Hi HN! In the past, I spent over 7 years working on Apple Mail, and today I am really excited to share a new email client I'm building: Mimestream, a native macOS email client for Gmail.
Mimestream is written in Swift, and uses AppKit+SwiftUI for a clean, stock appearance. It's designed to be fast, lightweight, and use a minimal amount of disk space. Mimestream's advantages over using the Gmail web interface includes features like multiple accounts, a unified inbox, system notifications, swipe actions, dark mode, (some) offline support, tracker prevention, multiple keyboard shortcut sets, and more.
Mimestream differs from other email clients because it uses the Gmail API rather than IMAP, so it supports more Gmail-specific features like categorized inboxes, Gmail's search operators, first-class labels support (apply multiple via ⌘L, set colors, etc), synced aliases, synced signatures, etc. I'm planning a lot more work in this area, including server-side filter configuration, Google Drive support, G Suite directory autocomplete, and more.
The app is a traditional email client that makes direct connections to Gmail and stores your data on your Mac. There are no intermediary servers with access to your account or copies of your messages. Mimestream is free for a limited time during the public beta, but will eventually be a paid app by the time it gets to the Mac App Store.
I hope you enjoy trying out the beta, and I look forward to hearing your feedback!
This is a great point: "There are no intermediary servers with access to your account or copies of your messages." A number of popular email clients use intermediary servers and that's a complete deal breaker for me. I'd argue that should be a deal breaker for almost anyone. I'm not a security expert, but as far as I can tell, for most people the single biggest security vulnerability is an attacker gaining access to their email. Using a mail client with an intermediary mail server essentially doubles the surface area attackers can exploit.
I never quite understood what the value add was for email-client developers to use intermediary servers. Is it to gather usage telemetry or something else?
Usage telemetry can be gathered pretty easily from the client itself. Having an intermediate service is usually for stuff like push notifications, search, autocomplete, recommendations and really any other feature that goes beyond the email spec and would be difficult or cpu intensive to implement on all the clients.
Pessimistically for telemetry, but I suspect some of them are Javascript apps in a lightweight shell that have actual technical difficulties making a TCP IMAP connection.
Yeah, I think difficulty making an IMAP connection is one reason. I think the biggest reason has been to decorate more features on top of the backing email service, like adding Snooze support to an arbitrary IMAP account (so the server can un-snooze a message at the scheduled time).
That being said, there are security/privacy implications to that model, and I wouldn't personally use an app that works this way. That's why Mimestream was built as a traditional client.
Doing TCP from a "native" JS app should be pretty easy[1] (caveat: I haven't tried.) I'd think the cost of running a proxy server would be enough motivation to figure this out, for any developer whose primary reason is as simple as technical difficulties with JS and TCP. I think it more likely the other responses such as doing heavy indexing that won't work as nicely on the clients.
On the positive side, you could use them for some privacy features, like predownloading images (works with popular clients like Gmail which prefetch them, whether you read the email or not, to water down analytics)
Indexing and search can be sophisticated & available before downloading any messages; you can ensure completion of complex pop and imap operation (eg working with messages "tagged" by gmail); just a few benefits.
Note, this is in no way an endorsement of middle manning email management and facading as a client.
I was about to install it until i went through OAuth setup which grants the "Mimestream" application permissions do to a number of things including
"Read, compose, send, and permanently delete all your email from Gmail"
One can blame it on Google OAuth UI or on Mimestream UI, but its not clear to me whether these privileges are granted to the locally installed application and can only be used by it
OR
whether these privileges are Granted to "Mimestream" the Google OAuth App account which can then be used to do those actions outlined above by some service associated with "Mimestream" Google App.
Needless to say, i chickened out from using my main google account with it and instead will test drive it with a toy account
I don't see much difference in the distinction between the client software (written by Mimestream, probably with regular updates) having access to your account, which it obviously has to has, and Mimestream having direct access. But IANA security researcher, so salt liberally.
I mostly agree -- it takes a level of trust to provide your credentials to a third party app.
However, there are precautions that you can do to minimize the risk of your credentials used without your authorization with a local client software:
1) requiring multi-factor authentication when credentials are used from a new location/device/ip...
2) A local firewall(like little snitch for osx) that surfaces any unexpected outbound requests.
These obviously wont be much help if you grant some other server permission to access your email.
Tokens are granted to the app running on your Mac, not a service. There's definitely no Mimestream-run service component with access tokens to your account.
One tip - on the Google OAuth sign-in page, you can inspect the URL's query component to see the redirectURL parameter, and you'll see where Google will send the token. In Mimestream's case, it is <long-custom-scheme>:/oauthredirect, which is a custom scheme registered with macOS by the app, so macOS shows you the "Do you want to allow this page to open Mimestream" prompt.
This being said, you are totally correct, when you use any closed-source app like this that you did not build yourself, you are placing trust in the developer, and you are wise to be cautious.
In my opinion, there are still several practical security/privacy downsides to apps that run intermediary services with access to (or copies of) your email:
- A larger attack surface (the intermediary service) for an adversary to take advantage of, and one that is probably less hardened than Gmail
- A larger bug surface, as the service could potentially accidentally expose your data to another user (and this sort of bug _has_ happened in the past to others).
- Google probably has serious policies/systems in place for preventing a curious (or disgruntled) employee from reading your unencrypted email. Hopefully. That level of sophistication seems less guaranteed from a small company, and it's completely invisible to you as a user.
The only reason it's like that is because gmail limits you to five sections. Ideally I would split up updates and social.
