Comment by _kwmj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _kwmj | Hacker News Reader

Nylas (like other apps e.g. Airmail) kept the password on their servers (Nylas ID, now it's Mailspring ID) so basically they had (could have) access to all my data even when it's not lying on my computer.

I asked them about it and they never replied. I wish it was just a native (or not) IMAP client and I definitely want out of those Link and Open Tracking features.

(Edit):

There's a GitHub issue related to it - https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring/issues/33

The dev is very clear about it

--- but for now Mailspring needs to target paying customers with great pro features so I can continue working on it full-time. The Mailspring ID is a core component of these Pro features and a lot of exciting stuff on the roadmap, like team templates, read receipt analytics and shared folders. Unfortunately, it doesn't make sense to remove the Mailspring ID and make the mail client better for you, because it pulls us further away from doing a great job on the pro features for paying users that will ultimately make this a long-lasting open source project.

Hope that helps! I'm going to flag this as a wontfix for now, but I welcome everyone's thoughts and feedback here. ---

So no, not an email client I would like to use.

Hey folks! Just to be clear, Mailspring does /not/ send your email credentials to the cloud - all the mail sync is done locally, and your passwords are stored in your system keychain / keyring. I spent a good chunk of time re-implementing things like snooze and send later to work without a backend server.

That's actually mentioned a few sentences before the quote above in that GitHub issue ;-) The Mailspring ID stores metadata for things like read receipts and link tracking, but that's pretty much it!

Thanks for replying here.

My bad. I somehow missed it.

Since you are here:

- What if I am sending an email to a person who doesn’t use Mailspring? Can the tracking still be achieved? I am don’t know the technical details of how email works but I believe it can’t be done unless the mail client adds something to the mail being sent. Right? So how does it work with Mailspring IDs?

- Can I opt to not track my mails/activities and not be tracked too?

- What all the meta data leavea my local system and goes to Mailspring? Is there a complete list somewhere? Also how are they stored on your serves?

Apologies again for posting incorrect info about your OSS.

I see there that the actual IMAP sync is done in the client, with the Mailspring ID relegated only to extra 'features' like spying on recipients. So it might be possible to fork it and just pull out the Mailspring ID stuff? It's a big codebase though, so much depends.

Not something I'd be interested in as I don't need another Electron app (I think it is?) on my machine, but if someone had a particular liking for this it might be doable.

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