10 ms·

Trojita: an IMAP mail client

99 points by kerneis 14y ago

moondowner 14y ago
How does it handle Gmail (labels, conversations..) ?
- masklinn 14y ago
  How does GMail do IMAP?
  - qznc 14y ago
    http://support.google.com/mail/answer/78892?hl=en http://support.google.com/mail/answer/78892?hl=en
- adlpz 14y ago
  About labels, I believe they are sort of in the IMAP spec as keywords or something like that, so if Gmail is being nice, they should work. About conversations, I read that Gmail does some client-side sorcery with In-Reply-To headers for that, so if this client does the same, it should work.
  - durin42 14y ago
    Gmail exports labels as IMAP folders, so it should be fine?
    - jeltz 14y ago
      Actually this is what creates the mess. If gmail had exported labels as flags an IMAP client should be able to re-implement the gmail folders. EDIT: The mess I refer to is that your emails will be duplicated if they have multiple labels. EDIT2: Hmm, actually I am not sure how good the support for custom IMAP flags is.
      - ygra 14y ago
        (Side note: It's been a few years since I looked through the specs and maybe I missed something) IMAP flags are sadly severely lacking in what they can represent. The character set isn't even enough for unmodified UTF-7 (Punycode could work, but only for one-word tags) which renders them useless for user-chosen labels so few mail clients actually bother supporting them in that way. Thunderbird uses \label1 through \label5 but the names that are displayed in the UI are stored on each computer separately so you'd have to set up the labels you use on each machine (which kinda defies the purpose of storing that on the server). And short of using a »label configuration mail« on the server I don't see an easy way of supporting them completely server-side. I'd love to completely forego folders and use tags/labels/flags/whatever they're called exclusively but last I looked IMAP wasn't able to support that.
    - pyre 14y ago
      You can determine labels, it's just more work. I wrote a script a while back that used IMAP to just generate a list of message-ids and the labels associated with each one. I iterated over all messages in all folders to build the associations. It might be possible to query for a single message-id in all folders, to get a list of labels to, but you would need to know the message-id ahead of time.
- Tobu 14y ago
  It's fast, but not conversations based; there's no threading at all that I can see, except a "replied" icon that isn't even an active link. It's a shame because conversations (unlike labels) don't require any protocol extension, thunderbird conversations work on any server.
jordanmoore_ 14y ago
Gut reaction: Trojita isn't far off Trojan. I think people will have issues with that.
- adlpz 14y ago
  I really hope people are not that close-minded, seriously... By the way, from the wiki: It's a cool name. What does it mean and how should I pronounce that word? It's a Czech word which means "triple". The meaning is an inside joke related to a Czech pseudo-word, blésmrt. The whole story is inspired by Mutt's "all e-mail clients suck, this one just sucks less". The real pronounciation is rather hard for English speakers, so you can stick with a Spanish-like style.
  - martin-adams 14y ago
    Trojan also came to my mind at first thought because I have no other basis of the meaning of Trojita in English. For me it's not about being close-minded, it's about the mind making quick decisions whether to engage or discard information.
    - adlpz 14y ago
      Maybe it's because English is not my first language then. Still, you could have thought of IMAP-Powered condoms, that would have been funnier.
      - Confusion 14y ago
        The 'Trojan' brand is primarily an American brand, so a lot of people aren't getting this.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    When I saw the title, I thought it would be about a mail client that was somehow insidiously stealing your passwords. Just another data point.
  - davidw 14y ago
mellamoyo 14y ago
I don't see GPG/PGP integration. I have been looking for a lightweight, multi-platform offline capable IMAP client with good GPG/PGP encryption for awhile now, and nothing seems to quite fit the bill.
- darxius 14y ago
  I'm also looking for something similar for OSX/Linux. I'd love to move my "life" away from services like gmail (not that I have anything against it, just don't like having all my data that far away from me).
  - js2 14y ago
    OS X's Mail.app with https://gpgtools.org/gpgmail/index.html https://gpgtools.org/gpgmail/index.html for GPG?
    - jcoder 14y ago
      Unfortunately it's apparently very difficult to keep up with Apple Mail. There's not a public api for the project to hook into, so GPG support always lags new releases of Mail.app by quite a while. 10.8 still does not have a public release of GPGMail.
      - js2 14y ago
        Drat, sorry. :(
  - ghostDancer 14y ago
    Have you tried Claws mail? :http://www.claws-mail.org/ http://www.claws-mail.org/ It has support for gpg (inline and mime) and is multiplatform, maybe you have done and you don't like it
    - pyre 14y ago
      Last time I tried Claws mail (which was years ago) the interface left something to be desired. It was too cluttered, and difficult to use on a small (1024x768) screen.
jeltz 14y ago
Good IMAP clients is something I always look out for. Be they command line, web based, or GUI clients. Most of the ones I have tried have had performance problems so I like they have it as one of their core goals. Anyone know of any other good IMAP clients?
- __david__ 14y ago
  Mulberry [1] used to be my gold standard of IMAP clients. It has one of the most complete IMAP implementations I've ever seen. Unfortunately the company that made it went out of business in 2005, but a little while later it came back and then was open sourced. There doesn't seem to be a lot of activity on the open source project and I eventually switched to Thunderbird (which only gets better, it seems). But I do miss many parts of Mulberry. It was stable, fast, and detailed. [1] http://www.mulberrymail.com/ http://www.mulberrymail.com/
  - jmj42 14y ago
    Mulberry was my mail app of choice back circa 1998. At the time, it was verifiably the most complete implementation of IMAP available. It supported server-side searching, server-side copying, shared mailboxes, and I believe partial fetch. All features that no other IMAP client supported at the time. Some of these feature were even difficult to find in server implementations.
