
Geary: a beautiful modern open-source email client - coderella
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/geary-a-beautiful-modern-open-source-email-client/x/1746809
======
dguido
I don't care if it's beautiful, or how it auto-saves drafts, I want an e-mail
client designed with security from the start. Everyone seems to be up in arms
about privacy these days, but people forget both how much data is available
inside their mail spools and the fact that none of it is encrypted. Put S/MIME
or PGP support in your roadmap as a first-class feature and I'll be interested
in your mail client. Consider a text-only mode and develop with a type-safe
language and I'll definitely take a second look.

~~~
betterunix
Encryption is not the be-all and end-all of security. Here is a good example:
your boss sends you a signed, encrypted message that just says, "You're
fired!" You send that signed message to the secretary you have a grudge
against, encrypted using her public key instead of yours. Now the secretary
thinks she is fired too (potentially leading to mayhem within the company).
This discusses the issue in depth:

<http://world.std.com/~dtd/sign_encrypt/sign_encrypt7.html>

PGP and S/MIME do not encrypt the subject line of emails; this is an easy way
to leak information. You also do not get encryption of References/In-Reply-To
headers, and various other headers that can leak information.

~~~
koenigdavidmj
Don't such systems generally encrypt first and then sign the encrypted text,
specifically to avoid this?

Your points about subject lines and other assorted headers are correct.

~~~
betterunix
The link I provided discusses this as well; not only are there other attacks,
but those other attacks are potentially more severe. A man-in-the-middle
attacker can claim credit for a message by substituting their own signature
for the sender's. A naive encrypt-then-sign system will also lack non-
repudiation in some cases (e.g. when using RSA signatures and encryption), and
will only provide non-repudiation on the ciphertext itself (not the plaintext;
this may or may not be what you want).

------
atacrawl
Forgive me if this comes across as snarky, but when "beautiful" is the very
first word used to sell me a piece of software, it would help if it were
actually beautiful to look at. I'm sure it's well-built, but Geary looks like
every run-of-the-mill mail client I've ever seen.

~~~
sergiotapia
Remember that this is Linux, where 29 out of 30 applications look like ass.
And what's worse - the Linux guys strut it as a badge of pride! Riddle me
that!

\---

Edit: I'm not claiming that they're struting _this_ particular app as a badge
of honor. I meant struting _bad designs_ as a desirable outcome, placing
"functionality" over "design". Example: Gimp. Works fine, looks terrible.

~~~
adestefan
Because sometimes I just want to get shit done and don't care what it looks
like.

~~~
sergiotapia
Function and design don't have to be mutually exclusive, you know?

I have to wonder, if someone were to fire off a pull request with GUI
improvements for aesthetics and UX, would the maintainers approve it, or
refuse it?

Is there a precedence for this?

~~~
adestefan
Yes, but sometimes I really just want to get shit done.

Right now I'm sitting here as Calibre converts a epub file to mobi and is
going to automatically send it off to my Kindle. Calibre is really, really
ugly and the work flow is terrible. But I don't care because it does what I
want, can suck in a ton of different formats, and in the end I have a document
sitting on my Kindle that I can read.

------
kapilvt
The state of _gui_ linux email clients has been abysmal for years. My primary
usage mode is across multiple imap accounts with a decade of email and
probably 15Gb total..

Evolution - imo bloated, painful, and abandoned. Thunderbird - Less bloat, but
not really progressing.

Opera's m2 email client was probably the best i could find for significant
volume though closed source.

The cli clients are significantly better mutt + notmuch, and sup were my
favorites.

I finally just went down the gmail road..

Beauty and features are great, usability at volume is even better. Good luck
to yorba folks.

