Show HN: Swift Mail. Fastmail's modern mail standard delivered natively on macOS

Show HN: Swift Mail. Fastmail's modern mail standard delivered natively on macOS(swiftmail.io)

79 points by knr2345 2 years ago | 102 comments

Hello HN! I'm excited to introduce Swift Mail, a native macOS email client purpose-built for the JMAP mail standard.

Primarily constructed with SwiftUI and occasional AppKit elements, Swift Mail combines the speed and efficiency of a modern mail standard with desktop-centric features such as system notifications, keyboard shortcuts, quick look, multiple windows, state restoration, dark mode, and more.

Swift Mail distinguishes itself from other email clients with its steadfast commitment to the JMAP standard over the traditional IMAP implementation, facilitating seamless alignment with modern mail features. It supports various innovative Fastmail features, such as multiple sending identities, the ability to send or reply on-the-fly from wildcard (*) aliases, and the ability to swiftly transition between (true) label and folder organization schemes.

Swift Mail prioritizes user privacy and does not collect any user data or function through intermediary servers. Instead, it directly connects to the JMAP server with the user's provided account credentials, processing and storing all data locally on the user's device.

Currently, Swift Mail is available directly via the Mac App Store with support extending back to Monterey.

I’m also running a developer build on visionOS (if you have hardware and are interested in testing a beta release, please reach out to beta at swiftmail dot io).

A sincere thank you to everyone who has contributed their valuable insights or participated in beta testing via TestFlight thus far.

Looking forward to your feedback!

- Karl

GrinningFool 2 years ago |

This looks good, but I'm not clear why it's a subscription. I'm happy to pay for upgrades when a new version with new features is offered; and I'm happy to not pay if the new version isn't compelling enough. (Sometimes support for major OS upgrades is enough of a feature.)

I'm increasingly disinclined to feed the subscription-based software economy, especially for the personal tools I use.

jbverschoor 2 years ago | |

Same! I like Sketch's and other app's approach. Keep the version forever, 1 year free upgrades.

Great work! Will def. try it out

knr2345 2 years ago | | |

I'm a fan of Sketch's approach as well, along with Panic's approach to Nova's licensing, which I believe is similar.

Unfortunately, as a solo developer on macOS, some of the more complicated approaches don't seem feasible from a maintenance and support standpoint—at least not initially. I hope to stick with the macOS App Store as well, which I assume adds additional complexity since that type of offering is not supported natively by the framework (to my knowledge anyway).

I would like to explore additional options in the future, but I don't see any major overhauls happening in year 1.

earthnail 2 years ago | | |

Unfortunately that’s not supported by Apple on the App Store. Luckily Mac apps aren’t super reliant on the App Store but it’s still a huge issue.

danesparza 2 years ago | |

Yeah -- I was confused too. Is the subscription just for the client, or does it come with an email account?

knr2345 2 years ago | | |

The subscription is for the client.

While Swift Mail is a Fastmail Platform Partner, it is not affiliated with Fastmail (or others) and does not offer email services directly.

lelandfe 2 years ago | |

Most macOS email apps do subscription pricing these days. Airmail, Spark, Mimestream… I wonder why that is.

mk89 2 years ago | | |

> I wonder why that is.

Money.

Apple gets 30% off your app purchase and/or in-app purchases, while it gets 30% from your subscription for the first year and 15% for the subsequent years.

So, if you think your app is worth 10$, you lose 3$ and the ability to make more money and to support its development (if you do, they have to be in-app purchases, like extensions, etc. and again 30% is gone).

On the other hand, if you sell it with a 0.83$/month subscription (= 10$ / 12months, just to be "fair"), the first year you lose 3$ but you gain later 1.5$. And btw, I don't even think 0.83$ is allowed (AFAIK the price points start with 0.10$ so you can't have weird numbers like 0.23$ or things like that), so you round it up to 0.89$/month or 0.99$/month and you gain even more money, which will be used also to keep the development going.

earthnail 2 years ago | | |

Apple encourages it heavily and even hosts workshops about how to do subscription apps.

szundi 2 years ago | | |

Lots of money

Kluggy 2 years ago |

Over all, I like how it looks, but the price seems high. $3 a month is almost as much as I pay for email service.

Plus it seems weird to double drip. I’m already subscribed to you for the email service and you want me to almost double that price for a client to use it?

Will the existing Fastmail app be deprecated to force folks to the new subscription app?

mk89 2 years ago |

So much criticism.

People, have fun developing stuff for free or for little to no money while having to support a shitload of OS versions and possibly multi-device, multiple framework versions, bugs, people sinking your app on the App Store if you don't react or whatever.

