I don't expect that we'll have time to put this together officially very soon. If you'd like to help though, the best way would be to figure out how to get N1 building on arch from the open source repo!
You can, but remember the sync engine doesn't provide any authentication layer by default, since people use it in so many different ways. You'll want to run it proxied behind some sort of authentication service. (With AWS, you can do this with different subnets via VPC.)
Bundling the sync engine with the client works if you're willing to download your entire mail archive onto every device that connects to your mail. An implementation of the sync engine that allowed only syncing partial mailboxes would be very difficult to implement on top of (all of) IMAP, Exchange, and Gmail. By abstracting that away into a new cloud service, clients end up being both simpler and more flexible.
It's not something we're likely to support officially in the near future since we don't run PostgreSQL and don't have the ability to test it well with production loads, but it'd be neat to see a working community fork.
Yep, the only reason we didn't have one for launch is a lack of time. :) You want to help? First step is making sure `script/grunt mkrpm` works from https://github.com/nylas/N1!
Putting on my "Python teacher" hat for a moment (I also work at Nylas), our codebase is interesting for learning purposes because it's a fairly homogenous, 'live' product managed by a commercial engineering team. Definitely on the complex side of things, though -- let me know if you want any help figuring it out (we also have a community Slack at http://slack-invite.nylas.com/).
On the testing side, I was chatting to a fellow Pyladies attendee about how we do test fixture setup and teardown (especially around databases) -- you might find that interesting to look at too.
I clicked through on this and browsed a few directories, none of which seemed likely. I do not see any `.py` files aside from an empty `__init__.py` and the `setup.py`. Are you sure a beginner just learning Python should see this?
The main codebase is in `inbox/`, with launcher scripts and tools in `bin/`.
(Might not be totally obvious, because the package namespace is called `inbox/` for legacy reasons.)
If a beginner wants to see real production code, rather than toy examples, I think it's inevitable that there will be some points of confusion. Part of the learning process is diving in and exploring and being okay with not totally understanding everything that's going on. :)
