from Hacker News

Sunsetting Nylas Mail Development

by sachinag on 9/6/17, 9:16 PM with 39 comments

• by jasonkester on 9/7/17, 6:45 AM

  These guys need to work on their message. Here was my read of the article:

  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.

• by 0x00000 on 9/7/17, 4:18 AM

  We originally piloted using Nylas's APIs in our product about a year and a half ago. In that timespan, their pricing has changed significantly about 4 times and they do not seem like they have a particularly good grasp on their business model. They also, despite advertising 10 free test accounts, arbitrarily delete said accounts and then when you ask to get them reactivated you get connected with a sales rep.

  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.

  [0] https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine

• by chtfn on 9/7/17, 2:30 AM

  Open sourcing everything? More like sunrising! Thank you for doing that.

• by bonaldi on 9/7/17, 11:30 AM

  As always with Nylas, I've got very little understanding of what's going on here. The API business must be successful, but I wonder who is using it, other than people making e-mail clients, and they all seem to have their own!

  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?

• by anoother on 9/7/17, 7:15 AM

  Was client-side Exchange sync ever released?

  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.

• by jacquesc on 9/6/17, 11:56 PM

  Glad the Nylas team is focusing. I really wanted to like the frontend client, but I stopped using it about a year ago due to reliability issues.

  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.

• by chrismatheson on 9/7/17, 11:58 AM

  Maybe I'm just missing something here, but I really can't figure out what Nylas (the api side) offers?

  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?

• by Lazare on 9/7/17, 1:21 AM

  As a user, I've been loving Nylas Mail/N1. I hope the project lives on in some usable form - the blog post mentioned Nylas Mail Lives and Mailspring, which I'll have to take a close look at.

  (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...)

• by patrickbolle on 9/7/17, 3:37 AM

  Interesting. I used N1 for a while a really enjoyed it, but the Electron apps were killing my laptop so I ditched it. Super interested in the Mailspring fork :)

• by fiatjaf on 9/7/17, 2:15 AM

  I don't understand, what exactly are you sunsetting? N1? Or the service that synced mailboxes?

• by grandinj on 9/7/17, 10:27 AM

  Maybe the Thunderbird developers can take over, some of them were keen on a rewrite using "modern" technologies, this would be a good bootstrap.

• by stevewillows on 9/7/17, 12:32 PM

  I used N1 during the beta, but switched to Postbox once they moved to their actual service.

  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.

• by lasoandrade on 9/7/17, 4:01 AM

  unsurprising