I’m not interested in the features Mailspring ID brings. Would it be possible to use Mailspring without Mailspring ID? I believe all necessary features for a fully-working open source email client are built-in, so why forcing to use Mailspring ID? This, along with mailsync not being open source kinda defeats the purpose of the Mailspring client being open source. Well, besides the fact that anybody can make a fork of this project and disable the feature.
(Originally posted by OmeGak on GitHub. Initial post had 396 likes.)
Hey folks! Thanks for filing this—I actually debated what to do about the “Nylas ID” concept when I forked Nylas Mail and ended up keeping something similar in place. This is great feedback.
The ID concept in Mailspring is a bit different than in Nylas Mail: Mailspring stores your mail credentials securely on your machine in the keychain / keyring, and does not send your email credentials to the cloud. All email sync is done on your computer. (This may change in the future as new features launch, but it will always be opt-in per the Privacy Policy.) Your Mailspring ID stores small bits of metadata used for snoozing, send later, read receipts, etc., and also allows for feature rate-limiting, which can be removed by purchasing Mailspring Pro.
I know you’re not interested in the features provided by the Mailspring ID, and that’s totally fine! I’d really love for you to use Mailspring as your mail client even if you just want a prettier Thunderbird.
That said, Mailspring is intended to be a /product/ as well as an open source project. If everything works out, revenue from Mailspring Pro (which competes with subscription products like Mailbird, Rapportive, Mixmax, etc.) will allow me and others at F376 to allocate time to maintaining it indefinitely. Maybe one day we can find another sponsor like Nylas (which spent upwards of $2.5M developing Nylas Mail) or Mozilla to remove the financial concerns, but for now Mailspring needs to target paying customers with great pro features so I can continue working on it full-time. The Mailspring ID is a core component of these Pro features and a lot of exciting stuff on the roadmap, like team templates, read receipt analytics and shared folders. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make sense to remove the Mailspring ID and make the mail client better for you, because it pulls us further away from doing a great job on the pro features for paying users that will ultimately make this a long-lasting open source project.
Hope that helps! I’m going to flag this as a wontfix for now, but I welcome everyone’s thoughts and feedback here. As I dig into the pro feature development a bit more, I’ll revisit this to see if we could make login optional.