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

[knr2345]

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]

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]

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

[danesparza]

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

[lelandfe]

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

[Kluggy]

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?

[mcpeepants]

this isn't a first-party app for Fastmail, at least afaict. I had the same initial reaction before realizing this.

(I still have the same reaction to the pricing... but at least it's not double dipping by Fastmail themselves)

[baggachipz]

The price is a deal-breaker for me. It's borderline insulting, having to pay a subscription fee for an already-paid email service. Were it a value-add, it'd be compelling.

-- edit --

Turns out it's not made by Fastmail, it just uses "Fastmail's standard" of JMAP. I'm still not going to pay a monthly subscription for it; a one-time fee would be much more palatable IMO.

[pembrook]

$3/month? Seriously?

Does nobody here see the irony of being a community of people who make their income working in software that refuses to pay even $3/month for software? Ditto for the universal hatred of ad-based business models.

This is why the consumer market for software is basically non-existent. Consumers value their time at $0 so they get free tools subsidized by intrusive ads or expensive hardware.

Businesses make more rational decisions with their time and resources. To the developer of this cool product, I recommend targeting B2B instead.

[internalfx]

Is this actually made by Fastmail? It doesn't look like it.

[mk89]

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]

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.

[Avamander]

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]

And if paid annually it's just $25.

[amluto]

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]

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]

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]

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

[Nevin1901]

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

[hrpnk]

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]

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:[e-mail]

[steviedotboston]

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

[pembrook]

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

[kylehotchkiss]

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

[ac29]

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

[Nextgrid]

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]

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]

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]

Congrats. Also on not collecting data! No trials?

[knr2345]

Thank you! 3 and 7 day trials are available.

[outcoldman]

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

[WirelessGigabit]

2. For 3rd party clients you cannot have a mail client without an intermediate server.

Consider a mail service that only has IMAP-IDLE [1]. iOS's mail does not support that.

So ANY 3rd party to be able to deliver notifications you either have to go through Apple's push notification service (or ask for Local push connectivity [2]). But regardless, it implies that in order for you to trigger the notification (either via Apple to the device, or directly) you must thus know that a new email has popped up. The only way to keep track of this is to use an intermediate server that maintains connection with IMAP-IDLE, and thus needs to know credentials.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP_IDLE

[2]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkextension/l...

[knr2345]

Thanks for following up below to update some these points. Just want to touch on a few, if I may:

2. An iOS client is planned going forward. The first few iterations of Swift Mail were actually deployed to both iOS & macOS, so there's quite a bit of shared platform code in place already when the time is right. I have a visionOS build up and running already as well, which I think bodes well for that effort.

3. (Trials do exist, as you mentioned below)

4. Swift Mail does provide support for mailto link handling, and it can be set as the default macOS mail client as well. I'm not familiar with linking from Reminders or Notes directly to the Mail app, however, so can't speak to that workflow at the moment.

Any and all feedback is appreciated & encouraged though so please don't hesitate to reach out as needed.

Note - that roadmap is not valid and was meant to be deactivated long ago after I cancelled my subscription during the beta (great experience but couldn't automate release notes with Xcode Cloud). A replacement roadmap and feedback portal should be back online very soon at that same link, however.

[outcoldman]

Actually, spoke too soon. There is a trial. 7 days trial for annual subscription, 3 days trial for monthly. But I was right about that being MVP/Alpha product:

1. No reply button to email. You can only compose a new mail message.

2. I have received new mail, got notification, but don't see it in the list (inbox). You need to restart the mail client to do so.

3. No images are displayed in the message body.

4. The interface is very not-intuitive in some parts yet. Like in the Threads - to expand the message you need to click a tiny button on the right, clicking on the message or on the body does not do anything.

Anyway, I am excited about this email client. But I don't see how I can justify paying for it yet. It is good maybe for read-only mode, but if I don't replace mail app, I don't see how it is much different from me just opening fast mail in the browser.

[boplicity]

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]

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]

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:[e-mail]

[thimp]

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

[jbverschoor]

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

https://jmap.io/

[holigot]

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]

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]

Thanks! This should be resolved soon.

[core-utility]

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]

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]

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]

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

[nikolay]

This is way too expensive!

[fotta]

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

[knr2345]

Thank you! Should be back up soon.

[stdcss01]

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.