> we think that superhuman, in it's current implementation is vim-like.

What does this mean? Superhuman has AI integration, an expensive subscription model, is built with Electron¹, is backed by VC money, and a bunch of other things to arguably dislike and actively avoid. It seems like the polar opposite of vim.

> and expand it into something more vscode-like.

Again, what does this mean? Are you going to add even more telemetry to something that’s supposed to be private?

I’m really struggling to see how the comparison applies. You do know vim isn’t dead? People still use and love it, and with good reason.

¹ If I recall correctly.

I can't speak to the rest of the comparison, but regarding

> You do know vim isn’t dead? People still use and love it, and with good reason.

I interpret their sentiment as "if you prefer vscode to vim, you'll prefer us to superhuman". Whether that's true is another question, but it seems like that's what they're going for.

> What does this mean?

I think it means its focused on hands-on-keyboard interaction with your email. Everything is acceessible via keyboard shortcuts and there's no need to reach for your mouse with Superhuman.

Aerc

https://aerc-mail.org/

Mutt

Pine.

Vim-like primarily in its mouse-free UX, not its other properties.

I think it’s a reference to the amazing but closed Superhuman.com email desktop app

First line of Readme lost me.

> Email has been around since 1971 (according to Google GPT).

Why state a fact, reference your potentially incorrect source, and then not fact-check it yourself to totally avoid the need to mention your source in the first place? That seems… silly?

Edit: read more comments and see OP has clarified this is a joke. The joke is easy to miss (according to ChatGPT)

Would be quit thrilled to see decent powerful alternative to thunderbird. Will it actually support any open protocols like IMAP or JMAP? If you say vim-like how is the relation to mutt? ( Would really love to see a web app version of mutt actually)

Likewise; this ticks so many boxes for me, but as a hippy-dippy non-gmail user I too have to second the IMAP/JMAP ask.

Gmail absolutely hits that sweet spot of API capabilities and where the users are, so I can’t fault the project creators (or most every email client business these days) for building first (or exclusively) for it.

That said, seeing Outlook as coming soon on their login page is reassuring that they’re building in a way that won’t tie them to Gmail forever. And while few email providers outside of Fastmail are offering JMAP support, as an API it’s much closer to the degree of functionality expected by anyone building on top of Gmail’s API today. A great new client that gives a big section of the public a better way to “do email” might be what it takes for more services to start offering JMAP.

So hats off to y’all and fingers crossed on incorporating open standards.

Hey Riordan, curious to know specifically what you're looking for?

But right on about Gmail, it's much easier for us to prototype and test than some of the other clients.

Also really appreciate the kind words! Means a lot to us at this early stage. Hopefully you do join the email list or discord so we can keep you posted on our progress!

Supporting standard SMTP and IMAP lets you access the whole universe of mail servers, from Yahoo to Zoho to MXRoute.

Plenty of powerful or unique alternatives were built and became popular over the years, only for them to be snubbed out by big tech acquisitions.

Remember Sparrow? (acquired and killed by Google, turned into Inbox then killed again)

Remember Mailbox? (acquired and killed by Dropbox)

Tech incumbents actively stifling innovation in email. Meanwhile the actual email spec itself hasn't evolved for decades so you still have to write HTML like it's 1999.

The reason why you have to write HTML like it's 1999 has nothing to do with "the email spec" not having evolved. The MIME RFCs are perfectly capable of supporting modern HTML and even any alternative representation (that's where MIME types come from!). The reason is exactly the lack of innovation in incumbent email clients — Outlook for Windows still uses the Microsoft Word HTML rendering engine from the nineties and Google Mail's sanitization allowlist is so aggressive that it filters out almost all modern CSS and HTML. And of course, all these clients support only text or HTML.

The most modern email client in terms of HTML/CSS support — by miles — is Apple Mail (on both macOS and iOS), which seems to support almost everything that modern Safari supports [1]. But you have to target the lowest common denominator (Outlook/Gmail), as polyfilling or progressive enhancement in emails are near impossible. GMail was once the client that revolutionized email, but then they started chasing after stuff like AMP for email and acquiring+killing other clients instead of just keeping up with standards.

Email could be such a nice technology if Google and Microsoft evolved their email clients with the same ambition as they evolved their web browsers.

