sync-engine

Nylas.com | Full time | San Francisco | Onsite ~ but we'll help you relocate Do you like writing open source code as your craft? Want to work on something that impacts every single person on the internet but isn't creepy? Nylas.com is hiring Engineers and SRE's to build beautiful products using EMAIL as its base. If you like ownership, steady customers, and a challenge of building then please reach out to me personally or apply below. You'll work on * https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine * https://github.com/nylas/N1 * Improving developer happiness - https://nylas.com/blog/technical-debt/ ... * And whatever else it takes to move the massive amounts of data that we see Tech Stack: Python, Flask, Electron, React, MySQL, AWS https://nylas.com/jobs/

Glad to see you here. The first time I learned about Nylas (here on HN, can't find the link atm) someone complained rather loudly that the open-source version of the sync server doesn't support 'proper' authentication. I never saw a reply to that. Do you understand that criticism? Do you understand what they might've been talking about? Looking at GitHub I guess they were talking about https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine#nylas-api-service and the need to pass the id via basic auth/as username.

Probably the biggest thing is that it translates a traditional document-based data structure (mailboxes via IMAP) into a stateless, streaming transactional data structure. This allows N1 to be way more efficient and faster, and only load about 2% of the total data in your mailbox. The sync engine is essentially an abstraction layer for IMAP/SMTP/MIME/etc. This architecture has become pretty common in the past few years: Mailbox, Outlook Mobile (Acompli), Spark, Cloud Magic, Gmailify, and many more run similar systems. Although as far as I know, we're the only one who has open sourced our backend.:https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine We actually released the API layer before N1, and lots of developers use it for their own apps and pay us to run the infrastructure. If you're curious, the full docs here: nylas.com/docs/platform You can prett

It's not a ploy-- just a design choice. The cloud sync engine does a lot of heavy lifting so N1 is faster and efficient. It's also open source free software so you can run it yourself! https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine (I work at Nylas.)

N1 supports connecting to all the major email providers, as well as pretty much every obscure IMAP server run by your ISP! What's pointed out in the FAQ is just that it uses a cloud service component (also open source! http://github.com/nylas/sync-engine) that we developed first to make it easier to build clients.