The first section is my triage section, and the only one whose unread count I care about. The rest I try to triage by skimming once a day and cleaning once a week.
Then the last section is my "todo" section, things I have to respond to that will take more than a minute.
So if I could customize the interface with the searches I want and in the order I want, that would be ideal. And then have a view where I can select how many messages from each section are visible at once (like in Gmail's multiple inbox view).
If I could do that, I could easily see myself paying $100 for that, especially if it has a companion ipad/iphone app.
Great feedback – I've gotten this request a lot today. It's been something I've always planned on doing, but based on the popularity of this request, this is a lot higher up on the list now.
Awesome! If you need more feedback or want to actually watch me work in gmail, I'm happy to do a screen share. My email is in my profile, hit me up if you're interested.
I use priority inbox with custom queries too, so that's the missing killer feature for me. Right now I just use standard priority inbox with the four slots (starred, important+unread, unread, everything else) but multiple inbox with five sounds pretty good now that I see these queries.
I'm pretty hungry to switch from Spark and their intermediate servers, and I bet I'm not the only one. At work I use full GSuite integration, so am pretty much stuck with Wavebox or another Electron aggregator. But for personal use this hits exactly the right spot for me.
I had to go through a Google security review process, which took surprisingly long to get through (probably a good thing!). However, the $15k+ 3rd party audit is only necessary if you are running servers that have a copy of client data. Mimestream only caches email data on your Mac, so I didn't have to pay this fee.
We do still have to trust you though right njhaveri? If I understand it correctly this is a closed source app with unlimited access to GMail.
How can users be sure that it doesn't do stuff that you say it doesn't or that you are who you say you are, considering "Mimestream LLC" only has an email address and your HN profile has only ever posted about this one app?
Hope that's not too aggressive :) legitimately curious if this is something that you've thought about or if you are planning on gaining reputation over time to the point where people will click through the scary "This app can delete all of your gmails" warning.
This is a very fair concern, and I sympathize with it a lot. I have thought about this a fair bit, and thought about eventually turning this into a "source-available" model (but not yet, I'd at least like to be fully launched on both App Stores first and have some user-base). There are pros and cons to that. At the end of the day, if you install an app from the App Store, you place trust in the developer. App Store Review only goes so far (e.g. look at Epic sneaking in an alternate payment system). Even if I made source available, the typical user has no guarantee that it matches the binary they're installing from the App Store.
I've also thought about starting with an OAuth scope that allows all operations except permanently deleting email, and asking the user to re-authenticate and upgrade their scope the first time they try to permanently delete something. This is a little awkward from the user experience, though. Maybe burying this as a fallback mechanism during the onboarding flow is an option.
General reputation-building is probably the right place to start.
How does Mimestream work in terms of MFA?
Im not familiar with how Goolge OAuth handles it, but if I granted access to Mimestream app from one machine, can the same grant be used from another(i.e. bad actor's server)?
I notice that many, many software + service / SaaS are like that.
"Sign up to our cool thing and see how well it works with all the PII you put in it. We are closed source, do not present our company, our team, or how we intend to earn money. No privacy policy too, but hey.. we do have a nice email"
/endrant
This really surprises me. I'd never try these out. Should be so easy to just be a bit more open.
In this case at least the founder announces himself, which is a good start.
Congrats on an amazing launch! You might though consider a new name before going to the App Store?
Telling someone who doesn't read HN about your app would be very difficult because "mime" and "stream" aren't words people would expect next to each other. "Mime" is also a pretty uncommon word. Getting the early adopter crowd now who understand the name is important but this app has exciting potential I think for an audience beyond that.
Because “Amazon” is a name that in 1997 implied online bookstore? Or “Twitter” implied microblogging platform in 2008? I feel you’re over thinking it because you do know what MIME means in this case, for the average person that doesn’t, they very likely won’t think twice about it.
Well, not lately, but there were plenty on the road when I was a lad.
I do think the median user would be nonplussed by a name like Mimestream. One struggles to form a mental image of a stream of mimes, and I assure you that knowing that something called MIME exists is uncommon.
The name does tap into the psyche though, thanks to the ancient TV show - and Indigenous tales, of course, though those are probably less widely known.
This is fantastic, please support Google Advanced Protection as I cannot add my account as a result of it being enabled on my account.
"Advanced Protection prevented your Google Account from signing in. This security feature stops most non-Google apps and services from accessing your data to keep your account protected."
> To prevent unauthorized access, Advanced Protection only allows Google apps and verified third-party apps to access your Google Account data, and only with your permission. - https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/
I didn't realise until now that third-party apps could work with Advanced Protection.
Thank you for looking into it. I will consider removing it from my account... seems to only add barriers that are vendor lock in and not actual security.
Do you need the full advanced protection setup (hw key required for every session)? It does work with the somewhat less draconian normal key support where the key is required just for new logins.
AFAIK from my time in the APP, The "blessed session" system doesn't work any differently as I don't recall needing the key to access passwords.google.com or anything like that.
Would you please please please share what “Classic mode” is all about in Mail.app? I have this theory that a few important people at Apple protested killing it, so some poor soul had to add “Classic mode” to keep them happy while working on improving Mail.app.
First of all congratulations on a great looking app. I just set it up for my work account (I use a different provider for my private mail) and I love how I have all labels available. I'm also excited that you'll distribute it via the Mac App Store.