[1] https://www.caniemail.com/scoreboard/

The problem if I understand correctly is that email was never intended to support embedded HTML but plain text (just as HTML was never intended to evolve to what it is today, beyond using it for sharing scientific information). I can't recall where I read it but sending a page to be rendered in an email is considered an aberration and one of the reasons to do that is for advertising/spam (and now also scam) purposes.

hey Riedel, that's something we plan to look into (after we nail gmail and add outlook) as I personally have a mailbox on IMAP too.

Do join our discord or mailing list so that we can keep you posted about it if you're interested!

I've also never heard of Mutt sadly :') but couple of you mention it already so it's definitely on my list of things to try today! What is your experiences with Mutt so far? How does it stack up with other more mainstream clients?

Mutt is the best TUI power-user choice (besides Emacs I guess). I’ve been using Mutt for over two decades. The one drawback is that there is no straightforward way to reply in HTML format to HTML mails.

> All third party components incorporated into the skylarinbox.com Software are licensed under the original license provided by the owner of the applicable component.

Can you elaborate on what components and licenses these are?

How does this client compare to the leading open source email client, Thunderbird? Can this client reply to emails with a custom From address, as catch-all domain users need? Can this client infer which custom From address to use from the mail being replied to?

This only works with gmail, with outlook coming soon.

So it is not comparable at all.

Thunderbird is an email client, this is an interface to proprietary email services.

I see, thank you.

> Can this client reply to emails with a custom From address, as catch-all domain users need?

Sadly it does not support either.

we're currently looking towards gmail(current) => outlook => protocol layer for now. However, will definitely keep note of it.

> How does this client compare to the leading open source email client, Thunderbird?

Took a shot at this here: https://github.com/curdinc/skylar-email/issues/61. I'd be glad to elaborate more as needed.

I'd love to know about your thunderbird experience.

> Looking for feedback and suggestions!

I'm not really sure what makes skylar-email different than my current email client.

Perhaps create a walkthrough / demo with screenshots that highlight different features?

Also, can you explain the basic requirements? I assume an imap email server? Does it run on Windows / MacOS, or do I need to figure out how to host it?

> Perhaps create a walkthrough / demo with screenshots that highlight different features?

Sounds good, will take note and add that in for future showcases!

> Also, can you explain the basic requirements? I assume an imap email server? Does it run on Windows / MacOS, or do I need to figure out how to host it?

Ya, so it turns out I might have been misleading when I mention email client which a couple others have pointed out. Going to update my post to be more accurate.

Right now it's more of a Gmail client. runs in a browser, and you can access it at curdinc.com/1

The banner in your readme says excalidraw but links to your site.

Was using their readme as a basis and it seems like I forgot to update one link which is affecting like half the folks :')

Thanks for pointing it out! Fix is on the way out!

I used Nylas for a while, followed my Mailspring when that died, but building an electron based app, especially something as complicated as a email client is hard.

I’d suggest focusing on your core requirements, and supporting plugins to delegate the hard work.

Gonna try this out!

Is superhuman a product name? I'm confused by this post.

Yeah, it's a fairly new (few years) email client that some people swear by. I believe they have a focus on being keyboard oriented.

It's 8 years old, not sure I'd call it fairly new :)

true, really depends on your perspective.

I like to think that my 8 year old tortoise is fairly new.

But I also think that my 8 year old shirt is fairly old

What's your take on the keyboard-oriented approach?

Fair enough, if we ever do a dedicated client, we would hopefully invest in something more efficient. Likely going to stay on browser for a while more though, since most people already have their browsers opens, having a tab open feels lightweight enough especially compared to an electron app.

Yeap, we hear you folks on the IMAP/SMTP support! Feel free to sign up on the email list or join our discord to keep up to date with developments!

Out of curiosity, What client do you use today? How's the experience been for the workflow that you use it for?

Looks great. FYI I tried signing up to the alpha waitlist and got an error message.

I'm an IMAP/Fastmail user.

I think there may be a significant overlap between individuals with IMAP requirements and individuals who can't or won't communicate over Discord. Any non-SMS-gated communication channel like Matrix or IRC would open you up to that crowd beyond this HN thread.

That's super good to know, thanks for sharing! been years since my last IRC. Will have to get back into it

Can this work with proton mail?

