Nylas is a beautiful app and, by design, easily extensible. As a result, I think that it has a better chance than other open source mail clients of providing an experience that&#x27;s as polished and complete as Gmail. Doing that requires a bunch of affordances like calendar integration, Youtube previews, warning if you forgot to add an attachment, 10-second &quot;undo send&quot;, and so on. Letting the community write those as add-ons seems smart.<p>To really make Nylas compelling over Gmail, and also to replace Thunderbird, here&#x27;s what I think needs to happen:<p>1. Bundle Sync Engine and N1 into a single program.<p>2. Implement local search. Faster than IMAP search and doesn&#x27;t rely on a network connection.<p>(As it stands, Nylas requires an internet connection to work. As long as that&#x27;s the case it&#x27;s no Thunderbird replacement at all, and will have a v hard time winning over Gmail users.)<p>The good news is that both Sync Engine and N1 are GPLv3, so it&#x27;s totally possible. The bad news is complexity:<p>* Sync Engine is written in Python and uses MySQL for persistence<p>* N1 is built with Coffeescript + React + Electron, and uses SQLite for persistence<p>So we need to simplify. We can&#x27;t just bundle all that into an app, it would be a monstrosity. Here&#x27;s how I think we could do it instead:<p>* Use Sync Engine as the basis for a Node library for IMAP sync<p>* Use the SQLite full-text feature (fts4) for search<p>That way you&#x27;d have a single Electron app with all persistence in SQLite.<p>I&#x27;m prototyping this now. Thoughts? Let me know if you have ideas or want to help!