~~~
ams6110
I use notmuch with emacs, and love it. Can't really imagine using a GUI for
email.

~~~
jff
I use notmuch with Emacs in an X window. It'll display image attachments and
give me clickable HTTP links, which is great. If X forwarding isn't an option,
I can always just fire up an ssh session and read it in emacs -nw.

------
skore
I have a number of problems with this.

First off - the project itself is just not worth the effort in my opinion.
There are a lot of email clients already in the FOSS world and most of them
are pretty good. Not perfect, sure, maybe lacking polish - of course. But they
do their job and that's really all I want from email. (And for a lot of things
- like conversations - I actively try keeping them OUT of email.)

They try kinda-sorta hard to pretend that I'm living in a dreary pit of
begrudging acceptance using Thunderbird on Linux, but that only works if
that's actually the case. It's not. Search could be a tad faster, conversation
might be neat, sometimes, and there probably are exotic cases where you have
dozens of imap accounts open that things get sluggish. None of these are
killer features that sell me on this project because none of these are out of
reach for the applications that already exist. (And again, as an actual user,
I don't really care.)

The video was... confused. I think they realized that you do need to "sell
something" when you do a fundraiser like this, but all they came up with were
minor features that felt lukewarm - both in the technical sense and in the way
they were presented. There is very little about what their passion point is in
all this, except "better" and "faster" and... kinda more like gmail and
mail.app. FOSS Projects usually start out with pain points that need to be
addressed and with passionate people who care very, very deeply about them. I
don't see that here.

The telltale is when the project lead goes for the "we've come so far". And
then lists... conversation view, an html composer and connecting to multiple
accounts. And then we arrive at the point where he almost starts explaining
why they need our help. Where they want to go with this. What will make this
so amazing in the future. Why _I_ should feel passionate about it and for
them. Why _I_ should _want_ to give them my money.

Nothing of that happens, he just stumbles into the final sentence. _Please
donate to Yorba today_. And that's really all there is.

Finally, I don't really think lines like "bring you software so good, you
don't know it's Open Source" (and a lot of further weird stuff in the same
direction) is anything but carelessly smug. I'm not sure they have any idea
whatsoever what kind of audience they're selling to.

Sorry guys, but this is not how FOSS works. You can't piss in the river and
then ask people to pay money to follow you further upstream.

~~~
wtracy
Agreed--in particular, "software so good, you don't know it's Open Source"
seems like a great way to alienate your audience. The people who think that
Open Source is categorically low-quality are already happily using Mail.app or
Gmail or even Outlook.

------
samstokes
Interesting:

 _Geary is written in Vala_

<http://www.yorba.org/projects/geary/>

 _Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming
language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime
requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and
libraries written in C._

<https://live.gnome.org/Vala>

------
mike-cardwell
I took another look at the open source mail client "Evolution" last night
after being a Thunderbird user for many years. I'm surprised how far it has
come since last time I checked it out. Nice fast clean interface. Worked with
PGP out of the box. Worked with my LDAP address book out of the box, including
adding/editing entries. Worked with my Google calendars out of the box.

------
jamesmoss
Did anyone else notice that when their CEO was listing out the things that
people expect from an email client he was basically just describing features
GMail popularised.

Good luck to these guys though.

------
darxius
I won't comment on the usefulness of the product they're showcasing because a
lot of people have already done so.

But seriously, those perks/prizes are absolutely horrible. The only different
between the $25 and $50 prize is that you get three stickers? For $500 I can
get a t-shirt and a one-hour conference call with the engineers?

Judging by the video and the prizes alone I get the impression these guys
aren't quite sure how to sell their product.

------
twakefield
So, I pay $500 and I get to be on a 1 hour conference call. I can't tell if
this is a joke or not.

------
gingerlime
_"email is not a luxury any more, email is a necessity"_

Is it just me, or is there something rather awkward with this sentence?

Personally, I believe a better open-source _webmail_ would be the way to go,
not a desktop client. Roundcube[1] has come a long way, but there's still a
big gap to get anywhere near gmail.

[1]<http://www.roundcube.net/>

~~~
brdrak
I have Roundcube setup on my web server just for backup, so rarely use it.
Just upgraded RC from 0.5.4 to 0.8.5 (upgrade script worked flawlessly) and I
am amazed at how beautiful it looks (I actually thought the old version was
slick).

IMO, it looks better than Gmail and displays plain text emails in a nice fixed
font out of the box!

Just curious what I'm overlooking as I don't see a huge gap between Roundcube
and Gmail.

~~~
gingerlime
you're right, the gap isn't that big. Hard to put my finger on it, but for me
the general look&feel and 'snappines' of the interface still feels not as
refined as gmail.

The threaded view is not nearly as good as gmail's where you just scroll to
see the next message (once you view a single message). It feels like there's
lots more double-clicks going on in roundcube to get to view messages and
interact with things...

