There're many decent web-based proprietary mail solutions, and I was really excited once Nylas Mail showed up, even though it's Electron-based. And then instantly disappointed by its license. Later, I was considering switching to Nylas Mail when they re-licensed their open-source client, but turned out by "please use this" they still require you to opt-in with Nylas Identity tied to Nylas Cloud[1] They could only help replace free (from mail vendors) Thunderbird, playing by the rules of the Thunderbird.
[1] https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail/issues/3484
In Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Timenylas
nylas-mail
JavaScript2015–2018
nylas / nylas-mail · Archived
nylas-mail
:love_letter: An extensible desktop mail app built on the modern web. Forks welcome!
39Distinct people
79Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
24.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
:love_letter: An extensible desktop mail app built on the modern web. Forks welcome!
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
Hey guys — I'm Chris Kirk, the author. It's an nw.js application (formerly known as node-webkit). Nw.js is basically a framework for building native desktop clients with Node.…
chrkirk used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- nylas/sync-engine · linked in 6 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month79 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-10-05 17:21:18 UTC to 2018-01-27 13:39:25 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2015 | 2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 2 | 7 |
| Nov 2015 | 2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Dec 2015 | 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| Jan 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Feb 2016 | 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 0 | 9 |
| Mar 2016 | 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| Apr 2016 | 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| May 2016 | 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Jun 2016 | 2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Jul 2016 | 2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Aug 2016 | 2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Sep 2016 | 2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| Oct 2016 | 2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Nov 2016 | 2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2016 | 2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Jan 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 1 | 12 |
| Feb 2017 | 2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Mar 2017 | 2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Apr 2017 | 2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| May 2017 | 2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Jun 2017 | 2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2017 | 2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2017 | 2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2017 | 2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2017 | 2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2017 | 2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2017 | 2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Jan 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Caution🛑 This repository is archived and no longer maintained.
Nylas Mail (originally N1) was open-sourced in 2015 and maintained by Nylas until 2017. It is preserved here for historical reference. Nylas is now an API platform — see developer.nylas.com. For an actively maintained desktop client, see the community forks listed at the bottom of this README.
Nylas Mail - the open-source, extensible mail client
Nylas Mail was an open-source mail client built on the modern web with Electron, React, and Flux. It was designed to be easy to extend, and many third-party plugins are available that add functionality to the client.
⚠️ Nylas Mail was initially released and open-sourced in early 2015 and was maintained by Nylas until Spring 2017. While Nylas no longer supports Nylas Mail, you can download the latest release or build it from source. There are also several forks that are being actively developed and maintained.
Getting Started
Setup your Environment (Mac):
Install Homebrew
Install NVM & Redis brew install nvm redis
Install Node 6 via NVM: nvm install 6
npm install
Setup your Environment (Linux - Debian/Ubuntu):
Install Node 6+ via NodeSource (trusted):
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
Install Redis locally sudo apt-get install -y redis-server redis-tools
benefit of letting us use subdomains.
npm install
Running Nylas Mail
npm run client: Starts the app
npm run test-client: Run the tests
npm run lint-client: Lint the source (ESLint + Coffeelint + LESSLint)
Exploring the Source
This repository contains the full source code to the Nylas Mail client and it's backend services. It is divided into the following packages:
Isomorphic Core: Shared code across local client and cloud servers
Client App: The main Electron app for Nylas Mail
mirrored to open source repo.
Client Sync: The local mailsync engine integreated in Nylas Mail
Client Private Plugins: Private Nylas Mail plugins (like SFDC)
Cloud API: The cloud-based auth and metadata APIs for N1
Cloud Core: Shared code used in all remote cloud services
Cloud Workers: Cloud workers for services like send later
See /packages for the separate pieces. Each folder in /packages is
designed to be its own stand-alone repository. They are all bundled here
for the ease of source control management.
Digging Deeper
In early 2016, the Nylas Mail team wrote extensive documentation for the app that was intended for plugin developers. This documentation lives on GitHub Pages and offers a great overview of the app's architecture and important classes. Here are some good places to get started:
Application Architecture
Debugging Nylas Mail
The team has also given conference talks and published blog posts about the client:
ReactEurope: How React & Flux Turn Apps Into Extensible Platforms
ForwardJS: Electron, React & Pixel Perfect Experiences
Blog: Splitting from Atom
Blog: Building Plugins for React Apps
Blog: Nylas Mail Build Process
Blog: Low level Electron Debugging
Blog: A New Search Parser
Blog: Developers Guide to Emoji
Blog: Nylas Pro
Blog: Nylas Mail & PGP
Blog: Calendar Events and RRULEs
Running the Cloud
When you download and build Nylas Mail from source it runs without its cloud components. The concept of a "Nylas ID" / subscription has been removed, and plugins that require server-side processing are disabled by default. (Plugins like Snooze, Send Later, etc.)
