Geary: simple email, for now

Yorba released the first usable version of its desktop email client Geary on May 4. Geary is heavily GNOME-based, but is focused on working well with popular web-based email providers out of the box. The initial release boasts considerable UI polish, but only a basic feature set.

Yorba is a relatively young non-profit software project that is developing several GNOME-centric desktop applications. Arguably the most well-known of the bunch is the lightweight photo organizer Shotwell. Geary is the newest offering, and like its sibling projects it is developed in the Vala language and uses SQLite for storage (in Geary's case, that includes offline email cached to enable full-text searching). It also comes with desktop notifications to integrate into the GNOME 3 environment.

On the one hand, a skeptic might asked why yet another desktop email client is necessary for GNOME, when there are so many well-established options — including the "official" client, Evolution. But that might be a question fairly leveled at the other Yorba projects, too, and they have gained popularity among users due to their simplicity. There is considerable bloat and feature-creep in Evolution, Thunderbird, and similar email clients. Geary seems designed to do away with as much of it as possible, starting over with recent GNOME platform components, and targeting GNOME desktop integration.

In the 0.1 release, Geary offers support for IMAP accounts only, and the application is limited to one account. The account data is stored in its own subdirectory under ~/.local/geary/, though, and multiple accounts are on the roadmap. The account setup window also comes pre-configured for GMail and Yahoo Mail accounts, which should suit the needs of a large portion of the user community. It does support SSL/TLS, but without much control over the settings — I was unable to get it to connect to TLS-equipped private mail server, for example.

Read Me

But supporting multiple server features is clearly not the emphasis in this release; a lot of work has gone into the presentation of messages and message conversations themselves. The application window is split into three columns: one for folders, one for the selected folder's message threads, and one for the open thread. Geary mimics GMail's "conversation" view, in which each thread is treated as a unit; Geary opens the entire thread as one item, with each message rendered in order in one long, scrollable pane. This is rapidly becoming the most popular way to render email threads, and it has its advantages. First, when reading long discussions, you can quickly scroll through the entire thread without clicking to load every message. Second, you see more of your inbox in the folder-contents column, by virtue of having each thread occupy only one list element. On the other hand, it is easier to get lost in a long thread, and it is more difficult to leap right to a specific message.

Geary makes this message threading model the only option, and the three-pane view the only window arrangement. More subtle, but equally important, is the work that has gone into displaying the messages themselves. Each email is rendered onto the message canvas like a sheet of paper, with headers and metadata (such as sender's avatar images) set off only by font attributes and spacing. The look is cleaner, and nicer than what Evolution and Thunderbird use, both of which employ separate GTK+ panes for message content and headers.

There are not a lot of other features to explore in this first release; you can read, reply to, and forward email. Message composition is not as smooth as message display — the editor looks like any other email client's composition window, which is not something that would be noteworthy except that it breaks with the slick presentation used for message display. Only HTML email is supported, and the editor sports an uneven set of editing tools. For example, your only font size choices are the vague "Small," "Medium", and "Large," but you have the full RGB / HSV color selector wheel to play with. I doubt I have often needed precise control over my font sizes in outgoing mail, but I have definitely needed it more often than I have needed multicolor text. There is a basic spell-checker built-in, which functions only in as-you-type mode.

Missing miscellany

What you do not get in this release is support for daily email tasks beyond message reading: no attachments, no searching, no filters, and so on. There is also no address book functionality, junk mail filtering, or encryption. It is clear that at least some of these tasks are already on the Yorba project's to-do list (hence the advertisement of SQLite, despite the fact that message searching is not implemented in 0.1). Thus, it is not a criticism of the project to point out that these features are absent, it is merely a warning that the client is not ready for industrial usage.

But I can't help but wonder how much of the "clean and simple" shine that Geary 0.1 enjoys will rub off as the project is forced to add more features to the mix (and to the window). For example, right now the three-pane window is slick, putting message reading front and center with each thread represented by a minimalist "card" showing a short message preview and an unread count. But there are not any columns in that view; it does not take long to realize that there is no way to sort the messages any way other than date, newest messages on top. A lot of users will want to sort and re-sort their mail folders, and it will be challenging to implement without adding considerable complexity to the clean and simple UI design.

That hurdle gets drastically higher when you start talking about address book management, or, worst of all, the pinnacle of usability nightmares that is public key encryption. In short, it is pretty easy to make a clean and simple user interface when you only implement a handful of features. What few projects can do is maintain the high standard of UI design as the feature set expands outward. That is not simply a theoretical challenge; as Shotwell has added more and more features, its menus and sidebar have started to fill up, making the application look more and more like every other photo organizer.

Of course, part of the reason for Yorba's projects is presumably to develop new code-bases built on top of Vala, GObject, and other modern GNOME frameworks, so in the long run feature creep is probably not anathema. At the moment, however, Geary offers a smooth and lightweight email reading experience. You could adapt Thunderbird to mimic many of the new application's UI features (via extensions or optional settings), but of course you do so with a higher memory footprint and more complexity. So perhaps it is a good idea to enjoy the simplicity of Geary while it lasts.