Hey.com is one of my favorite “new design” email clients. The OTP feature in Skylar seems cool, maybe they can steal it ;)

Stealing is the greatest form of flattery!

What do you love most about hey.com? Maybe we could steal you over ;)

are there docs? how do I build it myself?

Yeap.

https://github.com/curdinc/skylar-email/blob/main/CONTRIBUTI...

should point you in the right direction. Feel free to ping back here, on github, or on Discord.

does it jmap?

> Email has been around since 1971 (according to Google GPT).

So now LLMs are considered trustworthy references? Is it really that hard to read something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#History?

Spoiler: it seems wrong.

When I was in school as well. Though other encyclopedias were considered fine. Wikipedia was just new back then.

However, I see a big difference. First, Wikipedia generally lists its sources (LLMs don't, or not always, or just completely invent references). And then if I give Wikipedia as a source, first I chose that it was good enough in this case (I am not doing a PhD in the history of email), and I assume that you can think critically about the fact that it comes from Wikipedia (probably you will agree that it is good enough in this case).

Referencing an LLM is the exact equivalent to saying "a friend who I know routinely tells me complete bullshit told me this". I honestly don't see how this can get better than e.g. Wikipedia. Well at least before LLMs are used to populate Wikipedia and destroy it, I mean.

fair enough though, and ya, we were never allowed to cite wiki sources either. I'll make a note for future docs to be more serious

I apologize if that came off rude - I did not mean it that way. I honestly was not sure if Wiki sources were still "forbidden" in school, that was a while ago for me.

spoiler: it was a joke

Sorry, it was not obvious to me at all. The irony being that it may serve as training for a next iteration of LLMs (at least if their sense of humour is as bad as mine :-)).

Hijacking this thread (sorry) but does anyone really love Superhuman these days?

I want it to be great, and have given it a couple chances, but it never has paid off for me. Having conversation view for email be mandatory is one of several examples that make me thing it's just not a serious thing.

I don’t see the email signature much anymore, but maybe people just removed them. I know they rolled out a student discount that’s pretty substantial. If I could get it for $5/month, I’d consider it. But I’m not a student anymore!

I love-hate it. Work pays for it. And I feel guilty work spends money on it. But I love it so much more than Gmail's native interface.

You should try shortwave.com, it’s cheaper, has a similar feature set and in some ways it’s better (the dark mode is much better, for example)

I've tried it too, and it has some things I like, like the AI stuff seems pretty good compared to other solutions I've seen.

But all these tools suffer I think from being too opinionated. Like I get why they do that, and to some extent that's the right approach, but you need to add enough configuration options so that you don't end up with one thing that's a deal breaker.

For me it's conversation view. Emails don't come in conversations, it's totally outside the protocol and not supported within the information available (all such "threads" are by definition a guess as to what's happening) and I don't understand how any power user puts up with it.

Am I really the only one who has threads with the same subject line that branch into private conversations between specific people and/or change topic a few times?

How can an email client claim to be serious if it can't literally just show me list of the fucking emails I have received in the order I received them. Like how can this still be a thing?

And why can't I always just sort by attribute, like an XL sheet, sort by sender, by date, by subject, by whatever I want. Like this is the most basic function for any kind of table with rows. And yet...

Just hopped on shortwave and will pilot it for the next week or so.

Is the conversation view you are referring to like this screenshot? https://github.com/curdinc/skylar-email/assets/44563205/444f...

^ I just tried replying to the same email twice.

Totally get that an email client should really focus on letting you do what you want. What are you using today? And what's keeping on that client?

Yes conversation view is where if there's an email thread with, say, 8 replies, you still just have one "row" in your list of emails, and clicking into it reveals (usually) the most recent message with the others below.

I fucking hate it, passionately. Each email is its own communication and needs to be reviewed and addressed individually.

In like a personal conversation it's sort of tolerable but in a business context I can't stand it, it's insane that there are clients that don't let you turn it off.

As for me I use the gmail/workspace web interface for the most part, and no I don't like it but it's workable. For my main work email I also keep open a window to a client called "Mailstrom" which is stone cold simple and works great for the one thing I can't live with out, which is the ability to very quickly just see all emails from a sender, or with a certain subject.

