If you're looking for a great mail experience on Linux, I definitely recommend checking out Nylas N1. It's open source and built on ElectronJS with a beautiful UI and modern features.
Hey Ollie-- sorry about that. Honestly the truth is we weren't expecting N1 to grow so fast in popularity, and we realistically couldn't afford the unbounded infrastructure cost associated with running it for free.
We also didn't want to add an advertising system or sell user data or anything scammy like that to pay the bills, so we decided to simply charge users for the version which uses our hosted backend. We had to implement this pretty quickly, and I wrote about the transition here: https://nylas.com/blog/nylas-pro
Our team at the time was almost entirely engineers (including myself) and we definitely could have done a better job with the messaging.
But on another note... stay tuned! We're working on some updates that should make it more affordable for folks who just want the basic mail experience and don't need any of the pro features like open/link tracking, mail merge, Salesforce integration, etc.
Thanks for your reply. I totally understand, and of course, at the end of the day I was trying to just leech on the free tier. It was just the communication around it that sucked, as well as the suddenness.
To be honest, it's not really for me - I liked the app, but was only using your server infrastructure because that's the way the app worked. (I just wanted the UI into gmail and outlook.)
> Thanks for your reply. I totally understand, and of course, at the end of the day I was trying to just leech on the free tier. It was just the communication around it that sucked, as well as the suddenness.
Well, you did get a year subscription for free. That part of communication didn't suck. I'd agree it felt a bit like bait 'n switch, but their developers also gotta eat.
I'm just using Nylas N1 as home user, and I don't want any more subscriptions. I'm oversubscribed as it is. If I were commercial of business that'd be different.
A one time fee would be OK with me (YMMV!). It is also still an open source version.
Would I be able to self host on a Raspberry Pi btw? Aren't businesses better off to just self host instead of going w/Pro?
Nope, I would have been more than prepared to roll with that (hell, I might even have ended up paying for it) - but that disappeared as soon as the free tier disappeared.
It seems 1yr free Pro was there to entice you to upgrade, but once there was nothing to upgrade from there was nothing free at all.
How so? The free 1 year Pro came with additional features. There was effort required to activate it, but it was minimal effort. To me it feels like a 1 year demo. I come from a time where shareware stopped functioning after X days (where X was usually a month). So to me, it feels generous.
> but once there was nothing to upgrade from there was nothing free at all.
There is, if you self host. To me, it seems a serious organisation should anyway, for data protection reasons. Right now, I'm hosting the access to my e-mail data in the USA. Sounds good? For a European (individual, for profit, non profit organisation, or government), it isn't. I'd like to not hold that against Nylas, but OTOH they could just provide a self hosting backend server with Nylas N1 anyway. Or inform the user about this at least.
Nylas also plan to offer a limited, free version on top of that.
Its a young company, so they're still figuring out their business models. Its easy to attribute malice to that, but it could just as well be incompetence.
We sent out several emails to existing users that included a coupon for a year free, and thousands upon thousands of people did take advantage of this. Perhaps you missed the window? Either way, stay tuned. :)
https://github.com/nylas/n1
https://nylas.com/download
PS: I work at Nylas. :)