Call for testers of a new email client that sorts messages by contacts

[scailer]

We are the developers of Scailer, a new desktop email client for Windows and Mac. Scailer is entering the final beta test and we would love to get feedback on it before the final release. As a thank you, the first 300 users to give us feedback will get an unlimited version for free.

Scailer is the first email client that sorts messages by contacts like WhatsApp, giving a different and (we think) better way of working with email - there’s no folders, rules or categories because, in earlier testing, we found it just wasn’t needed. Anyone who sends emails to several different people in a day should find Scailer is a good fit for them. All of our previous test users have found that they worked faster and found dealing with their email easier than before once they’d gotten used to the Scailer way of using their email. Scailer provides the highest level of email security and protection of your data, with strong encryption of your local email database as standard.

If you’d like to get involved, you can download Scailer here https://scailer.com/download. Since the Scailer way of working with mail can take a little getting used to, we would be grateful if you tried the program for a week first before giving us feedback (either through the Google form that will be sent to you within the program or below in the comments).

We'd love to hear feedback from the HN community prior to the release of the product to see if you liked the software, and what you think we can improve. We will try to answer any questions as soon as we get them. If you’d like, you can read more here https://scailer.com/news/lifestyle/join-scailers-final-beta-test Thank you all, we can’t wait to hear from you!

Sincerely, The Scailer Team.

[rShergold]

My fundamental problem with email is all the robots.

I need a tool that sorts all my email into two boxes. "Robots" and "Humans".

Further I want repeated notifications about a message if: - It comes from a human - It was sent only to me - I have previously emailed this person

In [current year] my email account is like my post box on my home. I need it because I get important documents sent to me by robots (bills) but it just piles up until I know there is something in there that I need.

If a human were to send me a letter it would easily get lost.

Every email productivity tool targets the market of people who use email a lot. For most of us direct messaging has replaced email. However when an actual human does email us it tends to be very important. Something we don't want to miss. There is no tool I know of to solve this.

[scailer]

Thank you for your comment. Scailer is an application that is created to solve exactly the same problem you are saying about. Scailer distinguishes human emails from Robot emails but at the same time displays some categories of emails from robots as important (bills, urgent notifications, etc)

[moeffju]

I'm trying to add an IMAP/SMTP account and checking the SMTP connection fails with "The specified string is not in the form required for an e-mail address." The credentials are correct - it looks like Scailer is expecting SMTP login to be an email address for some reason.

Additional suggestion: Allow me to copy & paste error messages :)

(Windows beta)

[moeffju]

Otherwise I have to say I'm quite impressed with the responsiveness of the interface and the speed of the IMAP connection. Scailer is much more performant than Mailbird, which I currently use, and that in turn is much faster than Thunderbird and derivatives that I used before. So, great work on that.

I'm missing an option to define how many messages to download, and which IMAP folders to watch. The defaults seem to work for now, but I don't feel in control.

[scailer]

Thank you for the good words), we are glad that Scailer is working significantly faster for you than other email clients. We tested Scailer with email accounts with 500,000 - 1,000,000 email messages, and it works fast. Due to this Scailer has no option for limiting the count of messages to download. Yes, it may be a bit unusual that Scaler does not require customization, creation of folders and manual control. The application should automatically sort messages by contacts and robots and save user's time. Users can control where messages are displayed: in “Contacts mail”, “Promo and robots” or only in messages of a particular contact.

[moeffju]

Woke my computer from sleep today to find Scailer running in the background with no visible indicator other than taking a lot of power as per Task Manager. I don't recall setting it to run in the background, and found this surprising. I would expect either a task bar or notification area icon.

[scailer]

Scailer should not work in the background until you change the option "Minimize Scailer on close" in the Settings -> General settings (do not forget to save settings). By background we mean working without a window. Also, Windows suspends running applications when you put the computer into sleep mode. You have full control of background work. High power utilization may be related to the initial downloading of a large number of messages from your email account. Later Windows should recalculate these statistics.

[scailer]

Thank you for the reporting. We will update IMAP/SMTP settings to accept usernames within a few days. What email provider do you use?

[scailer]

hello moeffju, we have released an update of the program to allow user names for SMTP. Thank you.

[wodenokoto]

That actually sounds like a really good idea.