When I get behind and have 200 emails to get through in an hour that ability to limit/sort is invaluable and I don't understand why gmail still can't do that.

The other email I subscribe to is Clean Email, which is basically OK but is the best one I've seen for unsubscribing to stuff and seeing which mailing lists I'm on and so forth. I log in to that one every week or so and use it to get out of mailing cadences I've found myself involved in.

I see you don’t like threads, you just want each message to be it’s own entity. I think Apple Mail has a setting for this but Shortwave is very much a more sophisticated version of threads compared to other clients. They detect side conversations in threads and split them off into separate threads with links between them.

Heard that a lot. Most people I know have work paying for it. Mine does too.

Apart from pricing, I'd love to know - what problems have you faced while using superhuman? Any features that you miss from native gmail?

co-builder here...

> Hijacking this thread (sorry) but does anyone really love Superhuman these days? Not a huge fan, used it one, apart from the cost - it does have some nice features - keyboard first, super responsive, and sleek (although dark mode could use some love). Which led us to building the client - TLDR: create a customizable, tabular client with connectors to Gmail(current)/Outlook/Native.

> I want it to be great, and have given it a couple chances, but it never has paid off for me. Having conversation view for email be mandatory is one of several examples that make me thing it's just not a serious thing. Curious about learning more about your experience - always open to ideas... What were you looking for and how did it disappoint?

An email client for gmail is not an email client. It's a Gmail client.

fair enough, outlook will be coming soon.

Would love to pick your brain on what would make for a great email client

Actual email support. IMAP/JMAP and SMTP.

IMO it's misleading to call it an email client when it does not do actual email. Making your Gmail client also-an-Outlook-client does not make it an email client.

Fair enough, will take note in future communications!

> (...) what would make for a great email client

I have a fairly non standard use of email, so I'm a bad target for brain picking. I can give a summary, though.

I work generally using a simplified GTD. Important features which I already have are good integration with my calendar and todoist as well as keyboard only navigation. Email analysis features I'd like to have are classification of:

- messages where my action is required;

- message classification by project;

- how long will it take me to handle this message (i.e. do it now vs add to todoist)

Open-source superhuman email client? I don't know... Maybe the author is not aware of mutt: http://www.mutt.org/ (or neomutt: https://neomutt.org/). Which in my opinion is way way closer to "superhuman".

Or Aerc! https://aerc-mail.org/

I saw it a couple of times popping up on HN but never tried it (and forgot its name). It looks neat. Definetly deserves to be tried out!

damn, this looks pretty cool, I might use my mouse a little too much for this but will give this a spin alongside mutt and see how they compare!

Do you daily drive Aerc? How's the experience been?

I do, backed by mbsync and notmuch. I've tried most email clients and aerc is what's stuck around for the past few years.

If you're looking for something more graphical/visual, Asteroid's worth a try, too.

I do, with mbsync for offline sync. It is great, also with the git email workflow! The author (Drew Devault) has a few videos showing how to use it with git that got me into it.

I am actually not aware of mutt, but now that two others have mentioned it, I will definitely take a look!

Thanks!

do you use it? What do you use it most for?

I've stopped using it so maybe not the best person to contribute an answer, but I used it most for purely terminal, purely keyboard driven email.

Being able to do things on a headless VM over SSH is very useful to me. At one point I even dispensed with a graphical environment on my Linux machine, and just used tmux and a pseudo terminal!

Given my use case, I don't think the command line aspect is worth targeting for you in any way, but the keyboard only definitely would be! That doesn't mean it can't support a mouse, but if it can be completely driven with just the keyboard, that is a massive selling point to me.

Awesome work by the way! Really cool to see someone building an open source Superhuman!

Mutt is very well known. People are very opinionated about the way they use email. If you want to build an email client, I would go familiarize yourself with the massively popular mail clients like mutt, Thunderbird, Outlook. A lot of effort has been spent learning how to do email.

Yeap, have used thunderbird an outlook.

Email client are a lot like pokemons, trying to collect them all!

What do you use today? And how do you find it?

All that text and not a single screenshot. What does it actually look and feel like to use?

If you ever used vim, then that is what mutt is to email. You need to learn it and configure it, which can take some time, same as emacs or vim.