Mailspring - I really want to like this product

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#1

I have been using Mailspring for about 4 months or so now. I really want to like this product, but I have nothing but constant problems with: o365 and Apple Mail (@mac.com).

First, I love the interface, I like the sleek and simple design. I love some of the features that Mailspring has, but my issues are things that I am seeing a lot of people report.

  1. I have my own o365 email account (business) that I can make every change possible to make this work, and it was working (sorta) for a while. It uses oAuth to authenticate with o365 and every once in a while the token would expire and I would have to reauthorize. Well, today, it just stopped working. When I reauthorize it looks and does the same thing, but then the popup box with the URL (you can copy) just says that authentication failed, even though the web page says successful. It’s like Mailspring is having issues intercepting the authorization. Normally it would open the page and the pop up… complete the login on the web page, and then redirect to the popup and it would eventually finish and close the popup. Now, it’s just hung.

  2. I also have a personal @mac.com email address. I have a separate email password for this, and it too was working fine, but then one day, it just sits and starts scanning and never wants to complete. Mailspring will utilize 100% of my CPU, and when I click off the scanning, or minimize, the CPU stops running 100% and sometimes mail will come through.

Well today, I had my fill between o365 stopping completely, and now I can barely get @mac.com emails to come through, I just don’t think I can continue. The unfortunate part… I love this application. Aside from those two connection issues, I want this to work, I want to continue using it, and I just cannot.

I would love to hear about other things to try and fix, but I cannot continue to have email lose connection and not get emails. At this point, it’s just frustrating to me… if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

Things I have tired:

  • Updating to latest versions.
  • Delete cache
  • Remove accounts and re-add
  • Tried to manually copy/paste URL for oAuth (o365 only)
  • Tried to add as IMAP/POP3 (o365 only)

Unfortunately, nothing seems to work and I have now lost 4 - 5 hours of time trying to get this working. At this point, unless someone else has ideas, I am reluctantly going to be looking for another email solution. :frowning:

#2

Sorry, this doesn’t help in relation to your issues but a lot of users left Mailspring as this software was pretty much abandoned a long time ago now and almost all of its users were experiencing bugs in some shape or form…

See here. I posted this back in June… So almost 6 months ago now.

Unless someone with the necessary development expertise with what this software is built-in contributes and forks the project, it’s unlikely to get better any time soon. Make of that what you will of course…

#3

Thank you for your reply, I had no idea, and your experience seems about what I am going through. This is a real disappointment to be honest. Mailspring, as you even mentioned in your post, has a lot of potential and is actually one of the better clients (look, feel, experience) wise, but is riddled with bugs.

If I was better at coding and developing, I would consider helping out with the project/effort. I am currently in the process of building out some of my own python stuff, but I wish I could help out here, as I would try and fix some of these bugs/issues.

Maybe I will look at it and see if there is anything I can do, it will take me a long time to get up to speed, but maybe it will be worth it.

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#4

I am probably lucky, as I did not have big e-mail connection problems since I started using Mailspring around a year ago. Since then, I have implemented several big features such as color-coding accounts or a vertical reading pane. Currently, I am working on upgrading the electron engine to a much newer (and still supported) version, which hopefully makes further development easier.

@dgmiller81 If you want, I can try to point you to simple things, if you want to improve your development skills while working on a quite big project.

Unfortunately, I cannot really help with these connection issues, as my C++ knowledge (needed for https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring-Sync) is not really existent. I still try to push the project forward with my contributions, as I really love it despite these flaws, that you all mentioned.