3 dollars per month are nothing IF the app is useful. Email is literally the thing you use the most. Why 3 and not 1 or 5? Maybe 3 dollars are just enough to keep people who just criticize you out of your customer base, which is maybe more worth, considering that nobody installs an app with 1 or 2 stars.

linsomniac 2 years ago | |

That hits a little close to home. A couple months ago I built a tool to transfer my playlists from Spotify to YouTube Music, and I put it on github. Since then it's really taken off, I usually get a few stars a day, and I've put a bunch of work in both fixing issues that other people had and also just doing support for users having problems.

The thing that is funding the development of it at this point is my slow-burning rage at Spotify; the more people I can help get out of Spotify the more wrapped in wings of vengeance I feel.

mk89 2 years ago | | |

Well, I personally am happy that you found what motivates the development of your app :)

However, some people still want to make that ugly thing called ... money... :)

When that's the case, you really need to do your best NOT to let your app sink on the App Store - when that happens, you can say goodbye to your income (be it passive or active), unless someone really gives it a try because there is no other solution, etc. etc.

Avamander 2 years ago | |

If someone gives me an email client that can handle gigabytes of email with a breeze and provide near instant full text search, I'd dish out $3/mo almost instantly. The current state of most email clients is sad to say the least.

malshe 2 years ago | |

And if paid annually it's just $25.

amluto 2 years ago |

Does this work offline? Fastmail’s first party iOS app has such an amazing lack of offline functionality that I’m seriously considering canceling my Fastmail subscription. (Also the lack of threading is getting old.)

thimp 2 years ago | |

Yeah good question. I do a lot of email on planes and travel where there is no internet. In fact I refuse to use any software that isn’t offline first these days.

I was a Fastmail customer for many years but moved to apple’s iCloud+ when they introduced custom domain support as that works entirely offline on all my devices. Also that gives iPhone/mac integrated contacts and calendars with zero hassle that actually syncs to everything properly. It’s cheaper per seat as well (£25 a month for that plus Apple Music for 6 people a month). No brainer.

knr2345 2 years ago | |

Swift Mail currently offers partial offline support.

It doesn't provide full offline support by keeping a complete cached copy of all mail data on disk, as an IMAP client might. Any content received from the server will remain accessible offline and during subsequent app launches.

sonofhans 2 years ago | |

FWIW I’ve been using native iOS mail with Fastmail forever and it works perfectly for me.

Nevin1901 2 years ago |

I would be happy to pay $10 for this but definitely not a monthly subscription when Mail.app is free.

hrpnk 2 years ago |

Is JMAP the base for an email experience revolution? Wonder if we're ripe for one.

For a long time, The Bat! was one of the best e-mail client for its times in the 2000s. Loved it's ticker-style notification bar back then. Sad to see that this piece of software has deteriorated over time and not evolved to support Mac/Linux. Next, Thunderbird emerged as an open alternative that was stable for a time. When GMail took over, few innovations came for email with its own Inbox being a starting point, followed by Superhuman and Hey. Is there room for more? Or are folks too attached to the traditional form of email?

knr2345 2 years ago |

Apologies for the website bandwidth issue! The response caught me by surprise.

Working on this now & adding a few links below for ref in the meantime:

https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1595671863?pt=12263...

https://twitter.com/SwiftMail_io

https://mastodon.social/@SwiftMail

mailto:contact@swiftmail.io

steviedotboston 2 years ago |

The UI looks almost identical to https://mimestream.com/

pembrook 2 years ago | |

Because both are designed to look like Apple Mail (the MacOS native app look is a selling point)

kylehotchkiss 2 years ago | |

I thought it was Mimestream until I looked deeper and realized it wasn't.

ac29 2 years ago | |

It also looks nearly identical to Fastmail's web UI.

Nextgrid 2 years ago |

Is there a way to unlock the custom JMAP server option? Currently it says coming soon - is the feature actually missing or is just disabled due to being experimental, and if so is there a secret keyboard shortcut/etc to enable it? Been meaning to play with JMAP but the lack of native clients thus far has been a problem.

knr2345 2 years ago | |

No, it cannot be enabled within the client.

It was disabled pending user feedback to allow private external testing of the feature while the app itself was open to public testing via website link.

This was to ensure a high quality, two way support channel could be established when enabling the feature for external testing. (It also ensured Test Flight data & support channels would not become polluted with failed attempts to sign in with gmail or similar)

ubermonkey 2 years ago |

A mail client would need to be very very good indeed to get me to stop using the native Mac client. It's fast, stable, and talks to both IMAP and Exchange.

jbverschoor 2 years ago |

Congrats. Also on not collecting data! No trials?

knr2345 2 years ago | |

Thank you! 3 and 7 day trials are available.

jbverschoor 2 years ago | | |

I didn't see those lines somehow

outcoldman 2 years ago |

It is very interesting, but there are plenty of stoppers for me:

1. Subscription model. I will be willing to pay even $250 for a good email client, that is superior to the native macOS client. If it really adds more features that I need. Meaning, I can use mostly all the email related features offered by Fastmail. But I am not willing to support subscription models.

