Nylas Pro : Question regarding updates ?

[apsylone]

Hi,

I paid for Nylas for having special features and a nice support service for my emails client. But for now, I don't understand the releases cycle for making the Pro one better? I'm really disappointed to see a lot of bugs corrected for the free version but not ported to the paid one? Can someone explains me why we are stuck to the 1.5.0 pro version meanwhile the free is constantly upgrading to free annoying bugs?

In this state, the Pro version is useless and more buggy to the free one! I don't recommend anyone reading this comment to buy a license from Nylas... Choose the Nylas Mail instead !

What a shame...

[ArchangeGabriel]

Disclaimer: I’m not a dev nor a customer of the pro version. But here is how I understand things:

1) Facts: Nylas Mail is supposed to become the mail client for both types of account (Basic/Free and Pro/Paid). But currently it lacks features for the Pro version, so Nylas Mail is used for the Basic tier, while N1 is still in use for the Pro tier.

2) Hypothesis: N1 is not going to receive any further updates. Not sure about this, but if true, this was probably a hard decision for Nylas team: keep working on a software they’ll trash anyway while they are already short staffed, or leave their pro customers on the side for a while, focusing entirely on making Nylas Mail working for them. Both have drawbacks, and it would seems they took the bet on the more long-term vision of the twos, while hoping their Pro customers would understand this and thus won’t hurt their reputation.

Even outside of the fact I’m not a paying customer and my attraction here is in the free client/offer — which by the way still means I have interests in Nylas success —, given my knowledge of the situation I fully support this choice. They are few exceptions where short term is worthier than long term, such as when long term isn’t reachable if underconsidering short term, but I don’t think it is the case here.

Regards, A libre software enthusiast

[apsylone]

Hi @ArchangeGabriel,

Thanks for your vision about Nylas - because we don't have an official Nylas anwser :-) -. But if we would like to support Nylas, it seems normal for me to pay their services. Nylas isn't a "group of Open source Devs", it is a company. That's why I don't really understand their choice.

In another more technicals words, Nylas Mail is primarly based on the Pro one. They typically have to merge the "free git branch" into the "pro git branch" IMHO. But maybe I'm wrong...

[ArchangeGabriel]

I can’t pay for a “software service”, because it means that either it’s closed source or it’s hosted on a server I’m not the one in control, so in both cases I’m not in full control of my data, which is something I can’t afford. But I can support with donations (I do for some projects), and by helping in comments like here.

Yes it’s a company, but basically lets look at what involve both decisions:

1) Keeping work on N1: on the pros side, that’s where current paid customers are, so let’s not neglect them, because it’s important toward our reputation & current revenues. On the cons one, this means involving part of our staff in this task, so less people to work on Nylas Mail while we are short-staffed, which also means the transition will took longer and this has a lot of consequences. This also means that we produce code we will end trashing anyway, not very good.

2) Stop working on N1: on the pros side, this means we get everyone working on Nylas Mail, which hopefully means we can move everyone from N1 to it soon. This also means we don’t have to do everything twice. And the sooner we have Nylas Mail ready, the sooner we can expect to attract new users. And the cons side, our current Pro users will have to stay with current issue for the time of the transition, but this one should be as short as possible since we involve all our power into it.

There probably more to it in both cases, but since I’m not working at Nylas I can’t tell. Same goes to why they do not answer on all those issues on GitHub. I agree that they should probably at least add a comment to ACK and say they’ll come back to it ASAP but they’re currently busy with some hard work in the code/design/whatever. I think they mostly do BTW, the reason we have seen no commit or comment for a bunch of hours is because y-day was apparently an holiday in the USA, and it’s currently 6 AM in SF, so there hasn’t been any one at work for the last 80 hours. I have no doubt we will have some comments and/or commits later today. I also trust Nylas as a company to do sensible things regarding the project management, and that each comment they don’t write on GitHub is time spent building and enhancing their app.

