Pantheon Mail

Pantheon Mail
Developer(s) Yorba Foundation, The GNOME Project, Elementary
Initial release May 4, 2012 (2012-05-04)[1]
Development status Active
Written in Vala (GTK+)
Operating system Unix, Linux
Type Email client
License GNU LGPL v2.1
Website wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary
code.launchpad.net/~elementary-apps/pantheon-mail/

Pantheon Mail is a free open source email client written in Vala, based on WebKitGTK+, forked by the Elementary OS community. The project was originally called Geary and was mainly developed by Yorba Foundation. The initial name probably came from the name of the street (Geary Street), Yorba Foundation was located in.[2]

The purpose of this email client, according to Adam Dingle, Yorba founder, was to bring back users from online webmails to a faster and easier to use desktop applications.[3]

History

People at Elementary OS directly supported[4] the project and Geary became the default application in that GNU/Linux distribution.

On March 25th, 2013,[5][3] 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.[6] 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 has been pledged.[7][8][9]

After this failure, Jim Nelson declared in a blog post this crowdfunding campaign was kind of an experiment to see if that route was enough to sustain open-source development. He reaffirmed Geary has been created to improve the Linux experience, and therefore have no chance of being ported to OS X or Windows platforms.[4]

As Yorba Foundation stopped its activities and GNOME had not revealed its plans about this project yet, the future of this application was unclear. elementary OS, still using this email client by default, has decided to fork the project on November 18, 2015 and continue its development, renaming the project to Pantheon Mail during the process.[10][11]

However, in March 2016, Michael Gratton, an old Geary contributor, applied to become the new maintainer of Geary.[12] 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.[13]

Features

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.

References

  1. ↑ "GEARY 0.1 RELEASED". May 4, 2012. Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  2. ↑ "Donate to Yorba". Archived from the original on September 20, 2015. Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  3. 1 2 "Geary: a beautiful modern open-source email client". March 28, 2013. Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  4. 1 2 "GEARY CROWDFUNDING: WHAT WENT WRONG?". Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  5. ↑ "GEARY FUNDING CAMPAIGN IS LIVE ON INDIEGOGO! DONATE TODAY". March 25, 2013. Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  6. ↑ "Geary: a beautiful modern open-source email client". April 25, 2013. Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  7. ↑ "Open-Source E-Mail App Geary Enters Final Days of Fundraiser". April 22, 2013. Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  8. ↑ "GEARY CROWDFUNDING: GPG PRIVACY, CALENDAR INTEGRATION, AND MORE". April 5, 2013. Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  9. ↑ "GEARY CROWDFUNDING: WHAT’S NEXT?". April 25, 2013. Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  10. ↑ "Code : Mail : “elementary Apps team” team". Retrieved November 22, 2015.
  11. ↑ "RE: Geary". February 21, 2016. Retrieved April 4, 2016.
  12. ↑ "[Geary] Geary maintainership". March 6, 2016. Retrieved April 4, 2016.
  13. ↑ "Re: [Geary] Geary maintainership". March 21, 2016. Retrieved April 4, 2016.
  14. ↑ "Geary". Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  15. ↑ "PGP Support". May 12, 2015. Retrieved June 27, 2015.
  16. ↑ "PGP Support". November 22, 2015. Retrieved November 22, 2015.
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