My job these days is heavily email based, it sometimes feels like all I'm doing all day is jump between gmail, Slack and Zoom. Thus I've spent a lot of time optimizing my workflow with labels, etc. Unfortunately, I also rely on a lot of integrations with 3rd party services (through Chrome plugins):
- Salesforce
- Calendly
- Grammarly
If push comes to shove I can do without Calendly and maybe even without Grammarly but its entirely impossible for me to do my work. I dream of an email client like this but the unfortunate reality today is that anything not (easily) connected to certain other services is in a tough position for email power-users - or just people in weird jobs.
Good luck. I'll keep an eye on Mimestream. Maybe at some point there'll be a plug-in API and an opportunity to bring some 3rd party services into the app.
There are two main differences:
1. Mimestream uses the Gmail API (instead of IMAP), so it supports more Gmail features: Gmail categorized inboxes, first-class labeling support (apply multiple, change color, etc), use all the Gmail aliases you have set up, use the signatures you set up in Gmail, and conduct server-side searches with Gmail search operators. A lot more is coming on this front, as the app is still in development.
2. This is a lighter-weight client with a minimal local cache. Mail downloads a copy of every message in your account and requires a lot more disk space to use.
It's nice to have a RESTful API, and nice to access to more Gmail features, but there are several aspects where it is not as efficient as it could be, and multiple round trips are required with the server to perform some basic tasks that IMAP can execute in 1 round trip. It also has pretty aggressive request throttling, which is fine for a very thin client like Mimestream, but would not be a good fit for a client that wanted to download every message in the account.
Can you say a little more about the thinness and what the offline capabilities are? I noticed the search looks like it happens serverside which is great when you're online since you get actual gmail search. What happens when the client is offline?
Search is a merge of server-side results and a very basic local search that right now only looks at From and Subject. If you're offline, you'll get the local search results.
When you're offline, you can view messages. However, only the most recent messages are cached in the account, and caching is run lazily with the background activity scheduler, which won't run if your device is under any kind of load and runs infrequently on battery. Overall, I eventually plan to offer a "days of mail" setting to make this more predictable.
You can also take actions on messages – marking them read, starring them, replying and sending new messages, etc. This is all architected to work while offline and replay when a connection becomes available. This design is necessary to make things seem snappy when the client is online.
Overall, I have not yet heavily tested the offline capabilities, and there is some work to do around the caching predictability story. If offline access is a very firm requirement, I would recommend a client designed around this model, like Mail.
Thanks, I think you're right to identify 'predictability' as a key feature here. It's not so much that I need my every message offline (for which, as you point out, I can just Mail.app) it's that I'd like to have some idea of what I can expect offline if the client says it works offline. If the client doesn't offer any predictable offline features it's not really an offline client.
I know this is a low quality comment, but I wanted to take a moment to say that I think this looks incredible. Sleek, professional, private, and packed with utility. Great work.
Their title on HN and website is "A native macOS email client for Gmail," and that's exactly what it is, especially if you were trying to be technical.
It's like bickering that it's not a native client, it's a macOS client, because it only runs on macOS. Or that you'd feel swindled if it didn't run on Gentoo because anything that calls itself "software" when it's really "Macware" is basically false advertising. It's an odd attempt at pedantry.
> Their title on HN and website is "A native macOS email client for Gmail," and that's exactly what it is, especially if you were trying to be technical.
"Email client" used to mean something before everyone started assuming Email = Gmail.
Imagine someone submitting a link posted as "A web-browser for facebook.com".
Nobody here would ever accept that a piece of software which could only work on facebook.com to be an actual web-browser.
So why should we allow for the same exception when it comes to email?
Awesome. The only thing that drew me away from Apple Mail is the fact it didn't have build-in snooze functionality for emails like Gmail has. Does/will Mimestream support this too?
I am definitely interested in eventually supporting IMAP, JMAP, and Outlook in the long term. In the short term, the focus will be on making the Gmail support solid.
Can you make this a competitor to Thunderbird rather than being locked into GMail?
I would love to have an app like this that used IMAP and was multiplatform!
The multiplatform part is completely dependent on if anything is done to get appkit and swiftui working on other platforms, which is probably a solid "no" for the foreseeable future.
They did perform the audit in collaboration with the author[0], so chances are it's fine, but you never know when a new manager might come in and flip the script for what's acceptable use of the api.
This is something I asked about a few years ago when it was first introduced, and the vague answer I got is that the warning exists because the Gmail API is not as optimized as IMAP for some common email client tasks. (Indeed, for better performance, I would like to switch a few tasks to use IMAP instead of the Gmail API someday).
Google did vet Mimestream as a general-purpose email client before approving API access, and on the paperwork for that process "general purpose email client" was the app category that I selected, so I'm hoping all will be OK, or else I will be really scrambling to implement new protocols :P
Nice to see a native app and not something Electron-based.
I wonder about native app viability these days though. Years ago I used native email apps like Outlook, KMail, and Thunderbird, but lately I just use the websites made by the service providers (Fastmail for personal, Gmail for work). As an open standards person I find my behavior kind of depressing, but the websites just tend to work better.
SwiftUI will make the native application development experience much easier for Apple platforms. It still has a little ways to go, but once it's the "de-facto standard" for new apps, you will certainly see an explosion in innovative native development.
Hoping other platforms follow suit. Preferably using SwiftUI...hey, I can dream right?
> Hoping other platforms follow suit. Preferably using SwiftUI...hey, I can dream right?
