Thanks for checking out Mailspring! We'd love for you to contribute. Whether you're a first-time open source contributor or an experienced developer, there are ways you can help make Mailspring great!
One of the best ways is to grab a
bug report,
sync issue,
or feature suggestion
that has been marked accepted
and dig in. You can especially look for issues
marked as help-wanted
or low-hanging-fruit
.
Please be wary of working on issues not marked as accepted
. Just because
someone has created an issue doesn't mean we'll accept a pull request for it.
See Where to Contribute below for more information.
You can also help implement any feature by creating a plugin for it!
If you need inspiration, you can dig through the list of
feature suggestions,
especially looking for anything marked for-plugin
.
The first time you submit a pull request, a bot will ask you to sign a standard, bare-bones Contributor License Agreement. The CLA states that you waive any patent or copyright claims you might have to the code you're contributing. (For example, you can't submit a PR and then sue Mailspring for using your code.)
Another way to help is to answer questions, or to triage bug reports and sync issues. If you're good at testing and addressing issues, we'd love your help!
If you have a bug to report or a feature to suggest, you may do so on our Discourse. Please carefully follow all instructions in the template for the given type of issue you're reporting.
We also ask that you search for existing issues, including closed ones! We're in the process of migrating. If someone has already reported a bug or requested the feature you have in mind, vote for it at the top. Higher voted issues are more likely to be addressed.
For bugs, please verify that you're running the latest version of Mailspring. If you file an issue without providing detail, we may close it without comment.
Under no circumstances should you report an issue via GitHub. The GitHub Issues feature is exclusively for Mailspring contributors to track tasks which have been diagnosed, accepted, and scheduled on the roadmap.
If you want to understand how Mailspring works or want to debug an issue, you'll want to get the source, build it, and run it locally.
You'll need git and a recent version of Node.JS (currently v16.X is recommended with npm v8.1.2+). nvm is also highly recommended. Based on your platform, you'll also need:
Windows:
npm install --global --production windows-build-tools
OS X:
- Python
- Xcode and the Command Line Tools (Xcode -> Preferences -> Downloads), which
will install
gcc
and the related toolchain containingmake
.
Linux:
- Python v2.7
- make
- A proper C/C++11 compiler tool chain, for example GCC
- Library dependencies:
- On Debian-based Linux:
sudo apt-get install libx11-dev libxkbfile-dev execstack libgconf-2-4 libsecret-1-dev
- On Red Hat-based Linux:
sudo yum install libX11-devel.x86_64 libxkbfile-devel.x86_64 libsecret-1-dev libsecret-devel
.
- On Debian-based Linux:
After you have these tools installed, run the following commands to check out Mailspring,install dependencies, and launch the app:
git clone https://github.com/foundry376/mailspring
cd mailspring
npm install
npm start
When you're running Mailspring with npm start
, it runs with the --dev
flag
and user data is located in a Mailspring-dev
folder alongside the regular
settings folder:
- Mac:
~/Library/Application Support/Mailspring-dev
- Windows:
C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Roaming\Mailspring-dev
- Linux:
~/.config/Mailspring-dev/
From Mailspring, you can open the Developer Tools from the
menu: Menu > Developer > Toggle Developer Tools
. Here are a few tips for
getting started:
-
Errors and warnings will show in the console.
-
On the console,
$m
is a shorthand formailspring-exports
, and allows you to access globalStores
andModel
classes. -
You don't need to stop and restart the development version of Mailspring after each change. You can just reload the window via
CTRL+R
(Windows/Linux) orCMD+R
(macOS).
We use prettier
and eslint
for linting our sources. You can run both of
these by running npm run lint
on the command line. Always do this before
submitting a pull request to ensure the CI servers accept your code.
Back in 2015 and 2016, the Nylas Mail team made a huge effort to document the codebase. The docs are still available on GitHub pages, and are still largely relevant to Mailspring development.
You can run the app in different localizations by passing a langauge code to
Electron via --lang=de
. To use this in conjunction npm start
, you'll need
to use the --
argument forwarding syntax: npm start -- --lang=de
.
Check out our Discourse for all potential areas for contributions. Note that just because a topic exists does not mean we will accept a contribution to the core mail client for it. There are several reasons we may not accepts a pull requests, like:
-
Maintainability - We're extremely wary of adding options and preferences for niche behaviors. Email is a wild west, and we can't afford to support every possible configuration. Our general rule is that the code complexity of adding a preference isn't worth it unless the user base is fairly evenly divided about the desired behavior. We don't want to end up with this!
-
User experience - We want to deliver a lightweight and smooth mail client, so UX and performance matter a lot. If you'd like to change or extend the UI, consider doing it in a plugin or theme.
-
Architectural - The team and/or feature owner needs to agree with any architectural impact a change may make. Things like new extension APIs must be discussed with and agreed upon by the feature owner. To improve the chances to get a pull request merged you should select an issue that is labelled with the help-wanted or bug labels.
In short, if the issue you want to work on is not labelled with accepted
, you
can start a conversation on the Discourse topic about whether an external
contribution will be considered.
In order to keep the conversation clear and transparent, please limit discussion to English and keep things on topic with the issue. Be considerate to others and try to be courteous and professional at all times.
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.