One of the iPhones big innovations was bringing the chat model into sms, which historically followed the email model (they weren’t the first to try this, but to my knowledge they made it stick)

Looking at your concept it seems obvious in hindsight, but I have never once thought about having my email like my chat applications.

[scailer]

Yeah, that is because emails are generally longer than typical chat messages. If you try to display a series of replies directly as a chat it will look poor. Scailer resolves that problem. We created a unique algorithm that transforms a series of replies to a sequence of related well-readable posts about the subject.

[ng-user]

FYI I got a 404 when trying to visit - https://scailer.com/news/join-final-beta-testing

[scailer]

thanks, updated https://scailer.com/news/lifestyle/join-scailers-final-beta-...

[g_p]

> We keep a database of a user’s email messages locally on such user’s computer. Such database is encrypted with a machine-dependent key. We do not store passwords from a user’s email accounts if the user used OAuth2 to login into those email accounts (Gmail, G Suite, Office 365 all use 0Auth2). However, we do store passwords from email accounts that do not support OAuth2. We encrypt such passwords two times.

One suggestion here - a lot of email clients these days store credentials or oauth2 keys server-side. From your website it suggests Scailer aren't doing this ("Scailer does not store email messages or sensitive information on third-party servers, including Scailer servers.")

The above section of the privacy policy suggests that does happen, however it isn't clear if that's offline or online.

It might be possible to word the policy to better reflect whether credentials are shared with the server or not - there's an opportunity for more "all client side" email clients that don't breach policy by giving a third party server access to account data.

I ran the app on Mac, straight from the DMG (noticed that it is Electron-based, so not native on the M1). As soon as I ran it, the first thing I saw was a prompt to allow incoming network connections from the firewall. The second thing I see is a little snitch prompt to connect to scailerservice.azurewebsites.net, before I've even seen the app(!)

I deny that for the moment, then get told my trial has expired, and I need to buy a business licence. I've never heard of Scailer before, and definitely haven't used a trial before. I assume this is due to running it from App Translocation (i.e. straight from the DMG), or that first network request being denied. The link to buy a license then didn't appear to do anything.

In the settings menu (which I somehow got to by clicking activate), I went to general settings, and tried turning off auto download avatars and error reports. Each time I leave the tab, the setting doesn't save by default. Eventually I spotted an "apply changes" button tucked away at the bottom right (of a full-screen window by default).

I attempted to add a new IMAP account (fairly standard Dovecot setup), but got an IMAP connection test failure, apparently with status 3, "invalid command". Digging through the logs, it looks like the issue is something to do with the ID command being sent:

C: xxxxx CAPABILITY S: * CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS SASL-IR LOGIN-REFERRALS ID ENABLE IDLE LITERAL+ AUTH=PLAIN xxxxx OK completed

C: xxxxx ID ("vendor" "Scailer.Mac" "name" "Scailer.Mac" "version" "1.0.172.0" "contact" "[e-mail]") S: xxxxx BAD invalid command S: * OK IMAP4 ready

I don't want to sound negative - just sharing a first-run experience from double clicking the .app inside the DMG as a new user.

[scailer]

Thank you for the comment. For security reasons Scailer does not store oauth2 keys server-side and never will be. We will add information about this on the website.

We have not tested the work of the application directly from DMG. Probably this is the reason why it says that the trial period is expired. Try to copy it in Applications.

Scailer connects to scailerservice.azurewebsites.net to check for updates. This is Scailer service for updates hosted on Microsoft Azure. And also Scailer connects to scailerservice.azurewebsites.net to get avatars of contacts. Users can turn off connection for avatars on the welcome screen or in preferences.

What version of dovecot do you use? Is this your installation or mail provider?

[g_p]

Copied it into Applications and purged out the application data and it seems fine now - thanks!

It is a self-hosted install, using default dovecot on Alpine 3.14 in docker, which looks to be 2.3.15-r0. I've not had any issues with other mail clients. It appears to be that ID line which is causing the error, but nothing helpful is being captured in Dovecot sadly. SMTP works fine.

[scailer]

We could not reproduce the issue with our test installations of dovecot. Could you send us the configuration file of your dovecot to [e-mail]?

[scailer]

Thank you, we will recheck Scaler with this version of dovecot, fix the potential issue, and let you know when it works.