This makes it seems like it's up to those other platforms, but it's really all about Apple's decision, right? (in which case I'll eat my metaphorical hat if this happens)
That's a very fair question. Web apps made by providers are definitely several steps ahead feature-wise, because standardized protocols take a lot of time to evolve. My hope with Mimestream is to strike a middle ground here, by using the Gmail API to support more of the Gmail featureset, while retaining the ergonomics of a native client.
First thing I did when I clicked on comments is Cmd+F for "Electron". I was so relieved to find your comment. Electron apps are fine, but you have to pay me to use them :-)
Thanks! IMAP account support is something I would really like to add (and Mimestream already uses IMAP for some specific operations where it is a better fit), but from past experience I know that it is complicated ;)
I'm also really keen on adding support for JMAP and Office 365 I the future.
Excited that you're considering JMAP! Hopefully it solves some of the pain-points of implementing IMAP and makes it easier to deliver a great UX. If e.g. Mimestream can deliver as good a UX with a Fastmail account (or Cyrus IMAP or Dovecot installation) as it does with a Gmail account, I think it will help the independent email ecosystem. (Though there is a big headwind, so I understand focusing on Gmail now.)
Edit: downloaded the beta. Will give it a shot with my work G Suite account.
I am really excited about adding support for JMAP – I participated in the IETF WG for it, gave some feedback, and think it's a very well-designed protocol that should be really efficient at syncing email. It would probably be one of the most fun features for me to add to the app, but yeah, there's still a lot of work left for the Gmail account experience first.
Adding JMAP would be a definite +1 for me. I use fastmail and their web interface is good and mobile app is better.
I use Thunderbird on my Mac because I need things like smart signatures that are dependent on my outgoing email address but I want a combined Inbox.
A native app that supports JMAP and provides that sort of integration would let me migrate from Thunderbird, which while it's been awesome for the years I've used it, is showing its UI age.
Is there a list of shortcuts somewhere? All I see is the choice for Default, Apple Mail, or Gmail. And only about half of the Gmail shortcuts I tried seem to work.
Support for both Gmail and Office 365 with their own proprietary APIs would be a knockout feature. Also I really appreciate the fact you don't use any intermediary servers, which has held me back from using some other macOS email clients.
A mix of mutt for triage and reluctantly, the gmail web interface. I think I have tried every real client available and been disappointed in many different ways?
Have you tried Spark? It's the spiritual successor to Sparrow, I use it on phone and laptop and really like it. The only downside is that it's on a freemium model...
I loved Sparrow. I’m a Spark addict now, haven’t been this pleased with an email app. I normally jump around when stuff gets crappy and slow but Spark just keeps on giving. Highly rate it, both for Mac and android.
Nice! More than once I’ve gotten my hopes up after seeing screenshots of a spiffy new macOS email client, only to learn that it was Electron-based. At the time, I was using the Gmail web app but searching for a native alternative. Since then, I’ve settled on Apple Mail for the time being, but better Gmail integration is an enticing feature and I’ll definitely be trying Mimestream out.
Undo Send is definitely planned! The missing attachment warning is a great idea, I just added this to the backlog.
Unfortunately, Gmail API support is lacking for Snooze:
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/109952618, but I will eventually add the ability to do a Mimestream-local snooze (which makes more sense once there is an iOS companion app)
Since you're working on an iOS companion app, this seems like an appropriate time to mention the primary obstacle that has kept me off of the Gmail iOS app: it doesn't support links in email signatures.
I still find that hard to believe, and it's a deal breaker. IIRC, the Gmail app doesn't support signature formatting at all. Please do.
Thanks for the prompt reply. Will Mimestream-local snooze necessitate introducing an intermediate server to track across platforms, or will you use something like iCloud sync to keep track?
Definitely no intermediary server with access to your account. This idea would be to use iCloud to sync a set of snoozed server IDs, and only "hide" those messages from within the app, leaving those messages actually in the inbox on the server. No message data going into iCloud, either.
The way that other platforms have done it is by using custom labels - so the messages just get labeled as "snoozed until tomorrow", and at 9am the client simply grabs all those and moves them back to inbox and deletes the label. That's how Mailbox did it, for example.
Once Snooze is added, I'll happily buy this app for $20+ - I've been waiting for something like this since Inbox and Mailbox were killed off.
I've been looking for an initiative like this for so many years! Not even a month ago, I spent an afternoon looking all over the internet for somebody trying to build a native mail client for MacOs. Since DéjàVu from the lead dev of Sparrow, nobody it seems nobody has tried to do this. I haven't yet tested Mimestream but I already praise you for trying to do it! I will definitely give it a try and pay for it!
It looks really interesting, immediately downloaded and would be glad to pay a subscription if it works for me.
I have two asks:
1. Glad you're supporting Gmail shortcuts, but sad to say they aren't working in a second keyboard locale which I have (as basically any non-Anglo-American user would). Gmail provides two columns for keyboard shortcuts in settings so I went and manually adapted all keys. Or maybe Mimestream could support that automatically, for instance Superhuman has no issues with the language I'm using. Currently I just can't use any keyboard shortcuts unless I switch my input to English.
2. I specifically dislike unified inbox, could there be a setting to revert the side bar, so instead of the top level Inbox with folders for my accounts it would be top-level accounts with folders for each?
# 1. Put markdown on clipboard
# 2. Convert to hex
out=$(pbpaste | pandoc -f markdown -t html -s | hexdump -ve '1/1 "%.2x"')
# 3. Convert to an applescript data class
osascript -e "set the clipboard to «data HTML${out}»"
# 4. Paste rich HTML
You can use something like Alfred or Keyboard Maestro to trigger that script with a keyboard shortcut.
