Old Mailspring Roadmap

[CodeMouse92 (Jason C. McDonald)]

Since the old ROADMAP.md is hopelessly out of date, and probably not the best way to track that moving forward, given our shiny new Discourse, I’m just dumping the still-active feature plans here for now:

Calendar

Goal: Build a beautiful CalDav and Google Calendar interface that can be opened in a new window or as a tab in the main window, making Mailspring a full replacement for the calendar-contacts-email suite.

Calendar Support

We are presently in the process of implementing Calendar support in Mailspring! The preview version has been available for some time, and we hope to have a full release version of the feature shipped soon, hopefully this year. Original issue: Feature Request: Calendar Support · Issue #199 · Foundry376/Mailspring · GitHub

Email Signing

Goal: Allow users to sign outgoing email with a certificate, and verify the signatures of signed inbound email.

PGP Encryption/GPG Support/Keybase

A number of users want PGP/GPG/Keybase support to Mailspring. There used to be a Keybase plugin for Nylas mail, but it’s difficult (or impossible) to find now. This is a priority, but we really need someone familiar with this to help us implement it.

Mail Merge

Goal: Make it possible to use a Template and a spreadsheet to batch-send emails with open / link tracking. Nylas Mail used to have this feature but the implementation confused users and didn’t handle sending errors well. The new version will

Mail Merge with Templates

Make it possible to use a Template and a spreadsheet to batch-send emails with open / link tracking. Nylas Mail used to have this feature but the implementation confused users and didn’t handle sending errors well. The new version will do these things better. (From the roadmap) Related Issues:

Theme and Plugin Browser

Goal: Make it easier to download and install community themes and plugins from a trusted, centralized “gallery”, like the Chrome Web Store. (No immediate plans to allow to enable paid plugins.)

Plugin/Theme Catalog

The Problem There is no easy way to find or install Themes or Plugins, except to manually download a file and install it to Mailspring via the menus. Proposed Solution It should be possible to browse, install, and enable/disable Mailspring themes and plugins directly from the UI, via a sort of “catalog” or “store”. Context Right now, Mailspring has much of the technical functionality for enabling and disabling plugins. This would need to be polished up a bit and tested. The catalog itse…

Electron 11

Goal: Move Mailspring to a newer Electron release and make the necessary changes to support it.

Upgrade to Electron 11

Mailspring is still on Electron 4, which is at End of Life (as is Electron 5). We really need to bring it up to date with Electron 11, which will also seriously improve our OS integration. This will resolve a couple of issues besides:

Electron 11 Migration

This needs to happen in 2021, as part of our major development push. Electron 4 is extremely out of date. If we’re going to upgrade, we might as well do it right on the first pass. What all is this going to involve? @bengotow, any insight? Changes Electron 5.0.0 | Electron Blog Electron 6.0.0 | Electron Blog Electron 7.0.0 | Electron Blog Electron 8.0.0 | Electron Blog Electron 9.0.0 | Electron Blog Electron 10.0.0 | Electron Blog Electron 11.0.0 | Electron Blog

Sync Issues

Goal: Make it possible to connect and sync any IMAP account with Mailspring. The project is close but still encounters sync issues with small or unsual IMAP providers.

Sync Issues

Performance

Mailspring has high CPU usage

There are a plethora of reports of high CPU usage by Mailspring, across many systems and platforms.

Significant Lag on Large Threads

Description Mailspring lags with particularly large email threads or reply histories (> 25-30 replies). Turning off spell check mitigates this somewhat, although not completely. On the GitHub thread, drholera reported that on Ubuntu 20.04, a thread with 35+ messages freezes the app completely. Additional Context This bug has been reported to exist even in Nylas Mail, and is confirmed as of 2020. mikolajzieba on GitHub provided a stack track: [14840:0x305dbd921000] 48547 ms: Scavenge 2037.…

Advanced Mail Rules

Goal: Create a new UI and revamp the mail rules engine to enable mail rules based on custom JavaScript code. Could enable really advanced workflows to be automated if we did it right!

Contact Management

Goal: Replace Mailspring’s built in contacts list (which is based on email headers) with one that uses CardDav and syncs with Google Contacts / O365 Contacts and allows full contact CRUD.

Custom CardDav server

What I would like is a way to add an external contact server to mailspring. Currently I have a nextcloud instance up and running with my contacts on there. It would be nice if I could read/write the contacts from the CardDav server

Sync contacts with Global Address List/Directory Server / LDAP

This feature exists in Mozilla Thunderbird, which I have used in the past. Essentially, it is the ability to connect to an online GAL (Global Address List) which contains emails of every individual in the organization that I am a part of. These are stored on a server and accessed through a URL by the mail client. This is a guide I found on said feature for Thunderbird if it is of any help in describing it: How To Access Global Address List From Thunderbird Mail Client - Intermedia Knowledge Base …

[Daniel (Daniel Lo Nigro)]

@CodeMouse92

Goal: Create a new UI and revamp the mail rules engine to enable mail rules based on custom JavaScript code.

Please consider supporting Sieve (RFC 5429) too. Sieve support would allow the same script to be used either on the server side or on the client side (eg for servers that don’t support server-side Sieve filters). Not as powerful as JavaScript-based filters, but the ability to use the same editor for both client-side and server-side filters would be powerful.

I posted a related feature request:

Sieve editor for server-side filters

The Problem Sieve is a standard system (RFC5228 + extensions) for writing email filters, and ManageSieve is a standard protocol (RFC5804) for modifying these filter scripts. Currently, the “Mail Rules” section in Mailspring only supports client-side filters. These are less useful than server-side rules as they only run when my computer is on (for example, they don’t run if I’m just using email on my phone). Proposed Solution I’d love if Mailspring’s “Mail Rules” section also supported creation …

[CodeMouse92 (Jason C. McDonald)]

This topic is just to store the info from the old ROADMAP file I removed from the repository. I’m not actually the project owner. Whether sieves are implemented is more up to @bengotow than I.