I recently switched from Rainloop to Snappymail and I'm quite happy with the upgrade. The UI looks slightly worse but it's much snappier. I don't use it often as I prefer to use native clients but when I do, I'm happy with it.
I was using rainloop and the UI was better. I'm not sure what's wrong in Snappymail exactly. It's super similar and MUCH more lightweight so it seems that, in the process of optimizing, some important details where lost.
Edit: Now that I've looked a bit into it, I think it's just the font. Snappymail uses Deja Vu Sans while Rainloop used Arial. If I change the css in the firefox inspector, it looks oh so much better with Arial, imho. Icons still look worse though...
Very snappy on my phone.
However, it does not have a login button, so when autofilling my login, I have to touch an input field and press enter on the keyboard
Oh, thanks. I think I didn’t see it, because inline buttons in the password field are usually to mask/unmask the password and a login button is usually placed below the form.
Relative to gmail, I don't agree. The last time I loaded gmail in the web it took 30 seconds to load and the UI was full of so many non-mail related icons and things. I usually give up and load HTML view.
I saw ~1 second load time and <1 second to change views. For UI I like the minimalism. Although I won't use this, I want better native mail browsers, not web clients.
Having used gmail since its closed beta I’m bemused that it’s now consistently slower to load a new gmail tab than to cold start Outlook for the same account.
Those all appear to be terminal based, which I'm not sure is helpful for discussions about the UI of a web-based mail client. Unless there was a design element you thought could be ported to the web?
The original question was 'inspiration'. The URLs provided are all hacker-written clients with a lite focus in active or recent development. I think they're a good place to look for inspiration because of the relative heterogeneity they represent across time, space, use case and architectural conception (some are layered or adjunct UXs, not monolithic integrated clients per-se). It is true that you could just as easily include WIMP GUI, private-hostable or cloud web UIs in there, but I would not anticipate such heterogeneity in those client categories save gimmicky minor feature improvements brought about by or serving edge cases like translation, mail(spam) merge, weird corporate office uses for email (like printing and file transfer), etc. You could also broaden the scope to general UX principals and metrics, ML applied to UX, mail-related service providers and tangential services such as hosting, address validation, identity verification, on-disk formats, non-SMTP store-and-forward messaging systems and their general evolution, non-store-and-forward messaging systems, and either oddball (printer touchscreen), arguably dominant (mobile phone) or upcoming UX formats (watches, AR/VR, OSX-style OS-managed merged notification stream systems). But the question implied a traditional computer and email UI.
I personally dislike the basic assumptions made by email clients such as assuming we want to organize inbox by date. This leads to vicious responses like inbox zero because the psychological effect and UX utility of an ever-growing list is basically negative. When considered temporally it is actually amazing how long it took major email UX to begin to fix this, and it's still basically broken. That's largely an artifact of the fact the specification is SMTP (T for Transfer) and thus the UX for end-user use case was never considered during protocol design. Today we would seek a more holistic design process. IMHO a strong novel UX would include integration support for digital forms of communication segregated from email such as file transfer, video conferencing, hosted issue systems, payment, etc. while recognizing the critical challenges of such an approach from a security perspective. You ideally need a walled garden, in other words, with OS level controls. I am skeptical a pure browser experience can deliver this. You really need an OSX-like Unix with user focus tracking, security guarantees and a managed notification stream or better.
I don't see much difference compared to Outlook.com (on desktop, which looks pretty much like app, just block ads through ublock), it's faster, but also significantly uglier
missing/hidden login button ain't very user friendly, I even clicked on language icon first thinking it's maybe login button
I've been a Snappymail user for a bit.
UI is definitely needing some work, but performance is great, setup is easy, and it runs on docker flawlessly.
Honestly, for the quick webmail needs, it's perfect.
If you want something with more features, there's always SoGO or horde.
I may or may not have spent two minutes deleting folders... They should really make folders selectable for easy deletion.
(I'm not affiliated with the project, I moderate other communities, this is weirdly common of trolls online). Of course I say that and it got spammed to death. I think someone has a script going at this point.
They'll just change the folder names to something else eventually. Maybe they should just disable creating folders for the demo.
Also, you're really expecting me to write bash this early in the morning? I have not written bash for a few years now. I guess I could of just had postman generate part of the code for me and done it in an even shorter span of time, but I assumed they were not automating the vandalism.
Well, the fight between the people trying to create these and those trying to delete it seems to have brought down the demo site. Mission accomplished?
You definitely didn't read why that notification exists. This is required to allow (somewhat*) reliable background activity in Android 6.0+, and if you're using Android 9+ you can hide it (unfortunately Android 8.1 and below don't support fine-grained notification management). The other option is to rely on Firebase mobile push (previously GCM pushes), but that would require something else to read and push messages to Google.