As a programmer, having native markdown support in the app is something I wish for almost every day (especially for code blocks). It's something I plan to add.
This is really great. Way to go. I've always been a big fan of Mail.app, but it's Google integration always felt clunky and sometimes even buggy. Within a few minutes I can see how much snappier and more "native" this feels.
One criticism though, the swiping is incredibly annoying right now. You have to swipe an almost painful amount to archive emails without a click, it should require less than half the swipe-distance of what it does now. Look at how little swiping Chrome needs to go back to the previous page, and emulate that.
Yeah, I've heard this a few times now. This is the standard AppKit NSTableView swipe action, but I agree it's not tuned very well – I'll look into improving this this.
One tip: by default, the Delete key is mapped to Archive (though you can change that in Preferences to be Trash if you prefer that). A little faster than swiping.
I use Superhuman. I can see myself switching over to Mimestream. One of my recent complaints is the lack of deep integration with GSuite. If you can match the speed & shortcuts AND integrate deeply with GSuite, I think you have something really compelling.
> The app is a traditional email client that makes direct connections to Gmail and stores your data on your Mac. There are no intermediary servers with access to your account or copies of your messages. Mimestream is free for a limited time during the public beta, but will eventually be a paid app by the time it gets to the Mac App Store.
I appreciate the thought behind this. However, it means you can't implement some other features (pixel tracking, scheduled send, snooze) unless GSuite opens up an API for them. Consider having a subscription which uses a 3rd party server. I would be happy to pay for it.
Since Gmail is monopoly-scale though, they have plenty of users to serve. Gmail has a lot of proprietary features that don't work through IMAP. Most of them could work with JMAP (like labels) but Gmail doesn't support that (yet, at least).
"Advanced Protection prevented your Google Account from signing in. This security feature stops most non-Google apps and services from accessing your data to keep your account protected."
I'm a Mailplane user as well and once (if) I move to Catalina I'd love to check it out. What would you say are the benefits to Mimestream over Mailplane?
I'm a second Mailplane user who would be interested in a native app, but I'm on High Sierra and can't use this one.
Benefits: this app likely doesn't use 1 GB of RAM. That's pretty much my only complaint about Mailplane (not blaming them; there's not much they could do about that). The native UI is likely nice, but not going to be the main factor causing me to switch.
Thanks for releasing this. I've been looking for a Mailplane alternative for a while, ever since Gmail started becoming a resource hog when they forced everyone onto their new interface.
Is there a chance you could recompile this to support 10.14?
I'll most likely not be upgrading from Mojave for the foreseeable future, until my 2013 MacBook Pro stops working and I'm forced to get something new.
Sadly, no. Mimestream already uses SwiftUI for parts of the UI, and SwiftUI requires Catalina. I plan to release an iOS/iPadOS version in the future, so Mimestream will be investing even more heavily into SwiftUI. At some point later this year, Big Sur will become a requirement, too. I sympathize with those that remain on Mojave, especially those who need to run 32-bit apps, but as a 1-man project, it seemed like a necessary tradeoff to make.
This looks really promising and could be a good replacement for Mailplane.
One thing I don't like though is the Big Sur requirement as early as this year. I'm also still on Mojave and will probably upgrade to Catalina in the coming weeks.
What is the advantage of this over using the Gmail web ui? The Gmail web ui works great for me, has keyboard shortcuts, push notifications, works on all operating systems, supports multiple accounts with the /u/1/ subpath, etc. What does this offer that I'd be willing to pay for it and lock myself in to Mac OS exclusively?
Way faster and uses less memory. Unified inbox. And the killer feature for me is Command-Tab - being able to keyboard switch from my email to the browser.
Will check this out. I had tried multiple email clients and settled on the default macOS Mail. I try to stay with the default Apps that comes with the OS, even if that meant learning the shortcuts and spending a little more time understanding their nuances, and making use of all available features or ignoring some.
As another comment pointed out, can we have the ability to do like Priority Inbox or allow us to just show Unread + Flag (like Mail)?
After using emails for 20+ years, I'm pretty immune to all the jazz that comes with emails, and can survive pretty well. The only thing that I need now it the ability to see "Unread + Flagged". Please refer to my screenshot for how my Mail typically looks like -- https://public.oinam.com/photos-oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos...
The only thing I want to ask, at least from a marketing perspective, why Mimestream. The name doesn't really tell what the app is, and if it wasn't mentioned in the title I would assume it is something that has to do with streaming.
Just a minor gripe, otherwise looks great, keep it up.
To the author :
There are times where I would like my mail to be delivered at specific periods of time in the day rather than disturbing with any new email.
Or perhaps a snooze button for specific period of time.
Do you have any intention of such features?
I would love to be able to send an email tomorrow. I like to respond to some emails to get them out of the way, but the more email I send, the more I get. I would therefore love to be able to slow down the exchanges. Gmail has only a limited-time undo, with delay that's too short and almost entirely useless. I'd be quite happy with a default, say, 5-minute delay and undo.
Similarly, it would be awesome to hide inbound email until I want to see it (while I am still able to use my mailbox to send email and respond to already-received messages.)
EDIT: Ah, it turns out Gmail can schedule email sending. Thanks @llarsson!
Thanks! I've heard this request before in a few different forms, and I have it on the backlog. In the meantime, one option is to just quit the application, and you'll stop receiving any new mail notifications.
