💌 Mailspring

Mailspring is a new version of Nylas Mail maintained by one of the original authors. It’s faster, leaner, and shipping today! It replaces the JavaScript sync code in Nylas Mail with a new C++ sync engine based on Mailcore2. It uses roughly half the RAM and CPU of Nylas Mail and idles with almost zero “CPU Wakes”, which translates to great battery life. It also has an entirely revamped composer and other great new features.

Mailspring’s UI is open source (GPLv3) and written in TypeScript with Electron and React - it’s built on a plugin architecture and was designed to be easy to extend. Check out CONTRIBUTING.md to get started!

Mailspring’s sync engine is spawned by the Electron application and runs locally on your computer. It is open source (GPLv3) and written in C++ and C. For convenience, however, when you set up your development environment, Mailspring uses the latest version of the sync engine we’ve shipped for your platform so you don’t need to pull sources or install its compile-time dependencies.

Features

Mailspring comes packed with powerful features like Unified Inbox, Snooze, Send Later, Mail Rules, Templates and more. Mailspring Pro, which you can unlock with a monthly subscription, adds even more features for people who send a ton of email: link tracking, read receipts, mailbox analytics, contact and company profiles. All of these features run in the client - Mailspring does not send your email credentials to the cloud. For a full list of features, check out getmailspring.com.

Download Mailspring

You can download compiled versions of Mailspring for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (deb, rpm and snap) from https://getmailspring.com/download.

Getting Help

You can find community-based help and discussion with other Mailspring users on our Discourse community.

Contributing

Mailspring is entirely open-source. Pull requests and contributions are welcome! There are three ways to contribute: building a plugin, building a theme, and submitting pull requests to the project itself. When you’re getting started, you may want to join our Discourse so you can ask questions and learn from other people doing development.

Running Mailspring from Source

To install all dependencies and run Mailspring from its source code, run the following commands from the root directory of the Mailspring repository:

export npm_config_arch=x64 # If you are on an M1 / Apple Silicon Mac
npm install
npm start

You can attach command line parameters by separating them using a double hyphen:

npm start -- --help

Building Mailspring

To build Mailspring, you need to run the following command from the root directory of the Mailspring repository:

npm run-script build

Building A Plugin

Plugins lie at the heart of Mailspring and give it its powerful features. Building your own plugins allows you to integrate the app with other tools, experiment with new workflows, and more. Follow the Getting Started guide to write your first plugin in five minutes.

• To create your own theme, check out the Mailspring-Theme-Starter.

• To create your own plugin, check out the Mailspring-Plugin-Starter.

A plugin “store” like the Chrome Web Store is coming soon, and will make it easy for other users to discover plugins you create. (Right now, users need to “sideload” the plugins into the app by downloading them and copying them into place.)

You can share and browse Mailspring Plugins, and discuss plugin development with other developers, on our Discourse.

Building a Theme

The Mailspring user interface is styled using CSS, which means it’s easy to modify and extend. Mailspring comes stock with a few beautiful themes, and there are many more which have been built by community developers. To start creating a theme, clone the theme starter!

If you are updating an existing Nylas theme for Mailspring here is a step by step tutorial. Notice: as part of the update process you will probably need to import mailspring base variables.

You can share and browse Mailspring Themes, and discuss theme development with other developers, on our Discourse.

Localizing / Translating

Mailspring (1.5.0 and above) supports localization. If you’re a fluent speaker of another language, we’d love your help improving translations. Check out the LOCALIZATION guide for more information. You can discuss localization and translation with other developers on our Discourse.

Contributing to Mailspring Core

Pull requests are always welcome - check out CONTRIBUTING for more information about setting up the development environment, running tests locally, and submitting pull requests.