What can I do to help?

[ghost]

[mikeseese]

Hey @rucuriousyet! Thanks for reaching out. Currently, there are no active developers and the maintainers (myself and @dweremeichik) don't really have the time to support this repo too much.

Right now, if you want to do Nylas Mail development (and not for the more actively supported Mailspring), the repo just needs development on outstanding issues. We've tried to prioritize them, but you can do it at whatever priority you see fit. If you seem to be "worthy enough" after some PRs, we can talk about giving you repo write access to let you run with it.

We have a slack, but it has been dead for 2 months now.

Let me know if you have any questions.

[gathurian]

Hey guys I stumbled over this product a few weeks ago and love it so far! A good looking Linux mail client with Exchange support (who doesnt collect your data, as Mailspring is doing) is exactly what I need.

While I do have some limited JS experience and am getting started on NodeJS, I dont feel confident enough to actually meddle with the source code yet. However I would love to contribute somehow. Is there any possibility to contribute with pretty limited JS knowledge and experience?

[mikeseese]

First off, have you read the Mailspring privacy policy? As far as I'm concerned, Mailspring collects less of your data than Google, Facebook, or even Github lol. An important excerpt:

Using the App. If you download and install the App, you'll link one or more email accounts you want to access through the app. We take the security of your email credentials (passwords, refresh tokens, etc.) seriously. This information is stored securely in your computer's keychain or keyring, and is never sent to our servers for any reason without your explicit consent. Mailspring performs email sync locally on your computer.

It does mention something about credentials for future, not existing yet cloud sync, with the caveat:

these features will always be opt-in, and a modal dialog will specifically ask for permission to send your email credentials to our servers.

Don't judge a book by it's cover too quickly. If anything, your lack of support for Mailspring should be that the mail sync engine (that is run locally on your machine, just like Nylas Mail Lives) is closed source. So is every major game and a majority of services (i.e. Google, Facebook, Github).

Also, neither NML or Mailspring supports Exchange (see https://github.com/nylas-mail-lives/nylas-mail/issues/66 and https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring/issues/34); we do support Office 365 however (which is not the same thing!).

To answer your question directly however, I suggest you start off with getting the repo building and running. Once you're there https://github.com/nylas-mail-lives/nylas-mail/issues/199, and https://github.com/nylas-mail-lives/nylas-mail/issues/167 may be good issues to start on. Unfortunately the whole repo is either JS or CoffeeScript so you'll need to pick an issue that you want to fix and learn through the hard way.

[gathurian]

First off, have you read the Mailspring privacy policy?

I have, yeah. And while I agree, that they collect far less data than e.g. Facebook or Google, Mailspring doesn't really offer me a service, where those data are needed (I don't really need any of these features that are tied to the Mailspring ID). Once the ID becomes opt-in and/or Mailspring becomes fully open-source, I might switch. But until then, I'm pretty happy here :)

Anyway, thanks for the reply, I will try to build the app from source and start looking for issues I feel like I can tackle as soon as I have time :)