Nylas Mail

~ the last words ~

The sunset post went up on 6 September 2017 and said that beginning that day Nylas was open-sourcing the remaining components of Nylas Mail and ending further Nylas-sponsored development. Three weeks later, on 1 October, the people still running on old N1 coupon codes were moved onto the $84 a year Pro price. The company stopped working on the product and raised the price of it in the same month.

N1 launched on 5 October 2015, built on Electron and React, and the pitch was that a mail client should be a platform. You would write plugins for your inbox the way people wrote packages for Atom, and other people would write plugins you could install, and email would stop being a thing you merely endured. It was a good demo. The interface was nice to look at in a category where nice was rare.

The rename to Nylas Mail arrived with the release of 17 January 2017, which is the sort of thing a company does when it intends to keep going. Development effectively stopped that spring. By September the announcement only confirmed what the commit history already showed, and it came wrapped in reassurance: if you already have an account it will continue working, with all plugins, free and paid, for the foreseeable future.

~ the record ~

~ what you were actually paying for ~

The client was open source and the sync was not. Unless you stood up the sync engine yourself, your mail flowed through Nylas's cloud, which is where the paid features lived and where the company's real product was already pointed. That arrangement is why the app was never as portable as its license suggested. The code was yours. The service the code talked to was theirs, and it was being kept alive on the sufferance of a company whose revenue came from somewhere else.

Nylas the business was selling an email API to other developers, and by 2017 that was working well enough that a consumer mail client with a $7 a month tier looked like a distraction. The blog post said as much in the polite register these posts use, about focusing all energy on a single opportunity.

~ the fork ~

Ben Gotow, one of the lead developers, took the MIT-licensed code and shipped Mailspring in October 2017, about a month after the sunset. The important change was underneath: he threw out the cloud dependency and wrote a new sync engine in C++ on top of Mailcore2, which ran locally and fixed a pile of provider bugs that had dogged N1 for two years. Existing Nylas Pro subscriptions could be transferred across.

So the code survived and the product did not. Mailspring carries a different name and a different sync model, and nobody has shipped anything called Nylas Mail since September 2017.

~ the part that did not survive ~

The plugin ecosystem was the entire argument, and it never arrived at any size. A mail client has to be finished before it is extensible, and N1 was still fighting Exchange and Gmail edge cases when it was asking developers to build on top of it. Twenty-three months was not enough runway to get past that.

This one sat outside my orbit for a plain reason: it was a paid American desktop client aimed at people whose inbox is their working surface, released in the years when the rest of the world had quietly agreed that mail happens in a browser tab. I run my mail the way most engineers here do, in whatever the provider gives you, and a $84 subscription to reskin that was never a question I was going to be asked.

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