Mining organization data from email seems like a great opportunity. Context.io wasn't able to make it work, but Nylas looks a lot more capable.
Unlike Context.io, the Nylas APIs don't mine email organization data at all! We're not owned by a marketing parent company, and all our customer MSAs make it very clear that we have no rights to any of the email data passing through us.
Nylas is an infrastructure company, like Stripe or AWS, and we make money by building tools and making our customer's lives and products better, not by reselling user data.
(I came to Nylas after Dropbox finally killed off Mailbox. I seem to have a good track record of falling in love with desktop email clients which then die...)
It's definitely sad to see this post, but Nylas has remained committed to open source and I think they've done this right. Relicensing everything under MIT ensures the product will have a bright future, even though Nylas has better opportunities it needs to pursue for it's employees and investors.
Would love for you to check out Mailspring (http://getmailspring.com) when it launches this month. We always struggled to implement performant, battery-friendly mail sync in JavaScript, and Mailspring essentially "rebases" the entire JavaScript UI on top of a new C++ sync engine built on mailcore2. You get the flexibility of JavaScript + plugins + themes with a much lighter profile.
> Relicensing everything under MIT ensures the product will have a bright future
Absolutely. Very impressive move.
1. Some company I've never heard of is shutting down. I'll go read about it.
2. "Exciting Year", "Incredible Journey" They're shutting down their Mail Thing. Raising prices for old users to keep the lights on until "sunset" date. Ouch.
3. I wonder what their "Mail Thing" was. I'll click the homepage.
4. Strange. Looks like the rest of the company hasn't got the memo yet. They're still talking about their mail thing on the homepage as though it still exists. Looks like some Sync API for email providers. Shame. That might have been useful.
5. (later) Read discussion here. Evidently the thing they shut down was some tiny side project and the company still exists. Did not get that at all from the shutdown notice.
Is this correct? I haven't kept up with Nylas, all I know is they stored all your emails on their server at first, but then got rid of it because of server load and people didn't like it.
So we decided to focus on the API since we have a larger business there and we wanted folks who work at Nylas to be less stressed out.
Their API sync-engine [0] either hasn't been updated since March, or hasn't been kept open source--neither of which is a great sign. We're currently using the open source Nylas sync engine in production as we were uncomfortable trusting an important feature of our product in a company that doesn't seem to have a firm idea of what they want to do. But with the seemingly abandoned open source project, we are now working on building out our own syncing applications to ditch it altogether.
I would strongly caution anyone considering using the sync APIs to think about what they are getting into and the switching costs.
1. Company invests heavily in engineering and builds a sync engine. Progress is visible on GitHub and rapid.
2. Company launches and repeatedly adjusts pricing and business models. Drives everybody crazy BUT:
3. Company finds it's value prop and customer base and the changes stop. Entire company shifts to building a sales team and keeping the wheels on the bus while they make their first customers happy.
4. Engineers switch from working on the core sync codebase to surrounding services, infrastructure, and scale.*
* Last week's developer dashboard announcement: https://www.nylas.com/blog/announcing-the-nylas-dashboard-2....
And somewhere along the road: Company realizes customers that are willing to go through the hassle of provisioning, deploying, and maintaining their own version of the open source sync engine are not the customers to focus on. ;-)
Am i right in understanding that its essentially a Mailserver? AD / Gmail alternative kind of thing?
or is it an API facade interface over IMAP / SMTP, that i would use if i were creating a product and wanted to access a third parties email, contact etc which they would give me access to somehow?
The client i really like, and I'm happy that its being open sourced. I recently tried to run it locally as a jump of point for a project i had in mind, but fell down at the sign-up screen, so I'm happy to hear that that has/will go :)
https://www.nylas.com/customers/ lists some of our API customers; maybe that'll help!
The mail cient was originally called N1 (later Nylas Mail), and is the product being sunsetted so they can focus on the API.
N1 was the first good desktop alternative to Outlook for Exchange in a loooong time, so I was hopeful this would be a flier. Is it going to be possible at all to use the new open source app (or any forks) with Exchange?
[0]: https://github.com/MailCore/mailcore2
[1]: https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring#high-level-goals
For a main client, I really liked it. I'm looking forward to the forks.
For me, I find it odd how few strong email clients there are for OSX. Every app seems to have several quirks, and few provide a menubar icon with an unread count or proper theming.
Props to the team for releasing under MIT. The two forks listed look extremely promising.
Tried N1/Nylas Mail a few times in hope of this killer feature... But was put off first by having to give Nylas credentials, and then by the fact the new local sync engine didn't support Exchange.
