Tip / topic about whole NC mail concept

[rarapost]

Hello guys

It is a good idea to create mail client integrated to NC, but (by my opinion) the way how the team does it is questionable. There is a lot of useful (and more or less working) open source web mail client. There is already Rainloop NC app existing. Rainloop is user friendly, even if its development slowed down and there is a lot of unfixed issues. Also another option - Mailpile - has clean and well usable UI.
Isn't it better to adopt one of them, participate on its development (and so enhance its community), than develop new one from scratch? Or at least clone it and modify it according NC needs ?
NC mail app UI is a bit "spartan" to me and is is hard for daily usage. There is a lot of issues and unfinished things. It will need big development until it reaches maturity level, that today have both mentioned clients.
O know a lot of work has been done on the app, but still ... isn't it worth to think about change of this concept ?
I am fan of NC, I support you and appreciate your work. This my post is not criticism, only and idea and my thinking

[ChristophWurst]

The simple answer is that we want to have something tightly integrated. Not just some mail client. Those already exist.

See #2250. This was brought up before. And for the high-level goal see #65 :)

Thanks for taking the time to send this message.

[rarapost]

Thank you for your respnse, I really welcome good mail client in NC, but it would have to be matured enough for daily usage. And, of course, tight integration with NC is crucial.

I understand the point you wrote. But still ... I cant get rid of impression that you're trying reinvent thing already exist (at least in case od UI). There are many open source mail solutions (for example already mentioned Carnet) that have UI similar to well-known UIs (Google, MS). Google's approach (although maybe not the best possible) is proven, it works and lots of people are used to use it. MS Use similar layout. Google (and MS) have teams of UX experts ... so why invent any other things?

As a (former) SW developer I know the most work is on the side of UI/UX (and surrounding - input treatment, output formatting, layout, event reacting ... etc). If you develop everything from scratch, you need all these things develop once again. I guess better is use something already existing, either join to the community (this is better - if it is possible of course) or create clone of it and continue development this way. That's my point I wanted to share.

[ChristophWurst]

You can check out the existing integration of FLOSS webmail. They are subpar. It's very hard to integrate an existing but completely independent solution into ours. Also think about maintainability. Maybe we could take one of the php solution and adjust it design-wise and add features for the integration. But would we be able to update to the changes upstream? I doubt it. They are not designed as application components but standalone applications.