As a paying user, I am also beyond saddened that companies work on features I don't use, but I realize I'm not their only customer and different people need different things.
Strange that you’d feel entitled to how they spend their money. Imagine if they spent most of the money sipping pina coladas instead - would it make sense for a teetotaller to be upset about that?
You paid them for services rendered. They’ve offered an additional service they didn’t previously for no extra charge. Now you’re upset, even though you’re still getting the same service you were previously at the same price?
Do you see a regular user researching, downloading and setting up a third party email client or is it more likely they click the download button on Fastmail and log in with their account?
That’s the beauty of open standards, everyone can choose their favorite tool for the job depending on their preferences and skill levels.
Spending your money on this brings them in more money which could potentially be used on features you do want.
Not certainly, because that’s not how paying a subscription works. You would have to contact them too discuss directly paying for a specific feature. But potentially!
* Non-native UI toolkit
* Massive waste of resources (CPU, RAM, Battery, Disk). Consumption of 500 MB RAM for idle is the norm.
* Slow.
* Often issues with autonomous, local operation.
* Security -> Browser Engine
It is always better to use a well-working application with your native UI-Toolkit:
* Linux: Evolution, Geary, K-Mail, Claws, whatever TUI application you prefer. And Thunderbird.
* macOS: Apple Mail or Thunderbird.
* Windows: Please. Stop using Windows. You harm other people. Start with using Thunderbird :)
The “Electron” from Signal is one of the best applications using Electron. It is fat. Even in this case people resist. Signal isn’t supporting a stable API but:
https://github.com/boxdot/gurk-rs
TUI :)
Electron is used, when a company wants to save on developer. All users pay with suffering from bad UI and their hardware resources. In this case it is something nobody asked for?
Thunderbird is no different than Electron apps, though. It's built on a browser engine, renders UI written in HTML + CSS (+ XUL partially), consumes ~500MB of RAM on idle, etc.
I use Thunderbird everywhere, but I want to contribute this to the conversation: you don’t have to have your email client open all day long. I open my email client few times a day, and that’s it. I do the same with my chats, but with the chats (especially the work ones) I’m expected to reply within minutes, unfortunately. And, well, that’s another topic.
For email, I mostly don’t care whether it takes too much RAM, if the app is usable. I work with it, then I close it. That’s my workflow, at least. I believe I’m not alone in this. My iPhone is the mini server that gets all the notifications for the emails I need. (By being connected with the default email client.) So, if I want to reply from my laptop, I’ll open my app. Otherwise it’s closed.
I avoid Electron apps because in every case that I've used one, they have completely in-house UI and window management. Thunderbird is ugly as sin, I'll give you that, but, but at least it mostly let's me manage windows the way I want. Slack, on the other hand, won't even let me have tabs for two different channels. Let alone open the preferences while not navigating away from a chat I'm in the middle of.
Understandably, as technologists we are in uproar at yet another Electron app due to the widely-accepted performance concerns many have with them. But if you don't want to run this, you can always just run it in the browser as before. Nobody is forcing you to install it.
I sometimes think we forget that Electron would have allowed them to ship this to customers super quickly, across all desktop platforms, and get a nice-looking application in to the hands of their customers (who probably have been requesting this for years).
I love Fastmail, but this feels like a waste of time. I'd rather just leave Fastmail open in a browser tab, rather than install Flatpak just to load an Electron app with the web client in it.
Indeed what I do as well; gives me apps for Youtube, Netflix, etc. The only downside is that you have to login if you do not use the "app" for a while. Would Electron get around this?
This has been the standard way to distribute software across platforms for a while now. I'm not sure I understand this kind of objection anymore. What's the alternative?
Fastmail also have a decent API if you're keen to glue together a better client yourself.
There is no connection between whether an app is native or electron based and its UX so not sure why you'd bring this up. There's enough and more native apps with horrible UX and plenty of electron apps with excellent UX.
Yes. I'm over the hatred for Electron too. Programmers have few options if they want cross-platform compatibility without Electron. What else are they going to use? QT? Please, give me a break. Some angelic developers like the KeepassXC guys still use QT, but that is a tough road to go down on. For the rest of them, Electron Or Bust I'm afraid.
I would unironically rather have nothing than an Electron app in most cases. They are that bad. And in this case the app doesn't even add anything of value. Literally any email application will let you do the same thing.
Whoa. This looks very interesting. Does it support maths? Are the images stored locally? Can fonts and typography be changed? How does it differ from your open-source version which looks similar?
