SnappyMail – Modern, lightweight and fast web-based email client

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 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.

Am I understanding it right that it is a form of racism?

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?

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.

> tags

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?

I use tags as supplementary keywords.

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.

There's Open-Xchange. [0][1] My domain registrar offers it for managed email, it works well on both desktop and mobile browsers.

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/

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.

[0] https://cypht.org/

Roundcube is nice

Where should email client developers be looking for inspiration?

I mean, it's fast, that's all it claims to be really.

The UI is nothing that can't be fixed with an admittedly large amount of CSS tweaks :)

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 :)

Could connect this client to any mail server.

> the visible permanent notification about PUSH

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.

> the visible permanent notification about PUSH.

by what magic way do you think Thunderbird will not need that?

FairEmail can store all emails but doesn't by default

You can make the permanent notification invisible.

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...

It seems to be a problem with the 2-3px between the columns. Should be easy to fix.