Pantheon Mail

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Pantheon Mail is a free open source email client written in Vala, which is based on WebKitGTK+. Pantheon Mail is a fork by the Elementary OS community of a project that was originally called Geary and was mainly developed by the Yorba Foundation. The purpose of this e-mail client, according to Adam Dingle, Yorba founder, was to bring back users from online webmails to a faster and easier to use desktop application.[2]

History

People at Elementary OS directly supported[3] the project and Geary became the default application in that GNU/Linux distribution.

On March 25th, 2013,[4][2] Jim Nelson, executive director at Yorba, launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo to gather 100,000 USD that would have been used to pay the 3 full-time Yorba engineers that were working at that time on Geary. Among the proposed features that were proposed to be developed, we can cite: instant search, always-on notifications, support for all IMAP servers, auto saving of drafts, GPG, handle of calendar invites to your favorite calendar application and Google address book integrations.[5] Unfortunately, on April 24th 2013, only 50,860 USD were gathered from 1,192 backers. The amount was not met and the campaign failed. According to the rules fixed by IndieGoGo, Yorba did not receive a single cent of the money that had been pledged.[6][7][8]

After this failure, Jim Nelson declared in a blog post that the crowdfunding campaign was kind of an experiment to see if that route was enough to sustain open-source development. He reaffirmed Geary had been created to improve the Linux experience, and therefore had no chance of being ported to OS X or Windows platforms.[3]

As Yorba Foundation had stopped its activities and GNOME had not revealed its plans about this project, the future of this application was unclear. Elementary OS, which still used this e-mail client by default, decided to fork the project on November 18, 2015 and continue with the development; the project was renamed Pantheon Mail during the process.[9][10]

However, in March 2016, Michael Gratton, an old Geary contributor, applied to become the new maintainer of Geary.[11] His main purpose will be to try fixing pressing issues like the dependency on the old WebKit1GTK, collaboration with Pantheon Mail, better support for non-GMail servers, mailbox management, the account UI, extending search, etc. Contributing to Geary as a GNOME project requires the maintainer to become a GNOME member. After a discussion with Adam Dingle, Yorba's founder, both agreed to wait for Michael to fulfill GNOME membership application requirements. In the meantime, Michael will post his patches to the GNOME Bugzilla instance and Adam will commit them for him.[12]

Current version is 0.11 of 2016-05-15.[13]

Features

  • Modern and straightforward interface
  • Quick account setup
  • Supports Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook.com, and popular IMAP servers (Dovecot, Cyrus, Zimbra, etc.)
  • Mail organized by conversations
  • Ability to answer directly in conversations or open it in a separate window
  • Signature
  • Full-featured HTML mail composer
  • Fast keyword search with values like from:john
  • Desktop notification of new mails[14]

Implementation to support GPG has been started,[15] but to the lack of reactivity from Yorba and the lack of bug bounties validations, the maintainer has decided to give up on that topic, waiting for GNOME intentions about Geary (give up the project or continue) before continuing contributions.[16]

Technical information

This client internally uses an SQLite database to store local copy of emails and for indexing. It uses a fully asynchronous GObject-based IMAP client library. One feature that distinguishes Geary from other open source email clients is the conversation view.

Trivia

The initial name "Geary" coincides with the name of the street (Geary Street) Yorba Foundation was located in.[17] According to a former Yorba employee, the application was not named after the street name, though. The first beta of Geary has been released in May 2012, and Yorba still located on Capp Street.[18][19]

References

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  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ https://download.gnome.org/sources/geary/0.11/
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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