In order to use these plugins and get the full Nylas Mail experience, you need to deploy the backend infrastructure located in the cloud-* packages. Deploying these services is challenging because they are implemented as microservices and designed to be run at enterprise scale with Redis, Postgres, etc. Because these backend services must access your email account, it is also important to use security best-practices (at the very least, SSL, encryption at rest, and a partitioned VPC). For more information about building and deploying this part of the stack, check out the cloud-core README.
Themes
The Nylas Mail user interface is styled using CSS, which means it's easy to modify and extend. Nylas Mail comes stock with a few beautiful themes, and there are many more which have been built by community developers
Bundled Themes
Dark
Darkside (designed by Jamie Wilson)
Taiga (designed by Noah Buscher)
Ubuntu (designed by Ahmed Elhanafy)
Less Is More (designed by Alexander Adkins (account removed))
Community Themes
ToogaBooga
Material
Monokai (no longer available)
Agapanthus—Inbox-inspired theme
Stripe
Kleinstein—Hides account sidebar
Arc Dark
Solarized Dark
Darkish
Predawn
Ido—Polymail-inspired theme
Berend
ElementaryOS
LevelUp
Sunrise
BoraBora
Honeyduke
Snow
Hull
Express
DarkSoda
Bemind
Dracula
MouseEatsCat (no longer available)
Sublime Dark (no longer available)
Firefox
Gmail
To install community themes:
Download and unzip the repo
In Nylas Mail, select Developer > Install a Package Manually...
Navigate to where you downloaded the theme and select the root folder. The theme is copied into the ~/.nylas-mail folder for your convinence
Select Change Theme... from the top level menu, and you'll see the newly installed theme. That's it!
Want to dive in more? Try creating your own theme!
Plugins
Some plugins come pre-installed, and are a great starting points for creating your own:
Translate—Works with 10 languages
Quick Replies—Send emails faster with templates
Emoji Keyboard—Insert emoji by typing a colon (:) followed by the name of an emoji symbol
GitHub Sidebar Info
View on GitHub
Personal Level Indicators
Phishing Detection
Community Plugins
Note these are not tested or officially supported by Nylas, but we still think they are really cool! If you find bugs with them, please open GitHub issues on their individual project pages, not the Nylas Mail (N1) repo page. Thanks!
Jiffy (no longer available)—Insert animated GIFs
Weather
Todoist
Unsubscribe
Squirt Spe
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
79 sourcesSorry, didn't see the reply. You want a web app as close to native? Look no further - https://www.nylas.com/download, source https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail.
In How to get your first 100k active usersAhh thanks I need to update that!
Originally Nylas Mail was OSS, but tied to the Nylas Cloud APIs (which did the actual mail processing.)
The cloud strategy was too expensive, and in version 2.0 the entire mail-sync system was moved into the client and open sourced. (https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail/tree/master/packages/cli...). It's now much more like Thunderbird. There's a bit of cloud processing for snoozing / send later, etc., but it no longer syncs all your email through the cloud.
In Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologiesIs the "open source" label still comically misleading? [0]
I tried it out, didn't read the fine print, filed an issue, never looked at it again.
Because "It keeps user data local and private." is kind of one of the main benefits.
[0]: https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail/issues/860
In Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologiesHmm, I thought Mozilla had pulled financial support from Thunderbird? This would be an exciting new chapter for the product, but the article doesn't address whether it makes financial sense for Mozilla to invest this much in Thunderbird's future.
For most of the last three years I've worked on Nylas Mail (https://github.com/Nylas/Nylas-mail), and it hit 2.0 yesterday with Mac/Win/Linux support. It's entirely open source (GPL), written in JavaScript, syncs mail locally, etc. It essentially -is- what the author of the post is looking to build, except it doesn't look like Thunderbird. Nylas put at least $2M+ worth of engineering time into it, and I imagine ThunderbirdJS would take at least a similar commitment of time and effort. Heck, maybe they could just skin Nylas Mail and call it Thunderbird ;-)
In Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologiesOkay, something is weird. I have Outlook.com email with custom domain (previously Windows Live Domains). These kind of accounts had problems with Nylas since forever (see my old GitHub issue - https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail/issues/859). I have tried adding it to new Nylas app with Office 365/custom IMAP with no success.
