RE: Geary

If you thought we’d dropped off the face of the planet, you probably missed it: we have moved away from Medium and started publishing on our faster, open source, and privacy-respecting blog at blog.elementary.io. We’ve kept this blog post unlisted here on Medium for posterity, but all recent and future posts as of November, 2019 are exclusively hosted there.

Sometime last year the Yorba website was subtly changed from “Yorba is a non-profit free software group” to “Yorba was”. This made us very, very sad at elementary. Before that, we’d been working on building a better relationship with Yorba. We spent time at their offices designing and discussing Geary, a (still) very popular email app. At the time of writing, it’s been 11 months since Jim Nelson uploaded the last version of Geary: 0.10.0. As soon as we heard the news of Yorba’s demise, we started planning our next steps and within a few days we had adopted the Geary code base. While it’s very unfortunate that Yorba didn’t make it, their dream of providing great native apps lives on. We’re proud to formally announce Pantheon Mail.

Built for elementary OS

Since November, we’ve been working on a lot of little things. Geary’s codebase was massive. It included support and workarounds for very old Linux distributions and wasn’t taking advantage of modern toolkit features. We’ve been pulling out thousands of lines of old spaghetti code and replacing it with new code that’s much easier to read and maintain. The build system has been ported to CMake. We’ve removed options that don’t make sense on modern desktops like controlling notifications from inside the app (elementary OS, GNOME, and other desktops all provide these options in their System Settings), and we’ve added options that do make sense like the ability to always load images. We’ve addressed a bunch of issues related to translations and, as is our specialty, we’ve been working on making the UI more organized and creating new iconography. Mail feels more at home than any version of Geary before it.

But available for everyone else too

Just recently, we’ve fully completed our fork from Geary. This means that you can install Mail alongside Geary without conflicts, to compare the two and get a real feel for the difference. But it also means that Mail is available to package for other Linux distros like Arch. Also, instead of hard-coding icons and styles, we’ve been working on using the system themes as much as possible. This will not only make it more consistent and easier to maintain for us, but it will also open the door for third-parties to make Mail feel at home on their systems. We’ve also updated the AppStream metadata file to the latest specification so Mail can really shine in new app stores like GNOME Software.

We’re just getting started

Mail will make its official debut in the next version of elementary OS: 0.4 Loki. Until then we’ll continue to clean up old code, fix bugs, and add new features to get it ready. We’re pretty excited about having more control over the future of this particular app. Mail is an essential part of many people’s daily workflow and has recently become a space that many people are innovating in with apps like the late Mailbox, N1, and even Google’s Inbox.

We’d love your help!

If you’d like to help us work on Mail, now is a great time! You can grab the source code from Launchpad here. Be sure to check out the HACKING file for some detailed information on how to build Mail and contribute branches back to its development. Don’t forget to look at the bug tracker to see what’s on our todo list.

We’d like to say thanks again to our supporters on Bountysource and Patreon, those who’ve purchased a copy of elementary OS or merch from our store. Every contribution helps make all of this possible, and we wouldn’t be here without you! If you’d like to help improve elementary OS, don’t hesitate to Get Involved!