- ams6110 14y ago
  It was always my understanding that Pine, from the University of Washington, also home to the inventor of IMAP, was one of the most "correct" IMAP clients. It's pretty minimal feature-wise, though.
dragansah 14y ago
I hope it stands out it's promisses. My Gmail account is not usable on any gnu/linux IMAP client.
- readme 14y ago
  OK, so I assume by that you also mean GPL software, because mozilla thunderbird is pretty damn good. I use it to manage 4 gmail accounts.
  - dragansah 14y ago
    Thunderbird is better than evolution. But also gets stuck. Pretty unusable for me.
- qb45 14y ago
  Not exactly a part of the GNU (or Linux) project, but Sylpheed works with Gmail over IMAP.
  - jeltz 14y ago
    What is the difference between Sylpheed and Claws? Claws seems to be a fork from the Sylpheed project.
    - andyking 14y ago
      I wanted to know the same, so I looked it up on Wikipedia: Formerly known as Sylpheed-Claws, it [Claws] started in April 2001 as the development version of Sylpheed, where new features could be tested and debugged, but evolved enough to now be a completely separate program. It forked completely from Sylpheed in August 2005.
- TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
  evolution?
  - jeltz 14y ago
readme 14y ago
What's the advantage over thunderbird besides being written in Qt.
- w0utert 14y ago
  I can imagine there are many, in day-to-day use I find Thunderbird to be one of the worst e-mail clients I've ever used. Slow, unstable, makes simple things hard (try to configure an LDAP address book) and many basic features simply don't work (IMAP search for example).
- jeltz 14y ago
  The main advantages seems to be performance and more robust IMAP support.
- kerneis 14y ago
  The author of the original message (jch) wrote elsewhere: "The mailer is the result of an M.Sc. project, and is described in detail in Jan's thesis. http://trojita.flaska.net/msc-thesis.pdf http://trojita.flaska.net/msc-thesis.pdf In short, Trojitá is a pure IMAP client, written from the ground up to work well over IMAP with no support for any other kind of mailbox. It synchronizes stuff lazily, and (something that's close to my heart), is extremely aggressive about pipelining. I haven't read the source code in detail yet, so I haven't checked how the low level code is implemented, I'll let you know when I learn more. For now, if you're interested, I warmly recommend reading chapters 1 through 3 of Jan's thesis."
- migtav 14y ago
  Speed. I sometimes try it with my IMAP server (dovecot, around 15GB of email) and it's blazing fast to browse the folders. It also is quite a light feather (~20 MB of memory). Claws-email is another very fast and very light email client.
simfoo 14y ago
Not a single word about Windows support on the website. Since its only requirement is Qt > 4.8 it shouldn't be a problem though.
- jkt_ 14y ago
  Nobody builds the Windows binaries regularly. Last time I did so, it worked without any problem. If you'd like to help maintain the Windows port, I'll be happy to have you on board.
  - simfoo 14y ago
    I will take a look and see if I can compile it
themckman 14y ago
Off topic: Can anyone recommend a good command-line mail client. I'm used mutt quite a bit. Wondering if there are any more out there that are at least as good as mutt.
- thelittlelisper 14y ago
  I always go back to mutt. It does one thing, read email, and it does it well. The key is to set it up appropriately. Don't use mutt for downloading your email, especially if you wanna deal with IMAP. Use isync (mbsync) for that purpose (I used to use offlineimap, but it's buggy and not very fast). There's also notmuch, which I use for indexing my email. It also contains a pretty good email reader.
  - pyre 14y ago
    | I used to use offlineimap, but it's buggy My favourite bug was when it was blocking on wanting a password, but wasn't accepting input. I had to kill it externally because it wasn't accepting C-\ or C-c.
    - thelittlelisper 14y ago
      I only recently discovered isync (mbsync), which is sad given that it is crazy fast and written by the mutt author. offlineimap is cool, but it is sadly quite slow and crashes often. New releases usually bring as many bugs as they fix.
  - andreasvc 14y ago
    Mutt's IMAP support is working fine for me. And enabling the header cache makes opening mailboxes fast.
    - thelittlelisper 14y ago
      If your connection drops often it's a nightmare.
    - 14y ago
coob 14y ago
Reminds me a lot of Althea
hnriot 14y ago
I took a quick look and still prefer Thunderbird. Over the years tb has matured enough that it's solid and reliable. All I want from my work email client. For personal stuff, I'd never consider a client, other than the browser.
- aidenn0 14y ago
  In the past decade or so (basically since it came out) I've tried Thunderbird 3 times. Each time it lost some of my data. Granted only the first 2 times was I using POP; with IMAP having an e-mail client that completely corrupts and is unable to recover the local mailbox isn't nearly as big a deal, but it still makes me not want to use it. Even Evolution, which had a history of crashing if I looked at it funny, and seemed to be implemented as a loosely associated group of processes, any one of which could decide to monopolize the CPU and/or disk IO at any point never lost e-mail messages for me.
  - __david__ 14y ago
    Interesting. I've been using Thunderbird for years and years and have never had it lose any data... What IMAP server are you using?
    - aidenn0 14y ago
      It was the local data that got corrupted, which with POP and deleting from the server was a big deal; not so big a problem with IMAP.
- perssontm 14y ago
  Did you get it running? I compiled on debian stable and the app runs, but segfaults as soon as i try to read an email. There is really a need for an improved imap client, thunderbird is good but innovation feels like it got stuck.
AceJohnny2 14y ago
about 4 months ago, when the creator of IMAP passed away, I was fascinated to read about the quality of his RFCs and far-reaching vision for IMAP [1] IMAP has apparently always been misimplemented protocol. While I agree that Trojita isn't yet a replacement for more featureful clients, I'm glad it's finally blazing a path of showing how to do IMAP well. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4825893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4825893

