

Open-Sourcing PEPS: A modern webmail server - hbbio
http://hbbio.tumblr.com/post/66287893522/open-sourcing-peps-a-modern-webmail-server

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nathanb
Why is nobody working on a better rich client for email?

I use Thunderbird, which is the most full-featured of the three or so desktop
email clients for Linux. Thunderbird aggregates my many email addresses in one
place and allows me to manage my email mostly in the way I would like.

My biggest problem with Thunderbird is simply that it is not a joy to use. As
a tool, it accomplishes the job. Maybe that's all I can expect.

It seems like many people are releasing very cool webmail solutions. But
webmail is kind of gross. I have yet to find one that does a great job
aggregating several accounts in a seamless way. It requires my webserver to be
able to see the folder where I store my mail, which is a big concern (or
alternately it requires me to run an intranet-only webserver for the explicit
purpose of providing webmail, at which point why not just run a desktop
client?). And I am extremely skeptical of any end-to-end encryption strategy
using webmail...I understand that an HTTPS connection to the server + secure
encryption on the server before transmitting should be sufficient, but it
doesn't feel right. I'll be over here in my tinfoil hat if you need me.

Writing a desktop email client for Linux is not the way to get massive loads
of HN karma. It's kind of unsexy, and since in the Year of our Lord 2013 it is
still unnecessarily difficult to write something that looks nice and runs on
multiple platforms, only a few die-hard throwbacks will be grateful (and half
of them are running mutt or pine anyway and will sneer at your sissy X
windowing system).

OK, so I probably answered the question I opened this comment with, but it was
rhetorical anyway.

~~~
bane
I agree, perhaps I'm missing something but I don't understand why a decent
desktop mail program that's a breeze to use seems to be beyond all modern
engineering. Thunderbird is "fine" \- but I cringe a bit every time I open it
up. There's really nothing going on with mail that's so complicated that I
have to dedicate 20% CPU time and 250MB of RAM to it. And simple things like
just searching never seem to work _quite_ right.

It gets the job done, but I've seen enough great software that I feel like it
should be so much better.

But the truth is, email clients have always kind of sucked like this.

What are the alternatives?

~~~
nathanb
I don't know what OS you're running, but on Linux the biggest contenders seem
to be KMail (for KDE) and Claws-mail (formerly Sylpheed). I've used the latter
before, and it seems to primarily be a lighter-weight Thunderbird clone. I
haven't used KMail.

mutt and pine (or alpine) running in a terminal are fairly cromulent
alternatives to those who don't mind navigating with the keyboard and working
modally, but that's not really how many of us prefer to work with our email.

(I have over ten years of email archives, and in order for me to switch, the
new system will need to be able to import and search these archives.)

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wildfire
You present a number of licence choices but I think what you really need to
consider is who you believe your potential competitors are.

Are they (small) consultants / consultanties who are likely to install your
system for other to use and either provide feedback for environments you don't
/ won't have access to; or provide patches.

Or are they companies like Google / IBM / Oracle. If the later you should
_always_ choose a copyleft licence like AGPL.

Why?

Well all those companies, when they have the chance to release Free Software
pick BSD / MIT style licences; because all of them have the engineering
resources to fork something and take it in-house and improve on it _AND_
continue to pay the 'stupid tax'.

But if look at something like the Linux kernel, which is GPL'd, all of them
have had to contribute back.

You should pick the licence that makes things easiest for _you_.

Each comes with its own set of communities; I know people who will not
contribute to GPL projects, whereas others never contribute to BSD / MIT
projects.

Plenty of organisations make money from GPL software (e.g. Redhat) and plenty
do from MIT (but I can't think of any atm - late night, wine, etc.)

Summary: Pick what is right for you, and ignore nay-sayers. You will have
customers - if the product is good - no matter the licence.

------
hbbio
Yesterday's thread about PEPS:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682226)

------
hbbio
Awaiting the project release:

[https://github.com/MLstate/PEPS](https://github.com/MLstate/PEPS)

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iancarroll
Seriously, start collecting emails for the release of this. I'm pretty sure
I'm not the only one who really wants this.

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krakensden
That screenshot looks an awful lot like Inky
([http://inky.com/](http://inky.com/)).

~~~
jahewson
or Sparrow [http://sparrowmailapp.com/](http://sparrowmailapp.com/) or Airmail
[http://airmailapp.com/](http://airmailapp.com/)

~~~
krakensden
Or twitter for OS X, now that I think of it.

A veritable design plague.

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jstalin
Just played around with the demo. I love it.

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dochtman
Looks like it's currently slightly overwhelmed.

~~~
bovermyer
Indeed. I'd love to have a look, but the link got nuked.

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kbar13
Is this on github?

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martey
Being that they have not chose a license to release the code under, it should
not be on Github. Github repositories without a license are generally covered
by copyright. [1]

[1]: [https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-
licensing#what-...](https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-
licensing#what-happens-if-i-dont-choose-a-license)

~~~
pmahoney
To clarify, the _default_ copyright rules apply (which means, more or less, no
copying allowed).

Copyright very much applies to MIT/BSD/GPL licensed code as well. In fact, the
mechanism of the GPL requiring changed+released versions to include an offer
for the (modified) source code depends on copyright.