Hello! I downloaded and opened the app and it looks great! I saw I had 5k+ social and promotion messages so I right clicked and marked all as read. That however crashed the app and even if I open it again it crashes again.
Oh no! A few people reported this crash today, I'll be fixing it hopefully tomorrow!
You can reset your cache by running these this in Terminal:
rm ~/Library/Containers/com.mimestream.Mimestream/Data/Library/Application\ Support/Mimestream/Mimestream*
This is great, I'm a heavy G Suite user (I have folders with tens of thousands of messages) and I'm enjoying the beta: it scrolls like butter!!!! (or has teh speedy, as greybeard Mac users would say)
I miss some things, like keyboard shortcuts for jumping to a specific label, superstars, search items suggestion (for specific GMail filters like has:attachment), but overall this is really good, and honoring the label colors is an excellent touch.
Some more advanced features that come to mind would be multiple tabs, deeper Calendar integration to display inline your schedule when receiving .ics attachment.
Thanks! I will definitely be adding shortcuts for jumping to a label and search suggestions pretty soon. I plan to eventually add tabs and calendar integration, too.
Not sure if this has been mentioned in the comments yet (I came across this post 100+ comments later), but one thing I miss terribly after leaving AirMail was the ability to write markdown in email. I absolutely loved the split-pane window when writing an email, and see it update in real-time as I write my markdown'ed email.
I am on the web-client for Gmail for now, and although there are browser plugins for MD, they feel quite clunky to use. It would be great if you could consider MD support in composing emails!
Markdown support has been a major theme from the feedback I've gotten today by email and here. In addition, I find myself personally wanting it all the time, at least so I can insert code blocks. I definitely plan to add this in the not-too-distant future!
Keep in mind your audience here. I don't want to discourage you from adding markdown support, but I suspect that the overwhelming majority of your users won't know what markdown is, let alone actively want it.
It got very buggy over the past 12 months or so. I needed something more reliable, so I switched to the Gmail web-client (my workplace is using Gmail for business)
I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but I'm looking to tech myself iOS app development, and I'm wondering what y'all think of SwiftUI. Generally, I am quite the fan of iOS's visual defaults and I have prior experience doing backend work, but I'm quite unfamiliar with UI design.
After watching WWDC2020 this spring, I'm pretty convinced that Apple has set itself up with what looks like one of the cleanest IDEs for building user-facing ML applications and I'd like to give it a try.
I'm have about ten years experience with macOS and iOS development. I have not yet taken the plunge to do SwiftUI development exclusively, but from what I've seen, it's the future of UI development on iOS and macOS. If you're interested in iOS development, definitely learn it.
It uses a declarative language to describe the UI, so I think it should be much easier to learn than the previous imperative paradigm.
For the most part, you can get away with the standard "visual defaults" as you call them on the platform. You can easily create a complete app without having to customize any UI, although it obviously adds to the look and feel if you do.
Does it support e-mails with winmail.dat? That's been my biggest annoyance with Airmail, I end up having to go to the gmail web interface to view any e-mails with winmail.dat
Very excited to try this, I've registered.
I cannot run it at the moment as it requires 10.15 or later. I am running Mojave and not planning to upgrade before Big Sur.
Looks great. I'm currently using Canary mail because the Apple mail data loss bug still isn't fixed after almost a year! Canary mail doesn't feel as polished as Apple mail so I'm happy to see a potential replacement.
This looks great! Just a note that I signed up from my phone but couldn't go through with the direct download. When I tried again from my laptop I got an error[0].
Would have been useful to be able to reuse my email address from desktop but using a different email seemed to work fine.
First of all, this app is awesome. I started to make some serious progress on clearing up my email backlog.
One suggestion: I really love the iOS gmail app feature to quickly switch between all mail and show unread mail only. I'd love a button or an option under the "go" menu to jump to unread mail. I know I can type "label:unread" in the search, but a one/two click method would be awesome!
I held off from updating to Catalina last year and hope to go directly to Big Sur this year, so I can’t try this out yet but I just gave my email to your website, hoping I’d receive updates on the progress.
While we’re on this topic, do you have any plans to add custom integrations with 3rd party services like Todoist and Bear? That’s one reason I’ve switched to Spark and I’d be extremely happy to pay you for it.
This looks amazing. I am so glad that you kept it as close to the native Mail experience as possible.
My only question relates to payment. This is an app that I would gladly pay a solid price to own (in the ballpark of $50?). I would _much_ prefer that over a subscription model.
Because the site mentions eventual payment, but doesn't specify a pricing model, would you be willing to elaborate on your intentions?
Thanks! So, I don't know exactly what the pricing model will be yet, but I definitely hear your feedback on this topic, and I'm looking at pretty much every option :) My intention is to build a sustainable long-term business, and deliver a continuous/regular stream of updates (e.g. see the Release Notes at https://mimestream.com/releases), so the pricing model will need to support that goal.
IMHO, if you are looking for long-term business, you need to go the subscription-only route. Probably $19/year.
Don't offer permanent licenses, it will add complexity to purchase and support. You do not want a users with a product of yours with a vulnerability they are not entitled to update.
A subscription-only model will allow you to focus on only the last build which everyone will be entitled to download, greatly simplifying your support.
You will be able to add features at your pace and will avoid the bloating that results when you compete with yourself as is the case with a permanent license model and (increasingly stupid) upgrades.
You will focus on quality not on corner case features to justify upgrades or interface revamps for the sake of it, confusing your existing user base. If you keep your quality high and the product is stable and reliable, your users will stick.