Regarding the two branches, I honestly don’t know. Sure, master branch is based on the n1-pro one. They weren’t going to trash all the work they put in their beautiful UI. But they have been so much changes… Not sure how much of those can be easily backported into n1-pro, but I think that especially the interaction with the sync engine has fundamentally changed so that anything that depends on it cannot be translated as easily as git cherry-pick or git merge. So this would likely break N1 rather than anything else.

[apsylone]

So I paid for something which is now useless as I understand your opinion.

I'll consider it :-)

Thanks for your talk @ArchangeGabriel ! Was really interesting.

[ArchangeGabriel]

Short anwser (I’m on mobile right now): you didn’t pay for something now useless, you’re mistaking the clients (Nylas Mail/N1) for the price tiers (Basic/Pro). Nylas Mail is going to support both tiers, but obviously the features you(’ll) have will depends on the price tier. So the Pro account is and will still be useful and different from the Basic one.

Also please remember this is my opinion and understanding, I would advise you to wait for an official dev answer or try to reach their support by email with your concerns since after all you pay for that. ;)

[apsylone]

I would liked to say I'm paying for a software which is unusable in it's current state - so buggy -. Some of the coolest features in Nylas are buggy too. The Sync engine would be an awesome tool if the client was stable. Actually, there are memory leaks, slowness and so on... I Paid 6 month ago with the hope they will solved lot of these issues in the coming month. But 6 month later, I'm disappointed to see the state of Nylas. I think it's not fair for people who bought it.

But you're right, they did a nice work with their sync engine and we'll wait for an official answer ;-)

[stolinski]

I'm with you @apsylone . I'm really confused with the whole Mail / N1 app situation and where paying users fit into everything. Really hoping things change for the better before I have to make the choice to re-sub.

[GM-Polyakov]

@apsylone @stolinski @ArchangeGabriel

Nylas team member here. Most of your analysis is pretty accurate.

Right now, our number one priority is fixing the reliability issues mentioned (slowness, memory leaks, etc). We expect that work to be completed in the next few weeks, and will be rolling out fixes to all our paid users then. Our telemetry shows that Pro is less buggy than Mail, and with the influx of Mail users, most of our team has been focusing there for now, but expect major fixes for both shortly.

Thank you very much for your support and especially for the bug reports. Our dev team is working hard to bring you the best email experience possible -- Let me know if you have any additional questions!

[apsylone]

Hi @GM-Polyakov,

Thanks for your answer. Can I doubt about the "less buggy" words ? :-) I've tried the Mail client and its more reliable than the N1. Or maybe it's a "user feeling" and not your telemetry who talks, but that's what I felt.

Do you have some ETA ?

[GM-Polyakov]

Got it -- both qualitative and quantitative data points are super useful, so I appreciate the feedback.

I don't have a public ETA I can share, but I can tell you it's on the order of weeks, not months.

[didjeridou]

Thansk @apsylone, this is also my experience (emails not getting deleted or archived is the most painful bug). I have been recommending Nylas to a lot of people, now I can't anymore because there's just to much that ruins the experience.

Thansk @GM-Polyakov for the update, really looking forward to the next release.

[manuelgruber]

@GM-Polyakov Thanks for the info. Will be the new PRO version part of Nylas Mail (or still in Nylas N1)?

https://blog.nylas.com/nylas-mail-is-now-free-8350d6a1044d

[apsylone]

Quite 3 weeks now... I thought it was in weeks not month. But we are going to be in month in few week :-)

[sachinag-zz]

Well, seven weeks is still less time than two months. :)

Three things: Cross platform testing is hard. Estimating time to ship is hard. Naming things is hard. Off by one errors are hard.

We're working on it, we promise - please be patient with us.

[apsylone]

We know it's hard to estimate things. But we think that's not too hard to implement the fixes of Nylas Mail into N1 :-) Because they are already developed... Or am I missing something ? I'm not talking about new things... Just only fixed one !