around for awhile.

Customizability: As I mentioned, the App Preferences menu has been pretty static despite new updates. If I want to hide certain features from the UI, it should be as simple as doing so from here rather than doing it directly in the code (which is possible and much easier than any other client out there).

Design: The ability to import & create own themes is great and makes it very usable. That being said the default themes have very little contrast and have too little white space. In addition, the new icons for Send later, insert email template, insert link tracking, and enable read receipts aren't very clean. Against a gray background in the Light theme they are hard to distinguish as button since they are just icons. Also, with their sketchy design style they add too much detail to support fast twitch reactions necessary for an email workflow.

Extensibility: Although each theme is managed separately, I'm curious to learn how the community of developers stays on top of upcoming & new releases with regards to quality and timing. In addition, I haven't much change in the encouragement of plug-ins. I haven't seen new plug-ins recently.

I understand it's all about the community and I'm one of them. Hopefully this post is more constructive than offensive. Feel free to reach out for any clarifications or justifications. I'm a diehard user and recommend the product to everyone who struggles with email.

Definitely agree with all of the above, and most of these are next on our roadmap. Our next sprint is focused on polish and performance. Stay tuned! ;)

Unfortunately GitHub has kind of become a catch-all for general debugging and support from users, so it's not necessarily bugs or feature requests (e.g. https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/1412). Still, it's probably the best place to open issues for suggestions or things you want to see!

Thanks for the feedback and the kind words! You can also email me directly via mg@nylas.com

I'm really impressed with how fast this project is evolving. Been keeping up with it for a while and today is the best mail client IMHO.

Kudos to all involved.

Thanks! Glad you're enjoying it. :) (I'm part of the Nylas team)

I downloaded N1 after reading this post. I do not get such behavior. Instead I see snooze and archive buttons. I am using “self hosted” version, but I don’t think it should matter, since this seems to be “front end” feature.

I have Version 0.4.10-4e3595b on OSX (El Capitan)

This is fantastic, snooze is essential to my email flow and I've been waiting for N1 to release this. Love the additional features like emoji too. Keep it coming.

Does it have encryption yet?

Not yet! You can track the issue here: https://github.com/nylas/N1/issues/96

Reply on news.ycombinator.com