This is one of those things that I didn't know I needed. An email client made for power users with the speed, simplicity and flexibility of Sublime Text (and now Merge) would be the end of all of my email woes. I would pay a lot of money for this.

And then they add Exchange support and the whole thing slows to a crawl.

I know that, in terms of UI, this is not precisely the SublimeText equivalent of an email client but have you taken a look at notmuch[0]?

It basically operates on your local Maildir which you can keep in sync with your mail server by using a tool like OfflineIMAP[1].

[0] https://notmuchmail.org/

[1] http://www.offlineimap.org/

Or mbsync[1] – I've found it faster and more stable than OfflineIMAP.

[1] http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html

Agreed. I would pay quite a lot for a native email client that respects your privacy.

Have you tried mailspring?

Mailspring looks nice. I would like the metadata to be under my control and not synced to their servers. The fact that I need to login to their machines turns me off. I'm open to running my own instance of their server. I do not like requiring "the cloud" to use my email client.

Sciter's author here.

I am considering creation of EMail client, as a next step of my https://notes.sciter.com.

The Sciter Notes resembles email client UI pretty close, so UI portion is feasible in months time frame.

At the mean time I am doing html-notepad that has also close UI: https://sciter.com/html-notepad-new-kid-in-the-block/

If someone knows IMAP/POP/SMTP stuff and want to join or invest into the project - please let me know.

I believe it is finally the time to make convenient email client.

> in months time frame.

I'm going to assume you meant you could start in a month, rather than be completed in a month, because otherwise I'd like to save you some pain!

I wrote a mail client, two actual, focussed upon the console. (Think "scriptable mutt".) Writing a mail-client is hard. Partly due to the sheer amount of bogus mails you'll get, and partly due to people having very firm beliefs about what they want.

The user-interface is the easy part. More important is to design how you're going to work - Originally I allowed something similar to google's tagging, so you could "open a folder" which contained mail from multiple Maildir collections. It was not a success.

Using a database to store your state is a cheap alternative, but risks issues getting outdated if you ever interact with the mail outside your program. You either have to force an "indexing" step - like notmuch does - or scan the filesystem tree. Neither of those approaches are great, for obvious reasons.

(Also God help you if you want to work with remote IMAP servers. Standards? What are they!)

I only recently learned about sciter, and was pretty excited to start using it on a personal project. Thanks for that!

I'm not exactly an expert on imap/pop/smtp, but I'd potentially be interested in helping depending on what your plans are for it. Honestly I'd be happy to help with any new privacy-focused e-mail client that has a convenient ui.

That's definitely a brilliant idea. I wish Jon like this one.