99 points by kerneis 14y ago

moondowner 14y ago

How does it handle Gmail (labels, conversations..) ?

masklinn 14y ago
How does GMail do IMAP?
- qznc 14y ago
  http://support.google.com/mail/answer/78892?hl=en http://support.google.com/mail/answer/78892?hl=en
adlpz 14y ago
About labels, I believe they are sort of in the IMAP spec as keywords or something like that, so if Gmail is being nice, they should work. About conversations, I read that Gmail does some client-side sorcery with In-Reply-To headers for that, so if this client does the same, it should work.
- durin42 14y ago
  Gmail exports labels as IMAP folders, so it should be fine?
  - jeltz 14y ago
    Actually this is what creates the mess. If gmail had exported labels as flags an IMAP client should be able to re-implement the gmail folders. EDIT: The mess I refer to is that your emails will be duplicated if they have multiple labels. EDIT2: Hmm, actually I am not sure how good the support for custom IMAP flags is.
    - ygra 14y ago
      (Side note: It's been a few years since I looked through the specs and maybe I missed something) IMAP flags are sadly severely lacking in what they can represent. The character set isn't even enough for unmodified UTF-7 (Punycode could work, but only for one-word tags) which renders them useless for user-chosen labels so few mail clients actually bother supporting them in that way. Thunderbird uses \label1 through \label5 but the names that are displayed in the UI are stored on each computer separately so you'd have to set up the labels you use on each machine (which kinda defies the purpose of storing that on the server). And short of using a »label configuration mail« on the server I don't see an easy way of supporting them completely server-side. I'd love to completely forego folders and use tags/labels/flags/whatever they're called exclusively but last I looked IMAP wasn't able to support that.
  - pyre 14y ago
    You can determine labels, it's just more work. I wrote a script a while back that used IMAP to just generate a list of message-ids and the labels associated with each one. I iterated over all messages in all folders to build the associations. It might be possible to query for a single message-id in all folders, to get a list of labels to, but you would need to know the message-id ahead of time.
Tobu 14y ago
It's fast, but not conversations based; there's no threading at all that I can see, except a "replied" icon that isn't even an active link. It's a shame because conversations (unlike labels) don't require any protocol extension, thunderbird conversations work on any server.