In order to abide by QT's license, you have to follow the appropriate set of rules, depending on how you use it. You can use it LGPL, at which point you need to release the QT source you used and dynamically link it in your program. You can use it GPL but you have to release the source to your app. Finally, you can give QT money, and use it closed source. Okay, that wasn't that complex, but those are the rules if you want to use and distribute QT legally.
I've used similar webview solutions before and they can break even on Windows (example: needing edge webview2 but not available on the user install). I get why people are pissed off by Electron but I also get why it's the de facto standard in its field.
I pay for Fastmail and I'm using the Fastmail desktop app right now.
It's much faster than Thunderbird so far for me, and more convenient than a browser tab for me, and I'm especially liking the interconnections among mail, contacts, and calendar.
The app on my macOS system is using 700MB RAM; is that for Electron? The majority of RAM is showing as GPU rendering; is that for font smoothing?
I find it rather strange that so many email providers have to develop their own "app".
There are so many good clients out there, and I'd rather have 1. The team focus on their core offering, and 2. the existing email client is for the same reason (limited developer time, and matureness) a much better choice for security
It's very practical when you use a lot of different devices. It's nice to use native built in email apps, but when using multiple different OSes and device types, it can be very annoying to have the different clients play nice with each other.
One reason could be that they need one if there are unique differentiators on the roadmap that cannot be added into regular clients. I dont know if this is the case.
I use fastmail for long time and this move is not good. Instead of investing into TB for example, they do Electron bloatapp... Will for sure never touch that thing
Why should Fastmail invest in Thunderbird, an open-source email client run by a completely unrelated organization? Of course they could, out of good will. But you can't demand that they do.
This is just their webapp wrapped in an off-the-shelf browser engine. Hardly any development resources needed. It could have been quickly put together to tick a checkbox for some big client, the revenue from whom could help them work on features that actually matter more. None of us needs to use it. But somebody must have needed it, so here it is.
I don’t get the negative sentiment here. I know that as someone who uses a third party email client to use Gmail / Fastmail via manually configured IMAP I’m a very tiny minority. Most people probably use the web interface or the Gmail app on their phone.
Nothing wrong with offering an option for people who prefer a desktop app, you don’t have to feel like you are the target audience for everything.
Chief Product Officer of Fastmail here. I see a lot of comments here from people that don't appear to have actually tried using the app, which is a little disappointing; don't knock it 'til you've tried it! Happy to answer any questions, but to answer the main ones that are popping up:
# Why Electron?
Because it lets us build an app that works well across all major platforms with the resources we have available. Building an email/contacts/calendar app is a huge undertaking. Doing it from scratch on each platform is just not feasible for us.
With Electron, we can maintain a single code base across all platforms so we can move faster, and keep feature parity everywhere. More than that though, we believe it lets us build a really great experience on each of these platforms, while offering a consistent UI for our customers across all their devices. Honestly, we can never out-native Apple because by definition whatever they do is "native", even if it sucks (Liquid Glass on the Mac is … not great UX). If that's your primary consideration, you will always be better with Apple's own Mail app, so it's pointless us trying to build something in that space. (And instead we work to also make Fastmail the best service to use Mail.app with — which we believe it is!)
# Why would you use this instead of the webmail?
If you prefer to keep Fastmail in your browser, great! You can do so. But we hear from many customers that they would rather not have their email mixed in with their tabs. With a separate app you can see it in the dock, Cmd-tab to it, make it your default email app system wide etc. It also lets us integrate with the system, like the Mac menu bar and native context menus.
# Why would you use this instead of an IMAP client?
If you've ever used the Fastmail web interface you probably already know the answer, but for everyone else…
1. It's a lot faster. Compared to Apple's Mail.app for example (which is a good IMAP client!):
- It resyncs way faster when you open the app, and uses a lot less data (JMAP is so much more efficient).
- Moving between messages is quicker. With Mail.app there's often a slight lag between clicking a message and it rendering. In Fastmail, it's usually instant.
2. It's more powerful. We provide the best standards support out there, and are also working to make the standards better. But there's always going to be more that we can do when we control both the server and the client. With the Fastmail UI you can:
- Add private memos to emails
- Mute conversations to ignore replies
- Pin important messages to the top of your inbox
- Schedule messages to send in the future (and not need your laptop to be online then for it to work)
- See related emails when you open your contacts.
- Add events straight into your calendar
- And much more (https://www.fastmail.com/features/).
3. It's got much better search. (Yeah, this is kind-of just "more powerful", but I'm calling it out because search sucks in most email clients0.
# And finally…
This is just a choice. We hope this is something that some of our customers will love, but we're not backing away from our commitment to open standards and encourage everyone to find what works best for them.