2. No iOS client. I use email on macOS and iOS. Not having support for iOS is a dealbreaker. I want the same client.

3. No trial. As it seems like. I actually tried to download the app. There is a Sign-In page with a disabled Sign In button. I guess I need to subscribe to try it. I can spare $3, but I don't want to support subscription models. Seriously, give me an option to try it for 14–30 days, I will pay for it $100-$200, and you can ask me to pay you again for an upgrade in 3–4 years.

4. The main reason I don't want to try it, also because I am sure, there are probably some nice features, but at the same time, there are most likely so many issues with integrations between other apps. Like links from Reminders to the Mail client, or from Notes to the Mail client. And based on the roadmap [1] it seems like this is mostly MVP product.

[1] https://feedback.swiftmail.io/roadmap/roadmap

boplicity 2 years ago |

My number one requirement for any email interface is that it easily shows the "conversation history" of any contact I'm seeing. This saves me so much time, with the current software I use. I don't love my current software, though, so I'm always on the lookout for new options. Is this a planned feature?

smcleod 2 years ago |

Bandwidth Restricted

The page you have tried to access is not available because the owner of the file you are trying to access has exceeded our short term bandwidth limits. Please try again shortly. Details:

451 Actioning this file would cause "swiftmail.io//" to exceed the per-day file actions limit of 80000 actions, try again later

knr2345 2 years ago | |

Thank you! The response caught me by surprise. Working on this now & adding a few links below for ref in the meantime:

https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1595671863?pt=12263...

https://twitter.com/SwiftMail_io

https://mastodon.social/@SwiftMail

mailto:contact@swiftmail.io

thimp 2 years ago |

I like the look of it but I don't know what JMAP is and what the advantage is over say IMAP / SMTP.

jbverschoor 2 years ago | |

It's a reworked email protocol, created by fastmail. Basically email over json (send + receive) instead of imap+smtp.

https://jmap.io/

thimp 2 years ago | | |

Got it. Fuck that. JSON has no part in an email stack. Have we not learned from our failures as a species.

Edit: I've got 99 problems and 98 of them are JSON on a regular basis. Poor parsers, problems dealing with numeric values, terrible terrible schema support, poor encapsulation support, large things attached to it in base64 (difficult to stream on most parsers), difficult to read without external tools which actually tend to mung or fix the problem you are trying to see (jq does this), completely arbitrary and random metadata jammed in everywhere by everyone trying to make it self-describing, shitty enapsulated types i.e. ISO 8601 date in a text field rather than a principal type.

Urgh kill me. It's a hammer made of poo and no one knows any better any more. It's the PHP of wire formats. The COBOL of representation encapsulation.

Edit 2: the only positive is it's probably less bad than CalDAV but that's not even supposed to be part of an email stack is it? Everyone has outlook brain.

holigot 2 years ago |

Hi,

thanks for this nice App. Will have a look at it.

There is another cool app coming up. It's called FMail2 http://fmail-app.fr

Maybe it's also interesting to compare it. Just to let you know about.

berkut 2 years ago |

Getting a Bandwidth Restricted error:

Bandwidth Restricted

The page you have tried to access is not available because the owner of the file you are trying to access has exceeded our short term bandwidth limits. Please try again shortly.

knr2345 2 years ago | |

Thanks! This should be resolved soon.

core-utility 2 years ago |

Looked at it and debated leaving Spark Mail but the price throws me off, and the lack of IMAP support to still be able to receive my junk Gmail is a deal breaker.

vel0city 2 years ago |

Aside from the obvious FOSS arguments, what are the big positives to JMAP for me as a user over using a client that supports Exchange?

Nextgrid 2 years ago | |

It's HTTP-based and every request is stateless compared to IMAP, so it should tolerate unreliable connections better. IMAP in contrast is stateful and the process of establishing that state requires more round-trips, so connection establishment is slower.

heeton 2 years ago |

Email snooze is, for me, a standard requirement for any email tool. I tried the free trial but cancelled.

nikolay 2 years ago |

This is way too expensive!

fotta 2 years ago |

seems like you've exceeded the bandwidth quota of your cdn provider

knr2345 2 years ago | |

Thank you! Should be back up soon.

stdcss01 2 years ago |

Loving Swift Mail! Just installed last week and finally getting my email under control. Three email addresses from different services all together in the fastest email client I’ve ever used. Super smooth, clutter-free interface that I like opening every day.