jordanmoore_ 14y ago

Gut reaction: Trojita isn't far off Trojan. I think people will have issues with that.

adlpz 14y ago
I really hope people are not that close-minded, seriously... By the way, from the wiki: It's a cool name. What does it mean and how should I pronounce that word? It's a Czech word which means "triple". The meaning is an inside joke related to a Czech pseudo-word, blésmrt. The whole story is inspired by Mutt's "all e-mail clients suck, this one just sucks less". The real pronounciation is rather hard for English speakers, so you can stick with a Spanish-like style.
- martin-adams 14y ago
  Trojan also came to my mind at first thought because I have no other basis of the meaning of Trojita in English. For me it's not about being close-minded, it's about the mind making quick decisions whether to engage or discard information.
  - adlpz 14y ago
    Maybe it's because English is not my first language then. Still, you could have thought of IMAP-Powered condoms, that would have been funnier.
    - Confusion 14y ago
      The 'Trojan' brand is primarily an American brand, so a lot of people aren't getting this.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  When I saw the title, I thought it would be about a mail client that was somehow insidiously stealing your passwords. Just another data point.
- davidw 14y ago

mellamoyo 14y ago

I don't see GPG/PGP integration. I have been looking for a lightweight, multi-platform offline capable IMAP client with good GPG/PGP encryption for awhile now, and nothing seems to quite fit the bill.

darxius 14y ago
I'm also looking for something similar for OSX/Linux. I'd love to move my "life" away from services like gmail (not that I have anything against it, just don't like having all my data that far away from me).
- js2 14y ago
  OS X's Mail.app with https://gpgtools.org/gpgmail/index.html https://gpgtools.org/gpgmail/index.html for GPG?
  - jcoder 14y ago
    Unfortunately it's apparently very difficult to keep up with Apple Mail. There's not a public api for the project to hook into, so GPG support always lags new releases of Mail.app by quite a while. 10.8 still does not have a public release of GPGMail.
    - js2 14y ago
      Drat, sorry. :(
- ghostDancer 14y ago
  Have you tried Claws mail? :http://www.claws-mail.org/ http://www.claws-mail.org/ It has support for gpg (inline and mime) and is multiplatform, maybe you have done and you don't like it
  - pyre 14y ago
    Last time I tried Claws mail (which was years ago) the interface left something to be desired. It was too cluttered, and difficult to use on a small (1024x768) screen.

jeltz 14y ago

Good IMAP clients is something I always look out for. Be they command line, web based, or GUI clients. Most of the ones I have tried have had performance problems so I like they have it as one of their core goals. Anyone know of any other good IMAP clients?

__david__ 14y ago
Mulberry [1] used to be my gold standard of IMAP clients. It has one of the most complete IMAP implementations I've ever seen. Unfortunately the company that made it went out of business in 2005, but a little while later it came back and then was open sourced. There doesn't seem to be a lot of activity on the open source project and I eventually switched to Thunderbird (which only gets better, it seems). But I do miss many parts of Mulberry. It was stable, fast, and detailed. [1] http://www.mulberrymail.com/ http://www.mulberrymail.com/
- jmj42 14y ago
  Mulberry was my mail app of choice back circa 1998. At the time, it was verifiably the most complete implementation of IMAP available. It supported server-side searching, server-side copying, shared mailboxes, and I believe partial fetch. All features that no other IMAP client supported at the time. Some of these feature were even difficult to find in server implementations.
ams6110 14y ago
It was always my understanding that Pine, from the University of Washington, also home to the inventor of IMAP, was one of the most "correct" IMAP clients. It's pretty minimal feature-wise, though.

dragansah 14y ago

I hope it stands out it's promisses. My Gmail account is not usable on any gnu/linux IMAP client.

readme 14y ago
OK, so I assume by that you also mean GPL software, because mozilla thunderbird is pretty damn good. I use it to manage 4 gmail accounts.
- dragansah 14y ago
  Thunderbird is better than evolution. But also gets stuck. Pretty unusable for me.
qb45 14y ago
Not exactly a part of the GNU (or Linux) project, but Sylpheed works with Gmail over IMAP.
- jeltz 14y ago
  What is the difference between Sylpheed and Claws? Claws seems to be a fork from the Sylpheed project.
  - andyking 14y ago
    I wanted to know the same, so I looked it up on Wikipedia: Formerly known as Sylpheed-Claws, it [Claws] started in April 2001 as the development version of Sylpheed, where new features could be tested and debugged, but evolved enough to now be a completely separate program. It forked completely from Sylpheed in August 2005.
TsiCClawOfLight 14y ago
evolution?
- jeltz 14y ago

readme 14y ago

What's the advantage over thunderbird besides being written in Qt.