* Unfortunately, most Android phones bundle aggressive power management "features" that will kill K9 (or any app really) if you didn't whitelist them. You should probably read Don't Kill My App (https://dontkillmyapp.com) to learn how to disable this, assuming that your phone allows them.
I actually hide it and it also keeps working. If I remember correctly the notification contains a link with a short explanation and a hint how an experienced user can hide it.
I just opted to not note it here, because it requires manual work and isn't default.
Is there anything out there comparable to Gmail but open source? To be honest what I look for in an email client is not how snappy it is. It's how much it helps me deal with email. Gmail does it quite well. Search is good, tags are good enough, the interface is not bad, editing is pretty decent, features are plentiful. But I'd love an open source self-hosted alternative.
It means that they don't see it as out-of-scope or undesirable, but still didn't implement it after all this time. It indicates something in terms of product management and/or code extensibility.
Not that an open source project owes you anything, of course.
I used roundcube a long time ago but found it was too slow and a bit bloaty. So I switched to Rainloop which was faster and simpler to deploy. Snappymail is lightspeed compared to those two and there is even a debian package so even easier to setup.
i used roundcube a long time ago too, switched to rainloop, then switched back to roundcube about a year ago. they had just released a new theme (elastic) which also worked on mobile, and seems lighter too. i'm happy with it so far!
It's so interesting: when Gmail first came out, tags were so innovative. So much better than folders. I spent the first couple years tagging all my mail, and setting up filters.
Now I never think of it. If I want an email, I search. Having hundreds of thousands of old emails means tags would have long-since been overwhelmed.
Is this other people's experience? Or am I bad for not doing inbox-zero and carefully curated tags?
My webmail server runs on SoGo (https://www.sogo.nu/) which is more of an enterprisey mail client than many other webmail systems. Kind of a pain to set up independently in my opinion, but combined with Mailcow it runs flawlessly.
Search on it depends on your IMAP server's search system (I know Mailcow uses solr but that takes a while on my server, probably because of underspec hardware). Tags are easy to work with, the interface is quite good in my opinion, and integration with calendar/contact sync is also quite nice. The front end for basic Sieve rules works well for my requirements. Gravatar support and desktop notification support are also nice bonuses.
There aren't too many themes for it, though, so you'll have to make your own if you don't like the look. There's a SoGo demo on their website if you're interested.
I've been following Cypht [0] for a while. It's a web based, lightweight, modular e-mail and RSS client.
The features mention:
> Save the parameters of a search so that you can quickly access them later from the menu without having to enter them again. This is particularly useful for parameters of searches that are used frequently. Saved search parameters can also be deleted later.
If you know what thread you're looking for, search is good enough. If you communicate with distinct groups of people about different projects, search is good enough. If emails from the same few people can concern different projects, and there are no terms that always appear in those message to differentiate (or your colleagues are bad at using the subject line), tagging your messages with the proper project/issue/topic goes a long way.
This means that any tag applied by a filter is usually pretty useless, you can just repeat the filter's query when needed.
Hi I know nothing about coding whatsoever. Im curious why would someone set up a something like this? You would have to host your own mail server correct? Is it to have control over your data? Is it just "simpler" and faster than gmail?
This is a mail client, like Outlook or Thunderbird or Gmail. It has a web interface, like Gmail, but is not tied to any particular mail server, which makes it more like Thunderbird.
It is occasionally convenient: anywhere you can sit down at a web browser, you can read your mail. I think that it's not really featureful enough to be the primary mail client for most HN readers.
You can use it with any email server, doesn't have to be hosted by yourself. It's not better than the Gmail web client or anything, but it may be better than a shitty corporate webmail, or just better than no webmail at all :)
Kudos to the author. My recommendation would be to make it work without JS (JavaSCript should be used to enhance the UX, not create it - specially in an application like this).
I don't know if it's been hugged to death but I can't load the demo. Hitting the wayback machine shows a splash page but then it never loads beyond that.
63 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadSnappyMail is not affected by this and seems to be the successor.
Edit: Now that I've looked a bit into it, I think it's just the font. Snappymail uses Deja Vu Sans while Rainloop used Arial. If I change the css in the firefox inspector, it looks oh so much better with Arial, imho. Icons still look worse though...
I saw ~1 second load time and <1 second to change views. For UI I like the minimalism. Although I won't use this, I want better native mail browsers, not web clients.
What load times are others seeing?