I would consider using this app on my desktop instead of Thunderbird primarily due to the improved search.
After giving it a spin for 180 seconds, the main nuisance for me is that I can't elect to "Always show images from this sender". I use that in other desktop clients to ensure the image blocking banner doesn't end up being subconsciously ignored by me, as it will then only show for new senders who I'm not familiar with and need to be more wary of.
Also, like all banners everywhere no matter how well designed, it's ugly. In fact to be honest... this is the main reason I want the option to get rid of it.
I can understand why you don't offer that in the web app if you're storing it server side for each customer's list of saved senders, but for a desktop app where it can be stored locally, I'd value it.
A good IMAP client (in combination with my own domains) gives me freedom. I use Fastmail, I like it, and your support is great, but I don't want to tie my usage of your service to your UI. That would tie me down to your service.
So I use Thunderbird and K-9 Mail, and occasionally the Fastmail web UI to manage masked e-mail addresses etc. That is my happy path.
I want to be tied to Fastmail because of your stellar support and good service, not because I am trained to use your UI.
By the way, fastmail.com is now in full advertising mode for this new app. It's hard for potential customers to see that you support IMAP just fine. Please show potential customers that the app is just one option as you say; not a requirement. Your website currently does not communicate that message clearly.
Hi! I have been using Fastmail for the last 2 years and love it!
I don't use the web interface much, instead I use Apple's Mail.app. My only issue is that external email accounts (gmail) take some time to be fetched periodically. When I open the web interface and click on the tag, it instantly pulls the new mail in from the external account, but if I fetch in the Mail.app, it doesn't refresh the external accounts. So, for things that have a very short time period (confirmation codes), I still end up needing to open the web interface. I wonder if this would still be the case with the new desktop app?
I will take some time to set it up over the next days and try it out!
I think you should also understand that HN is not best place for this kind of news. This is page for people posting very obscure and hacky things. People that try to squeeze miliseconds on everything they do or do things the clever way. Why we should be happy for something that is the antitesis of clever and basically could be called corpo-slop?
I am already using fmail3 [1] and before that fmail2 which is also a web wrapper but feels more native to mac than Electron apps. And I think it is written in swift. So I don't know why fastmail cannot do something similar after all these years.
On the same boat as everybody else that this is electron based and not a great experience. I think from a business perspective this is just meant to satisfy those customers that are asking for a standalone app.
I would rather have more integrations with third parties rather than this.
My main problem is that I have to put a lot of effort to not use gmail for my business because most of third-parties (like CRMs) work only/better with gmail.
Do you mean to access Fastmail as a client for your Gmail-hosted inbox? How about using the fetch feature that moves all emails to your Fastmail inbox, and the 'send as' feature where you can send emails out from your Gmail SMTP via Fastmail. Those two features already exist.
I know Fastmail isn't the hugest place in the world and the set of skills involved but it feels a bit insulting to roll this out rather than contribute into Thunderbird in a way to get what Fastmail feels is necessary out there.
Thunderbird has had a good number of QoL improvements, and the calendar plugins etc are quite niec. Just if one day search could... uhh... work, that would be nice
they have an amazing team, integration with 1 pass, tons of good things and chose a shortcut like every other major company because it generates revenue, short wins over strategy
I don't hold it against them in the sense that this is the easiest stack to onboard onto, but all the recurring lost effort on native e-mail clients seem very unfortunate.
Fastmail does, of course, probably consider its UI chops etc to be part of their value add. Just seems like if they also want to win over people who like native clients then "here's a bunch of shit that makes native clients also work very well with our offerings" is less of a lift while being more helpful overall. Maybe.
Replying to mail that arrived through masked email addresses will also reply with the masked email address and not accidentally leak your main address.
Also creating masked mail addresses in the first place.
Going to post the unpopular opinion here, this is also good for them purely for deployments/sales.dont forget the common denominator of "open fastmail app on your windows computer" for the tech literate.
I'm sure there was some deal that didn't get completed because of this.
If AI is really making developers so much more productive, companies should invest that productivity into offering better technical solutions. This means native applications for each platform.
I’m not a customer of Fastmail, because the laws in Australia are very anti-privacy and Fastmail is at their mercy. But my mail provider has exactly the same problem: a lame web app.
This is not a “technical person” complaint. These so-called apps look and behave worse on macOS.
Surely it’s more efficient to just ignore this release and continue using the browser than it is to switch providers? Unless there’s another reason, in which case I’m all ears. I’ve been quite happy with Fastmail as a provider.
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