w0utert 14y ago
I can imagine there are many, in day-to-day use I find Thunderbird to be one of the worst e-mail clients I've ever used. Slow, unstable, makes simple things hard (try to configure an LDAP address book) and many basic features simply don't work (IMAP search for example).
jeltz 14y ago
The main advantages seems to be performance and more robust IMAP support.
kerneis 14y ago
The author of the original message (jch) wrote elsewhere: "The mailer is the result of an M.Sc. project, and is described in detail in Jan's thesis. http://trojita.flaska.net/msc-thesis.pdf http://trojita.flaska.net/msc-thesis.pdf In short, Trojitá is a pure IMAP client, written from the ground up to work well over IMAP with no support for any other kind of mailbox. It synchronizes stuff lazily, and (something that's close to my heart), is extremely aggressive about pipelining. I haven't read the source code in detail yet, so I haven't checked how the low level code is implemented, I'll let you know when I learn more. For now, if you're interested, I warmly recommend reading chapters 1 through 3 of Jan's thesis."
migtav 14y ago
Speed. I sometimes try it with my IMAP server (dovecot, around 15GB of email) and it's blazing fast to browse the folders. It also is quite a light feather (~20 MB of memory). Claws-email is another very fast and very light email client.

simfoo 14y ago

Not a single word about Windows support on the website. Since its only requirement is Qt > 4.8 it shouldn't be a problem though.

jkt_ 14y ago
Nobody builds the Windows binaries regularly. Last time I did so, it worked without any problem. If you'd like to help maintain the Windows port, I'll be happy to have you on board.
- simfoo 14y ago
  I will take a look and see if I can compile it

themckman 14y ago

Off topic: Can anyone recommend a good command-line mail client. I'm used mutt quite a bit. Wondering if there are any more out there that are at least as good as mutt.

thelittlelisper 14y ago
I always go back to mutt. It does one thing, read email, and it does it well. The key is to set it up appropriately. Don't use mutt for downloading your email, especially if you wanna deal with IMAP. Use isync (mbsync) for that purpose (I used to use offlineimap, but it's buggy and not very fast). There's also notmuch, which I use for indexing my email. It also contains a pretty good email reader.
- pyre 14y ago
  | I used to use offlineimap, but it's buggy My favourite bug was when it was blocking on wanting a password, but wasn't accepting input. I had to kill it externally because it wasn't accepting C-\ or C-c.
  - thelittlelisper 14y ago
    I only recently discovered isync (mbsync), which is sad given that it is crazy fast and written by the mutt author. offlineimap is cool, but it is sadly quite slow and crashes often. New releases usually bring as many bugs as they fix.
- andreasvc 14y ago
  Mutt's IMAP support is working fine for me. And enabling the header cache makes opening mailboxes fast.
  - thelittlelisper 14y ago
    If your connection drops often it's a nightmare.
  - 14y ago

coob 14y ago

Reminds me a lot of Althea

hnriot 14y ago

I took a quick look and still prefer Thunderbird. Over the years tb has matured enough that it's solid and reliable. All I want from my work email client. For personal stuff, I'd never consider a client, other than the browser.

aidenn0 14y ago
In the past decade or so (basically since it came out) I've tried Thunderbird 3 times. Each time it lost some of my data. Granted only the first 2 times was I using POP; with IMAP having an e-mail client that completely corrupts and is unable to recover the local mailbox isn't nearly as big a deal, but it still makes me not want to use it. Even Evolution, which had a history of crashing if I looked at it funny, and seemed to be implemented as a loosely associated group of processes, any one of which could decide to monopolize the CPU and/or disk IO at any point never lost e-mail messages for me.
- __david__ 14y ago
  Interesting. I've been using Thunderbird for years and years and have never had it lose any data... What IMAP server are you using?
  - aidenn0 14y ago
    It was the local data that got corrupted, which with POP and deleting from the server was a big deal; not so big a problem with IMAP.
perssontm 14y ago
Did you get it running? I compiled on debian stable and the app runs, but segfaults as soon as i try to read an email. There is really a need for an improved imap client, thunderbird is good but innovation feels like it got stuck.

AceJohnny2 14y ago

about 4 months ago, when the creator of IMAP passed away, I was fascinated to read about the quality of his RFCs and far-reaching vision for IMAP [1] IMAP has apparently always been misimplemented protocol. While I agree that Trojita isn't yet a replacement for more featureful clients, I'm glad it's finally blazing a path of showing how to do IMAP well. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4825893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4825893