The UI is nothing that can't be fixed with an admittedly large amount of CSS tweaks :)
I think some people (such as HN users) would like that. The closest client to that description that I've seen may be:
https://squirrelmail.org/images/shots/nodeco/compose.jpg
I.E. HTML links for navigation, textarea for message composition, etc. I don't think its very popular.
I personally dislike the basic assumptions made by email clients such as assuming we want to organize inbox by date. This leads to vicious responses like inbox zero because the psychological effect and UX utility of an ever-growing list is basically negative. When considered temporally it is actually amazing how long it took major email UX to begin to fix this, and it's still basically broken. That's largely an artifact of the fact the specification is SMTP (T for Transfer) and thus the UX for end-user use case was never considered during protocol design. Today we would seek a more holistic design process. IMHO a strong novel UX would include integration support for digital forms of communication segregated from email such as file transfer, video conferencing, hosted issue systems, payment, etc. while recognizing the critical challenges of such an approach from a security perspective. You ideally need a walled garden, in other words, with OS level controls. I am skeptical a pure browser experience can deliver this. You really need an OSX-like Unix with user focus tracking, security guarantees and a managed notification stream or better.
missing/hidden login button ain't very user friendly, I even clicked on language icon first thinking it's maybe login button
(I'm not affiliated with the project, I moderate other communities, this is weirdly common of trolls online). Of course I say that and it got spammed to death. I think someone has a script going at this point.
Also, you're really expecting me to write bash this early in the morning? I have not written bash for a few years now. I guess I could of just had postman generate part of the code for me and done it in an even shorter span of time, but I assumed they were not automating the vandalism.
I hope we will soon see Thunderbird on Android! Finally decent Email-App with PUSH-IMAP, local storage of all E-Mails and a comfortable UI.
But K9? It works. But it is complicated and has raw edges e.g. the visible permanent notification about PUSH.
But FairMail? Cannot store all E-Mails locally.
But GMAIL? Doesn't support PUSH with IMAP, only with Googles own Email-Service. Cannot store E-Mails locally.
by what magic way do you think Thunderbird will not need that?
The magic of not knowing how Android handles background tasks, I guess.
https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/blob/241ecce7527daafeb021e...
Was awkward.
https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/blob/6eba172ee7f77e1400813...
But implemented it now!
You definitely didn't read why that notification exists. This is required to allow (somewhat*) reliable background activity in Android 6.0+, and if you're using Android 9+ you can hide it (unfortunately Android 8.1 and below don't support fine-grained notification management). The other option is to rely on Firebase mobile push (previously GCM pushes), but that would require something else to read and push messages to Google.
* Unfortunately, most Android phones bundle aggressive power management "features" that will kill K9 (or any app really) if you didn't whitelist them. You should probably read Don't Kill My App (https://dontkillmyapp.com) to learn how to disable this, assuming that your phone allows them.
I just opted to not note it here, because it requires manual work and isn't default.
Not that an open source project owes you anything, of course.
Is roundcube better now?
It's so interesting: when Gmail first came out, tags were so innovative. So much better than folders. I spent the first couple years tagging all my mail, and setting up filters.
Now I never think of it. If I want an email, I search. Having hundreds of thousands of old emails means tags would have long-since been overwhelmed.
Is this other people's experience? Or am I bad for not doing inbox-zero and carefully curated tags?
Search on it depends on your IMAP server's search system (I know Mailcow uses solr but that takes a while on my server, probably because of underspec hardware). Tags are easy to work with, the interface is quite good in my opinion, and integration with calendar/contact sync is also quite nice. The front end for basic Sieve rules works well for my requirements. Gravatar support and desktop notification support are also nice bonuses.
There aren't too many themes for it, though, so you'll have to make your own if you don't like the look. There's a SoGo demo on their website if you're interested.
The features mention:
> Save the parameters of a search so that you can quickly access them later from the menu without having to enter them again. This is particularly useful for parameters of searches that are used frequently. Saved search parameters can also be deleted later.
[0] https://cypht.org/
If you know what thread you're looking for, search is good enough. If you communicate with distinct groups of people about different projects, search is good enough. If emails from the same few people can concern different projects, and there are no terms that always appear in those message to differentiate (or your colleagues are bad at using the subject line), tagging your messages with the proper project/issue/topic goes a long way.
This means that any tag applied by a filter is usually pretty useless, you can just repeat the filter's query when needed.
Looks like they're not really aiming at the DIY crowd though, I wonder if it's tricky to set up.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Xchange
[1] https://www.open-xchange.com/products/ox-app-suite/
It is occasionally convenient: anywhere you can sit down at a web browser, you can read your mail. I think that it's not really featureful enough to be the primary mail client for most HN readers.