The weird thing is, in last 15 minutes someone from USA - AWS instance, 35.167.235.231 - tried to connect to my account. This app is said to sync locally, right? But I see no attempts from my IP in Outlook.com panel, but about ten from AWS. All of these started when I installed Nylas and tried to configure it; remaining logins logged by Microsoft are 100% by me (web client, iPhone Mail.app). WTF?
edit: https://a.pomf.cat/gxhabs.png
2nd edit: According to https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail/issues/3405#issuecomment...
Read the rest
someone else is unable to connect with GMail because of Nylas servers throwing HTTP 502. Does it sync locally or through Nylas' AWS instances? Is this why I can't configure my account with IMAP?
Hard to answer your question without hijacking the thread, but here goes:
• It's got pretty much all the power features out there like Snoozing, Open Tracking, Send Later, Reminders, Enriched Contacts (i.e. Rapportive), Unified Inbox, Swipe Actions, Templates, etc.
• It's open source and super easy to extend with JavaScript plugins. Developer have made dozens of themes and some cool plugins including PGP, Unsubscribe, Translation, Todoist, Trello, Markdown, etc.
• It's cross-platform for Mac, Windows & Linux with custom UI styles for each.
• It works with all mail providers including Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, Outlook and even vanilla IMAP and on-prem Exchange servers.
• It syncs your data directly (not via a cloud service) for speed and security.
• It works offline, so you can use it on a plane or when you don't have WiFi.
• It's open source
Read the rest
GPL available on GitHub with >20k stars: https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail
• It's free.
It's also still improving and has over 800 GitHub issues and we would love help from anyone who wants to make email better! :)
At Nylas we made a huge bet on Electron-- our desktop app Nylas Mail actually started as a fork of Atom Shell before the project was rebranded to "Electron."
To be honest, we would have never built this app without Electron. It allowed us to have a small team (2 devs) ship the first version of the app without learning an entire new dev toolchain on multiple platforms. There certainly can be performance issues with building on Chromium/Node but those can be pretty easily addressed.
We even had an early engineer with tons of Cocoa/ObjC programming experience and they still preferred shipping with Electron.
The HN crowd complaining about Electron kind of feels like the early criticism of Dropbox or the iPod. "This is technologically inferior and has fewer features so it is clearly worthless."
For some reason there's a deep-rooted philosophic
Read the rest
al opposition to Electron-like technologies from lots of hackers. But I predict it will be like Java-- everyone "hates" the JVM for years and calls it slow and then one day it's running nearly every mobile device and being used across Google.
It's not crazy to think Electron will evolve like this-- it certainly has the momentum. And the ideas of a web-based desktop app platform have been pushed by Google, Apple, and Microsoft in the past. Seems like we're finally getting there...
(For the curious: https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail )
Not the OP, but the Nylas mail client is open source.
https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail
In Ask HN: Is there a powerful open-source Google Calendar replacement?Heya, I'm the PM for Nylas. We have a Mac mail client called Nylas Mail that's totally free that we launched on HN a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13417616
Built on Electron and the code is open source: https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail
Happy to answer questions about it if you have any -
(And, yes, we are working on getting Windows and Linux out - even though it's an Electron app, there's a lot of platform specific stuff we need to do so that it doesn't go all T Rex on your memory and CPU.)
In Ask HN: What macOS email client do you use?If you're looking for an alternative open source email platform, check out Nylas Mail. It's built in React+ES6 with a rich plugin system.
https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail
(I work at Nylas.)
In Gmail Add-onsWe're getting closer and closer with Nylas Mail, although still have a long way to go!
https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail'
(I work at Nylas)
In Mozilla Acquires PocketI just stumbled upon N1, although I haven't tried it:
https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail
In Finding an Alternative to Mac OS X – Part 2Try the windows release here: https://github.com/nylas/N1/releases
I haven't tried it, but the Linux version works fine with a basic account.
In Nylas Mail is now freeShowing the 15 most recent of 79 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.