Yorba crowdfunding Geary development [LWN.net]

Back in August 2012, Yorba Foundation founder Adam Dingle spoke at GUADEC about the complexities of crowdfunding development for open source applications. This week, the group officially launched a campaign at IndieGoGo to underwrite development of its open source email client Geary. The target is US $100,000, which, as executive director Jim Nelson explains, is a number chosen to support three full-time developers for the next release cycle. "I doubt there’s a widely-used desktop application out there developed for less than US$100,000 — it’s just that the price tag might be hidden from its users." The campaign runs for one month; among the many factors Dingle spoke of that differentiate between funding sites, IndieGoGo only distributes funds if the target is met.

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Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Mar 29, 2013 23:48 UTC (Fri) by Beolach (subscriber, #77384) [Link]

> IndieGoGo only distributes funds if the target is met.

While that's true for this specific campaign, IndieGoGo offers 2 types of campaign: Fixed Funding, where funds are returned to contributors if the goal is not met; and Flexible Funding, where the campaign keeps the money, even if the goal is not met.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Mar 30, 2013 8:19 UTC (Sat) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]

It seems to me that this funding round will not succeed. I bet most people who would contribute already heard of this, and the funding factor (proportion of money raised divided by proportion of time elapsed) seems to already be less than 1. Why exactly do we need another email client? Isn't one of the like, dozen, sufficient?

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Mar 30, 2013 9:29 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I'll happily substitute a dozen shitty GUI email clients for one that actually works well with IMAP.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Mar 30, 2013 9:36 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

And I am not kidding either. The best imap client I can find is really Mutt. I've tried a lot of clients. I'd love to have something like Geary promises to be.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Mar 30, 2013 11:39 UTC (Sat) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link]

>The best imap client I can find is really Mutt.

You make that sound like "even Mutt is better than .."

My experience differs in that it's hard for me to understand how people for whom mail-handling has any importance in their workflow can get along *without* Mutt.

Like any piece of software that sets out to suck less, it's initially harder to get used to. But once you cobble together a half decent .muttrc, and have memorized the most common keys, you start wondering why people willingly would subject themselves to any other mailclient.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Mar 30, 2013 12:29 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

Yup. Mutt, combined with 'notmuch', is what I use for all of my email.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Apr 5, 2013 1:21 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

I like mutt too and use it all the time, but the one thing I really miss (and had back in 1996 on my riscos box) is the ability to look at several mails at once and cut and paste between them to synthesise a response from several inputs. This is incredibly useful and I used to write better mails in the 1990s because of it than I do now. Mutt can have one mail (and one mailbox) at a time open, and one has (so far as I know) to do an awkward dance with postponing the current mail, finding another relevent one, saving it to scratch space, re-opening the original mail then importing the new one to take bits from. This is very inefficient. I have started to use screen/tmux with several mutt instances to see more than one thing at a time, but this wastes memory and you still can't actually see them both at once. Perhaps I am just missing some much better way of doing this?

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Apr 5, 2013 5:49 UTC (Fri) by mp (subscriber, #5615) [Link]

For mails that are in a single mailbox you can tag several before starting to compose the response. Then they will all end up quoted in your draft.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Apr 8, 2013 8:09 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. This is a major reason that when I left elm for Gnus back in the 90s I never considered going back to anything like elm, or mutt, or gmail again. I need multiple mails open. I need my mails to appear in my editor so I can copy from one mail into a temp buffer if I need to, and I need them to stay open when I open another one. Gnus can do that without terribly much effort, because it's sitting atop an editor that can do multiple buffers natively. mutt can't.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Mar 31, 2013 11:06 UTC (Sun) by paravoid (subscriber, #32869) [Link]

Have you seen Mutt's IMAP implementation? Besides being old and not implementing half of newer extensions, it's also very crappy, fragile and slow. Even with the header cache, opening a large folder takes secodns (compare it e.g. with Thunderbird), as it still sends an IMAP command for each message. I regularly use mutt with both Dovecot and Gmail's s IMAP (personal & work respectively) and IMAP support is always the biggest problem. I've even attempted to fix some of those issues until I bled from my eyes after seeing Mutt's IMAP code.

