
Mailr: an open-source webmail client with Gmail-like conversations - cocoflunchy
http://pusto.org/en/mailr/
======
rjzzleep
this is interesting, but in a way it's also really scary from my quick look at
it it seems that is sql to store the emails. any reason to use that over mbox,
or milder, which you can then easily index?

it also implements a small imap client(which may work fine for just reading
gmail, but imap is a scary thing, everyone uses it a little differently)

[https://github.com/naspeh/mailr/blob/master/mailr/syncer.py](https://github.com/naspeh/mailr/blob/master/mailr/syncer.py)

that said i guess it's a nice example for writing a mail client in python.

you might want to use mailpile which had it's first release a while back:

[http://mailpile.is](http://mailpile.is)

but even for that, if you don't care about fancy guis, you're probably still
better off running mutt, imap, mu on a shell you have somewhere

edit: i didn't pay enough attention, as was mentioned it's using imaplib,
which is the same library offlineimap uses. i do believe though that a lot the
work that happens is how people deal with the rfcs. i remember reading about
frustrations of the offlineimap author with different servers, and clients.
but basically imaplib itself is just a basic protocol implementation,
everything else happens on top of it.

and while you can indeed easily store your terabytes of data in postgresql and
you can easily setup full text search, it's still much more portable and
easily to handle backup and syncing purposes in different formats.
Archiveopteryx looks interesting though, so thanks for the hint. if i never
write a service to handle mails for other people i'll revisit it.

~~~
feld
All of my email _is_ in Postgres. Ever heard of the IMAP server called
Archiveopteryx?

[http://aox.org](http://aox.org)

Arnt and Ahbijit know more about the email RFCs than probably anyone else on
the planet. Arnt has been involved in writing several RFCs himself. Aox is
blazing fast and your mailboxes scale as large as you want. Millions of emails
in a single mail folder is not a problem. It's also really nice that it
handles deduplication of your mail at several levels.

~~~
darklajid
Thanks, I've never heard about that project, imap was cyrus, courier or
dovecot for me (I run the latter). The dovecot developers claimed in various
mailing list threads, that a SQL based backend would not make sense, not even
performance wise. Interesting to see a different approach.

What irks me is the FAQ entry claiming "If you have trouble with user
authentication, edit the pg_hba.conf to allow trust or md5"... I - don't think
that this is a good idea?

~~~
feld
I've never had to do that before. That would require a very poorly configured
Postgres server.

~~~
Arnt
Yes, it would require that. Such servers do exist, I'm sorry to say.

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owenversteeg
I was enthusiastic about this being able to replace Roundcube/Gmail (what I
currently use), but it's rather ugly (no offense to the author.)

If nobody else is going to, I may start work on some better styles for it.
Also, I'm not really sure why there are two panels and profile pictures;
neither gmail nor Roundcube nor Outlook do this. (Gmail and Outlook do put
profile pictures to the side of the email itself when opened, however.)

~~~
troels
It seems quite similar to gmail in it's overall design. With a bit of css
handycraft, I'm sure it could be made to look reasonably pretty?

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iuqiddis
If anyone wants to use a desktop client with gmail-like conversation view,
this add-on for Thunderbird does a great job: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
us/thunderbird/addon/gmail-con...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
us/thunderbird/addon/gmail-conversation-view/)

~~~
naspeh
Here is another one
[https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary)

I had probably tried all of possible solutions to get gmail like conversation
before starting Mailr from scratch

------
CharlesMerriam2
Ah, the rising tide of open source software. Whatever was done a decade ago
will show up in open source. Companies need to invent new things to stay
competitive.

~~~
mikemoka
there is also
[https://github.com/khamidou/kite](https://github.com/khamidou/kite) in early
development...

------
naspeh
Just wanted to mention. The source of this link is
[http://redd.it/22bvy4](http://redd.it/22bvy4). I have posted link only to
reddit and then it appears here. There are some my answers on questions which
can be simular to this thread.

P.S. I'm an author of Mailr.

------
e12e
I welcome this new mailclient. Unfortunately it currently leans differently
from what _I_ prefer, but perhaps it is close enough that the source code will
form a useful basis for what I prefer (no html (and a decent html>text
renderer for the brain dead services that don't provide (useful) text parts),
no rich editing, threaded -- not gmail style conversations).

At any rate it seems like a more viable (for me option) than eg hacking on
prayer (because, I think it's just silly to try and work with something
exposed to so much bad user input/data as email -- in C):

[http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/](http://www-
uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/)

------
dfc
Does gmail-like conversations mean "threaded email"?

~~~
rgeorge
I believe it means "flat" threaded email. You care about all messages that are
part of a conversation, but you are not concerned about the exact structure of
a conversation, so you list all messages of a thread in time-received order.

~~~
dfc
That is what I was afraid of. It did not make any sense to me why one would
advertise to the HN crowd that even though the mail client may not provide the
best threaded message display at least it does not provide the worst case
scenario of flat sorted by date emails. I really wanted to like mailpile, but
the email threading is terrible for serious use with mailing lists.

------
otikik
I think I will wait for [https://www.mailpile.is/](https://www.mailpile.is/)
instead.

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nor-and-or-not
There's an existing webmail project which is already using the name Mailr
([http://mailr.org/](http://mailr.org/),
[https://github.com/lmanolov/mailr](https://github.com/lmanolov/mailr)),
although development seems to be on hold.

~~~
naspeh
I saw this, but before it I had chosen name for working version and then I
used it for publishing. Maybe I will change it one day.

------
erikb
I think the killer feature of Gmail is the priority box view. It is your
personal todo list, your second stage spam filter, etc. Would be great if that
could be implemented in a mail client. I would instantly use it!

~~~
Semaphor
Sanebox [0] is in my opinion better than the priority inbox. I used it back
when I used gmail and I use it now with fastmail.

[0] [http://www.sanebox.com/](http://www.sanebox.com/)

------
shittyanalogy
This is a project for people who like to read and write source code, not for
people looking for a drop in g-mail replacement. All the feature requests and
UI complaints make no sense here.

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currysausage
+1 for the possibility of merging conversations. I have wondered for so long
why you can't do that with Gmail.

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plumeria
Great! Feature request: support for Markdown syntax!

