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by popey456963 3350 days ago
Must admit I am somewhat jaded with current mail applications and actually creating my own. Sylpheed is wonderful and the one I currently use, it's fast and works. My problem is with the GUI. Every single linked email client in this thread looks like it has come from 2005 and, unsurprisingly, most of them were created around then.

Hoping that maybe by using some more modern libraries, and aiming for a material design-esque client, I might be able to make something easy to use and reliable.
3 comments
stevekemp 3350 days ago
I wrote a mail-client, mine is console based with lua-scripting. I figured, when I started, that the task was simple, there are MIME-libraries, etc, out there, so to create a simple mail-client I only had to write three things:

* A view of all maildirs/folders.

* An index-view to show the contents of a maildir/folder.

* A view of a single message.

How naive I was. Broken email is everywhere. Things like IMAP support, GPG-support, and similar took months to get done. That moment when you're checking email in your spam-folder and your mail-client crashes? That happened far too often.

Writing a mail client isn't hard, but it is fiddly, and you don't realize it until you think you're done. (UTF-handling, malformed MIME-messages, etc etc.)

In the most sincere way possible: good luck!

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self_awareness 3349 days ago
I've upvoted you, because I think we need more e-mail clients. Actually, I was thinking about creating one myself as well.
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popey456963 3349 days ago
Would you perhaps consider working together instead of on two separate projects? Half the workload for both of us to get the same final product!
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self_awareness 3346 days ago
I'm currently involved in writing a hex editor for big files (i.e. disk images), because I felt world needed one as well :), I already have a significant amount of code, it would be a waste if I'd switch projects now. Thanks for asking though. Working solo is hard, both for motivation and the amount of work that needs to be done. If I wouldn't have my current project I would definitely pair up with someone!
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benjie_homer 3350 days ago
Is it open source and are you looking for contributors? If I can help, I'll contribute.
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popey456963 3350 days ago
Honoured to have your first post Benjie. It is open-source and made in Electron, but I'm not sure it's upto much at the moment. I've mostly been working on getting IMAP and SMTP setup as opposed to any graphical work.

If you're interested in helping out, I'd love any help I can get. Email me at the address on my profile page and I can give you some more details. The current design looks as follows:

https://puu.sh/vmtT6/b803a88da5.png

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