We have been selling our desktop product (in our case B2B) as subscription-only for 8 years and we couldn't be happier about the decision.
I think they can do a pricing model similar to what Sketch uses, but given it is an email client, I am not entirely sure of that myself (though still worth exploring).
For those unfamiliar, with Sketch, you basically have a yearly subscription and you continue receiving regular updates while you are subbed. Once your subscription expires, you get to keep the version you paid for at the beginning of your subscription period, but you stop receiving future updates (aside from security ones and such, ofc).
With Sketch it makes sense, because each year they add a cumulative of lots of new features and such, so people are motivated to renew the sub every year to get those features. With an email client, however, there isn't much in terms of "new features coming every year with updates" that people would be excited to pay the sub for on regular.
However, I still think it is worth exploring and considering as a viable possible option. With that model of "yearly sub, but you get to keep the old version once the sub expires", you allow people (who don't wanna deal with subs and just wanna use the barebones product to pay for once and forget) to experience your product and give you money. And powerusers and those who just want to support the project would be happy to pay the annual sub on regular and receive new features as they come. With that in mind, I would think a yearly $50-60 sub is pretty reasonable, but I am not an expert on pricing things like that, so take it with a grain of salt.
I'm on board with the pricing model creating sustainability. Some guidance towards that point would be ideal, as I would be very frustrated if I invested in using a piece of software only to receive sticker shock and needing to throw that effort away. (Been burned by more than a few promising dev tools and services that did black box betas)
A possibility I just considered was a whitelabel option so that email vendors like Fastmail could offer it as part of their subscription... integrate to their contacts and calendars and let them to do the work of that, similar to how you're letting Google do the lifting on their side.
I pay for the following subscriptions/software as a tech user (I do some development, but most of my work is design and management):
* Fastmail business (I've got email in the archive back to 1998)
* Microsoft Office for Mac
* Dash
I see my subs as a monthly work/business cost, so I'd see Mimestream as "worth" somewhere around the $10/month price point. I'm just one data point though :)
The company I work with/for uses a combination of GSuite and things like Lucidchart/Confluence/JIRA, but that's their choice :)
I am not in the market for this, but would prefer a subscription model. Because a one time fee means the developer has to grow the sales constantly to keep receiving revenues. I think that gives the wrong motivation: adding features might be prefered to solving bugs. Or just stop working on it all together because the growth has stopped.
Trying this now, but I'm stuck on authentication. My default browser is Firefox, but I have Firefox specifically configured to block access to Gmail. It would be great if I could choose the browser to use for login, or at least be able to copy the URL so I can put into Chrome.
In the meantime I'll change my default browser for a moment and see how it goes.
This is an HTTPS GET of https://mimestream.com/appcast.xml in order to check for the availability of beta software updates, using the Sparkle framework that is popular amongst Mac apps.
Makes me wish I use Gmail. I want a natively designed email app for IMAP. There's one feature I desire: group by sender. Unibox does it, but the apps jump around when loading email contents and aren't that fancy other than that feature. The app I use must not use an intermediate server.
Cool! I use MailPlane but would be happy to try this out. I'd need two things though: gmail-style keyboard shortcuts (or at least sufficient alternatives) and a way to link myself to an email (so I can put a link to an email into my task manager). Any chance those will be possible?
Gmail shortcuts (and Apple Mail shortcuts) are available as an option in Preferences > General. Linking to a specific email in the app is something that's on the roadmap, and I've gotten several requests for it (all mostly for your use case of putting emails into a task manager app).
Thanks for this fantastic app. I love the native Gmail features with this level of polish, speed and OS integration.
I would love to see — and would definitely pay for — a similar approach to Google Calendar. Unfortunately CalDAV-based clients only offer a fraction of the web client functionality.
Just downloaded it and it looks very nice. One of my favorite features of Gmail is multiples inboxes which I use for a GTD-like set up with "To Do"/"To Read"/"Waiting For" etc. Any plans to add support for that?
I'm very excited about the continued evolution of SwiftUI, as well as Apple Silicon! I think these are both great moves for the Mac, and while there are some aspects of the Big Sur UI I'm not totally sold on, I think these will be refined over the coming years. I'm hoping for way more new Mac apps with SwiftUI and Catalyst making it easier for iOS developers to write Mac apps!
Looks great! This question is entirely unrelated, but the picture of you that you have on your site looks uncannily like the ones that they do for badges, with the white background and all. Is it one of those?
Thanks for making this app! I'm super excited to use it as it's much faster than Spark. One thing I feel missing is ability to snooze the email and batch mark as read. Do you have plan to add it?
I’d easily pay $100+ for a native macOS client for GMail that is not a poor IMAP substitute like Mail, Thunderbird, or Outlook. But I’ll wait for v1 before I download anything outside of the app store ;)
I was really hoping this was a very quiet video streaming service ... I'm not a MacOS user so I can't take it for a test-drive but I'd like to say congratulations on launching!
I commented on the same problem. I am very eager to upgrade to Big Sur but I absolutely do not intend to run Catalina yet, so I'll stick to Mojave (10.14) for now.
Ditto. Now opening for ~3s before crashing. Possibly coincidence but began after marking all messages in an inbox category as read (there were tens of thousands).
Mind sending the crash reports to bugs@mimestream.com? If you aren't sure where they are, just run /Applications/Mimestream.app/Contents/Resources/collectDiagnostics.sh in Terminal and that should zip them up into a file on your Desktop. Thanks!
