What would it take to get more active development on Mailspring?

Lounge
#1

This is absolutely not meant to be anything negative against Ben or the others that work on Mailspring. I have worked in the dev and FOSS world long enough to know that you have to eat and live, so please do not take this as that.

But, it is clear to see that available time to fix or even respond to bug reports is almost non-existent. There are known security issues due to still supporting ancient versions of some distros like Ubuntu. We have major bugs that prevent it being installed on Fedora 42, without manually editing the RPM. There is a Flatpak out there put out by someone who is broken and has major issues. Snap is not really being globally accepted outside of Ubuntu. It’s still lacking business features like proper calendar support. So on and so on.

I say all this because the Linux desktop is screaming for a quality email system. Mailspring could be that system if there was just more focus on both the planning, dev, and promotion/marketing side. It is such a great system for the most part.

So what needs to be done? Funding? More Devs? More help in other areas?

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#2

Just curious if anyone know what the actual user base of Mainspring is? Like the app seems so solid and generally works great aside from a bug or two, yet the community feels so… dead… Like I have seen some really non-exciting apps have more engagement than this and I am just not sure why…

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#3

Hard to know. I don’t see any stats or anything. The problem I see is whenever you see people asking for mail clients on Linux, Mailspring is often an afterthought. There is no buzz around it, which is surprising as it works better than many others push.

It is what concerns me. Without the buzz, it makes it difficult to grow and build a community around. All of which effects development.

I would assume that Mailspring knows the user numbers.

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