Too bad that mutt is mostly abandonware these days. I'd happily donate to someone implementing a nice, usable, configurable modern console mail client to replace mutt (sup is not that). Another GUI client for Linux though? No way.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Mar 31, 2013 12:59 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Alpine (née PINE) is an excellent console mail client. Very good IMAP support (the code underneath is from the reference implementation for IMAP). It's interactive, with menus and prompts, so it's easy both to configure and use. However, it's also powerful. It has a query language for searching your email according to various attributes (including "tags" you can apply to your email), and you can refine queries with further queries.

When GMail came along and everyone went "Ooh, powerful email searching!" I, and other PINE/Alpine users were wondering "uhm, we have that already?".

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Mar 31, 2013 13:18 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

FWIW, mutt development has picked up a bit more in recent months. Maybe it has something to do with switching to a DVCS. :)

But in all seriousness, Mutt was originally intended to be a local mail client, and remote stuff was bolted on later, and it shows.

But that hasn't stopped it from being my primary mail client for oh, a decade or so. Mutt is made of so much win...

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Mar 31, 2013 21:52 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> Have you seen Mutt's IMAP implementation?

I don't care. It's still works better then anything else I've ran into for Linux desktop.

Which is sad.

> Too bad that mutt is mostly abandonware these days. I'd happily donate to someone implementing a nice, usable, configurable modern console mail client to replace mutt (sup is not that). Another GUI client for Linux though? No way.

Mutt is a GUI application. It uses ncurses and is a console application, but it's still uses a GUI. It's just very primitive and doesn't use X.

So what you said really doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Apr 1, 2013 13:54 UTC (Mon) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]

If you want to be pedantic, it is a TUI (Terminal User Interface), not really a GUI at all. You can't run a GUI in a vt via a crashcart in a noisy datacenter or over a serial connection using minicom / screen most of the time.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Apr 2, 2013 2:17 UTC (Tue) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link]

I've used mutt with UW IMAP / Panda IMAP for nearly 15 years. It is slow to open mailboxes, but I've not had any problems with it beyond that.

Just *how* scary was the IMAP code in mutt? I'd be tempted to take a look at it myself..

Mail client that works well with IMAP

Posted Mar 30, 2013 12:41 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

claws-mail works pretty well with IMAP, though you do need a recent version to have proper expunge behavior rather than the brain-dead "delete-means-move-to-Trash" default of most GUI mail clients.

Re: email client that actually works well with IMAP.

Posted Mar 30, 2013 21:58 UTC (Sat) by jnareb (subscriber, #46500) [Link]

There is always OfflineIMAP.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Mar 30, 2013 13:17 UTC (Sat) by joey (subscriber, #328) [Link]

If I type 'l~hsmtp.gmail.com' into mutt while my Debian folder is open, it finds "Msgs:245/1671". The tip of an iceberg of people who would be happy to use a mail client that's free software, if there was one that met their needs ...

The campaign is at 13k right now after 5 days. Hopefully now that it's taken off to some extent it'll get enough publicity to ramp up slightly, which would let it succeed. It would be sad to get to 80k and fail -- and these campaigns typically have a dip in the middle.

I do wonder how long a release cycle is. Is this paying for 3 months, or a year or what? Given that they're in SF, my guess would be toward the short end, which is a pity. Different living situations can stretch a minor 25k croudfunding success into a much longer opportunity to Get Things Done. My experience is, it's awesome when it happens.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Mar 30, 2013 19:48 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

they state that this is paying for three developers for a year

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Mar 30, 2013 19:58 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

Actually, now that I look I don't see where I had found the year timeframe before

0.3 was released 3/2013 0.2 was released 10/2012

their roadmap for 0.4 is at http://redmine.yorba.org/projects/geary/roadmap

I don't think that their stated goals match up with 100K worth of work, but I suspect that with that much effort they will actually get a lot more done than the small amount they have listed.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Apr 5, 2013 10:19 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

"We realized that people want to see their email as conversations, not threaded replies."

The only people who want this are people who don't deal with email conversations that are nontrivial. A single dimensional thread is not better than a tree for representing an email thread with branching discussions.

Oh well, I still have mutt.

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Apr 5, 2013 22:09 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I'd be fine with people who did "emails-as-conversation" if they would learn to quote and trim properly (trimming being the more important part). Obviously, the client will have to do this. If they'd auto-trim anything other than the first quoting level, maybe people would reply properly…

Yorba crowdfunding Geary development

Posted Apr 6, 2013 15:47 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

It seems what you are describing and what Geary looks to be implementing is a clone of Mail.app from Mac 10.8