Thanks! Porting to iOS/iPadOS is something I would really love to do, but I still have a lot of work left on the Mac client. I'm curious to hear more what your pain points are with Gmail on iPadOS – I've been using the Gmail iOS app on my phone lately, and aside from the nonstandard UI, my experience has been fairly positive.
Right now, it's WYSIWYG HTML composing only. Got a ton of requests for plain text (and markdown) composing support, and I definitely plan on adding it, though it might take a few months at this point.
this looks amazing! pretty excited to try it. signed up for the newsletter and downloaded it. however...
> Read, compose, send, and permanently delete all your email from Gmail
anything you can say to make me feel better for allowing this level of power for a beta app from a random person on the web? i'd really like to try it out.
Yes, it does! Flagging messages as important/unimportant is already supported in the code, but the feature is currently disabled in the UI. I plan to enable it once I add sections support to the Inbox to match up to Gmail's Priority Inbox feature.
On this note, the notifications are popping off about every 10 minutes for me. It would nice if I could set notifications to only show for "important" emails.
PS - Thanks for the app, it's already an improvement in some ways over the gmail interface... looking forward to even more!
Yes, Gmail aliases are supported and automatically synced (e.g. I have my old ISP email address set up as an alias). G Suite accounts on custom domains are also supported.
The application itself looks absolutely amazing, and the authors should be commended for it.
That said, the FAQ mentions that the for-profit model is designed to avoid ads in the client and to "take a strong stance on privacy", which is a little bit disingenuous given that the client exclusively relies on an email service provided by the world's largest advertiser and email data miner.
Yes, Mimestream itself isn't using my data, but there's a bit of induced cognitive dissonance in taking a strong privacy stance for a Google-specific product.
> In order to build a sustainable business that can continue to innovate and improve our products, Mimestream will eventually transition to being a paid app.
Come on, they're explicitly saying that they're charging for the service. It's pretty clear that when they're talking about privacy the caveat is that they won't suck your data into another sink (them) _other than google itself_, being the provider of gmail and all.
I'm all for privacy and informing the user but they're hardly playing word games here.
> I'm all for privacy and informing the user but they're hardly playing word games here.
I'm not saying they're playing word games. I'm saying the strong ethical stance on privacy is diluted by the underlying service they built their product on.
If I built a new automobile refueling station that dispensed diesel and gasoline, but used the fact that the pumps themselves ran on solar energy to claim "I strongly believe in 100% renewable energy", well yes, in one way you're living up to your ideals, but in another larger way, you're really not.
Google also provides the account contents to the US military intelligence community on demand without a warrant via the PRISM program, so it is impossible to use this program as it exists right now and have private email.
Here’s hoping you can use it with an actually private email service in the future.
Yeah, the intention isn't to claim that Mimestream somehow makes using Gmail more secure, but rather that it doesn't suck your data onto an additional server, like a lot of email clients tend to do these days.
I would like to add support for IMAP and JMAP in the future, which should broaden the scope of services you can use this with!
I would much rather have my emails sucked into some developer’s private server than sit on the server of a large multinational that provides them to the federal police and national military without warning, notice, just cause, due process, or meaningful judicial oversight.
Doing gmail-first is the error, and is an endorsement of a society without privacy or the rule of law.
You have produced an espionage-only email client.
We can’t just go about our lives, pretending gmail is okay because it’s popular. Using gmail and building in its ecosystem is an explicit endorsement of gmail which is part of an illegal military spying program.
They aren’t different things, as much as I
imagine we’d all like them to be. To endorse gmail is to endorse illegal military spying, and is to endorse a society without privacy.
I think you're missing the point I was trying to make. When Gmail decides to ship their own native client on MacOS, this platform will become abandonware.
Unless it's better or google disables the api. I say this because I use the paid Apollo app for reading reddit and it's far superior to Reddit's own free app. But I do agree that it's probably a niche user base compared to the OEM app promoted by the service itself.
To be fair, very few companies have rolled out JMAP support, AFAIK. It's unsurprising Google would hesitate to replace their proprietary API/advantage with an open standard while it's not well-used. Presumably if enough other mail services use it, Google will eventually follow suit.
Wasn't supposed to come across like that. The sad part is that Google has enough grip on e-mail to halt adoption of any standard; GMail has been around for 16 years, you'd expect some kind of standard to come out of it to support modern e-mail features. Developers not having a choice doesn't make it less wrong.
Mimestream is written in Swift, and uses AppKit+SwiftUI for a clean, stock appearance. It's designed to be fast, lightweight, and use a minimal amount of disk space. Mimestream's advantages over using the Gmail web interface includes features like multiple accounts, a unified inbox, system notifications, swipe actions, dark mode, (some) offline support, tracker prevention, multiple keyboard shortcut sets, and more.
Mimestream differs from other email clients because it uses the Gmail API rather than IMAP, so it supports more Gmail-specific features like categorized inboxes, Gmail's search operators, first-class labels support (apply multiple via ⌘L, set colors, etc), synced aliases, synced signatures, etc. I'm planning a lot more work in this area, including server-side filter configuration, Google Drive support, G Suite directory autocomplete, and more.
The app is a traditional email client that makes direct connections to Gmail and stores your data on your Mac. There are no intermediary servers with access to your account or copies of your messages. Mimestream is free for a limited time during the public beta, but will eventually be a paid app by the time it gets to the Mac App Store.
I hope you enjoy trying out the beta, and I look forward to hearing your feedback!