I suppose these are not huge functionality gaps, more refinements to the UI.
Functionality-wise it would be nice to have some intelligent filters in
roundcube like google's. That's where gmail is a combination of an email
client and server though.

~~~
brdrak
For filters I use Sieve [1] (comes with Cyrus Imap and I believe some others
like Dovecot). There are a few plugins for roundcube that provide an interface
for managing sieve rules [2], [3]. I tested both linked below and both worked,
but they seem geared toward users who want a UI for rule creation, like in
Gmail, whereas I have an existing sieve script I want to edit directly.
Anyway, filter functionality is there in roundcube that's at least comparable
to gmail, so long as your imap server supports sieve.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_%28mail_filtering_languag...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_%28mail_filtering_language%29)
[2] <http://trac.roundcube.net/browser/github/plugins/managesieve> [3]
<http://www.tehinterweb.co.uk/roundcube/#pisieverules>

------
sleepybrett
Is the state of linux email clients so abysmal that rebuilding the mail.app
interface (without some of the fancy features (VIP, smart folders, etc)) is a
desirable goal?

~~~
Wilya
There aren't really any mail.app-like clients, with a heavily simplified
interface. Most clients I can think of have very traditional interfaces, or
are aimed at big mail users and lean on the heavily configurable side (like,
say, mutt).

I'm not sure if there is a demand for this sort of simplified things for
Linux, tough, but I guess I'm not the target audience.

------
emehrkay
It looks like Apple Mail done in QT. For 100k target I was expecting some
next-level stuff.

~~~
sneak
Apple Mail is the best email client I've ever used.

~~~
1SaltwaterC
By any chance, did you try Sparrow?

~~~
stock_toaster
It was promising (i loved it), but sadly it was abandoned before it was
completed (still fairly buggy, high cpu, etc).

~~~
adamors
What is the last version you've used? 1.6.4 is nothing like you said.

------
cupcake-unicorn
So Linux only, no cross platform? I'd actually love to see a better mobile
option for email, I find the GMail client to be buggy on Android.

------
tiziano88
I'm _totally_ going to pay $2,500 so I can work for them for one day :P Jokes
apart, I hope they are successful with their project

~~~
supercoder
Yeah those rewards are really odd. Seems they just got lazy and hoped people
would want to pay money to talk / hang out with a team they havent heard of
before.

------
joseph_cooney
Chandler project, anyone? <http://chandlerproject.org/>

~~~
nonamegiven
It may not be fair, but that was my first thought.

~~~
joseph_cooney
Yeah, I felt like a bit of an asshole for pointing it out too. I hope Geary
can be successful, an can learn lessons from the chandler project about how
not to do it.

------
jrussbowman
Not sure I see the point for yet another interface on top of mail for Linux. I
suppose evolution is ugly enough something might be able to supplant it as a
default. However, the lack of Outlook in a corporate environment is the real
pain point for email on Linux.

I currently get by using a combination of Kontact and Davmail to get my email,
address book and calendar working in my corporate environment. Fortunately we
keep imap available as an option so I can get my mail at a decent pact rather
than having to run through davmail for that part.

I'm not seeing where Geary is going to make anything better than what I
already have. Kontact is already pretty enough.

------
jblock
This is Apple Mail in Linux. A good idea, but not worth this hyperbole.

------
frozenport
I don't see why aesthetics mandate a rewrite of the Thunderbird coebase. Maybe
their team should instead improve Thunderbird?

~~~
repler
... and the screenshots from the kickstarter don't even look that interesting.
absolutely nothing new going on here?

------
pwnna
Is it that necessary for another mail client? I find that Thunderbird works
just fine myself. I'm not sure if I need something that's "beautiful".. All I
need is when it gets the job done and thunderbird does that quite well.

Any use cases that I'm missing perhaps?

------
evo_9
Very cool project, looks quite well designed. I'm not sold on the name though.

~~~
ipedrazas
But the name is not that important, is it? I mean, at the end we use an email
client, no-matter-whatever-the-name

Brands are important for the companies not for the people.

------
tetsusoh
no for mac. : (

~~~
abrowne
Mail.app seems to be the big inspiration. (Not a snark -- I installed Geary
from their PPA a couple days ago, and recently switched back to the Mail.app
from gmail)

------
iwanttoprogram
The name makes my penis hurt. Naming conventions these days are terrible

~~~
MrUnknown
This has to be the dumbest comment I have ever read on HN.

~~~
skore
From his history, it seems like he came over during dongle/fork-gate.

(edit: Not sure about the downvote - was just wondering myself how such a
comment ends up on HN.)

