15 ms·

Mailr: an open-source webmail client with Gmail-like conversations

218 points by cocoflunchy 13y ago

CharlesMerriam2 13y ago
Ah, the rising tide of open source software. Whatever was done a decade ago will show up in open source. Companies need to invent new things to stay competitive.
- mikemoka 13y ago
  there is also https://github.com/khamidou/kite https://github.com/khamidou/kite in early development...
coned88 13y ago
What are gmail like conversations? Sorry I don't really use google products so I have no idea.
rjzzleep 13y ago
this is interesting, but in a way it's also really scary from my quick look at it it seems that is sql to store the emails. any reason to use that over mbox, or milder, which you can then easily index? it also implements a small imap client(which may work fine for just reading gmail, but imap is a scary thing, everyone uses it a little differently) https://github.com/naspeh/mailr/blob/master/mailr/syncer.py https://github.com/naspeh/mailr/blob/master/mailr/syncer.py that said i guess it's a nice example for writing a mail client in python. you might want to use mailpile which had it's first release a while back: http://mailpile.is http://mailpile.is but even for that, if you don't care about fancy guis, you're probably still better off running mutt, imap, mu on a shell you have somewhere edit: i didn't pay enough attention, as was mentioned it's using imaplib, which is the same library offlineimap uses. i do believe though that a lot the work that happens is how people deal with the rfcs. i remember reading about frustrations of the offlineimap author with different servers, and clients. but basically imaplib itself is just a basic protocol implementation, everything else happens on top of it. and while you can indeed easily store your terabytes of data in postgresql and you can easily setup full text search, it's still much more portable and easily to handle backup and syncing purposes in different formats. Archiveopteryx looks interesting though, so thanks for the hint. if i never write a service to handle mails for other people i'll revisit it.
- naspeh 13y ago
  I'm author of Mailr. PostgreSQL has full text search, has transactions and I like working with them :). I had tried mailpile of course, but I don't like their way. I want conversations which really like gmail :). And I want to write less code for that. The first priority to work with gmail, so syncer just work with gmail :). there is a lot of work, as I said in my post
- skorgu 13y ago
  If you choose your layout carefully SQL should be fine. Certainly you can index on whatever you like that way. You also get the potential to do clever things like storing message bodies or mime parts once and foreign-keying them into individual mailboxes (if I email 30 people a single 1M file I should only really need to store it once). This actually looks almost like what I want out of a webmail client except it's lacking hotkeys. I don't know how people manage email without keyboard shortcuts.
- andor 13y ago
  it also implements a small imap client(which may work fine for just reading gmail, but imap is a scary thing, everyone uses it a little differently) It uses imaplib from the Python standard library. Doesn't look scary to me.
  - tonyarkles 13y ago
    How deep have you gone with the library and with an imap client implementation? There is definitely a lot of variation from imap server to imap server. Things come back with weird and broken encodings sometimes (the server will tell you that a message is unicode and then return invalid unicode), commands that seem to be read-only will have persistent effects, etc. IMAP is nowhere near as nice to work with as its standard and interface imply.
    - naspeh 13y ago
      I know IMAP is hard way, but it most used nowadays. Now I try to work with gmail imap, so it is easier for support just one server for first. BTW. I had seen unicode issues... And yes, there is a lot of work...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
owenversteeg 13y ago
I was enthusiastic about this being able to replace Roundcube/Gmail (what I currently use), but it's rather ugly (no offense to the author.) If nobody else is going to, I may start work on some better styles for it. Also, I'm not really sure why there are two panels and profile pictures; neither gmail nor Roundcube nor Outlook do this. (Gmail and Outlook do put profile pictures to the side of the email itself when opened, however.)
- troels 13y ago
  It seems quite similar to gmail in it's overall design. With a bit of css handycraft, I'm sure it could be made to look reasonably pretty?
iuqiddis 13y ago
If anyone wants to use a desktop client with gmail-like conversation view, this add-on for Thunderbird does a great job: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/gmail-conversation-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/gmail-con...
- naspeh 13y ago
  Here is another one https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary I had probably tried all of possible solutions to get gmail like conversation before starting Mailr from scratch
dfc 13y ago
Does gmail-like conversations mean "threaded email"?
- naspeh 13y ago
  It means conversations really similar to gmail conversations BTW. gmail has flat conversations, threads usually have more hierarchy.
- rgeorge 13y ago
  I believe it means "flat" threaded email. You care about all messages that are part of a conversation, but you are not concerned about the exact structure of a conversation, so you list all messages of a thread in time-received order.
  - dfc 13y ago
    That is what I was afraid of. It did not make any sense to me why one would advertise to the HN crowd that even though the mail client may not provide the best threaded message display at least it does not provide the worst case scenario of flat sorted by date emails. I really wanted to like mailpile, but the email threading is terrible for serious use with mailing lists.
- giovannibajo1 13y ago
  One additional difference between GMail/AppleMail "conversations" and Thunderbird/Evolution "threading" is that the formers do merge conversations from different IMAP folders (as long as the auto-threading rules kick in), and do merge duplicate mails automagically (e.g. if you have the same mail in "Sent" and in "Mailing List Foo", they will not be displayed twice in the conversation). This for instance allows to have full conversation for emails in Inbox, which is usually not working in Thunderbird since the emails are usually split between Inbox and Sent. IOW, a "conversation" is displayed in any folder that contains at least one message which is part of it, and contains all messages that are logically part of it, even if they're not stored in that folder. A "thread" is a visual arrangement of the emails in the specific folder, but doesn't cross the folder limits. Another important point of the user interface is the "mute" button, that hides (archives) the conversation and doesn't allow it to popup anymore even if new messages arrive (in any folder).
erikb 13y ago
I think the killer feature of Gmail is the priority box view. It is your personal todo list, your second stage spam filter, etc. Would be great if that could be implemented in a mail client. I would instantly use it!
- Semaphor 13y ago
  Sanebox [0] is in my opinion better than the priority inbox. I used it back when I used gmail and I use it now with fastmail. [0] http://www.sanebox.com/ http://www.sanebox.com/
otikik 13y ago
I think I will wait for https://www.mailpile.is/ https://www.mailpile.is/ instead.
nor-and-or-not 13y ago
There's an existing webmail project which is already using the name Mailr (http://mailr.org/ http://mailr.org/, https://github.com/lmanolov/mailr https://github.com/lmanolov/mailr), although development seems to be on hold.
- naspeh 13y ago
  I saw this, but before it I had chosen name for working version and then I used it for publishing. Maybe I will change it one day.
plumeria 13y ago
Great! Feature request: support for Markdown syntax!
currysausage 13y ago
+1 for the possibility of merging conversations. I have wondered for so long why you can't do that with Gmail.
naspeh 13y ago
Just wanted to mention. The source of this link is http://redd.it/22bvy4 http://redd.it/22bvy4. I have posted link only to reddit and then it appears here. There are some my answers on questions which can be simular to this thread. P.S. I'm an author of Mailr.
e12e 13y ago
I welcome this new mailclient. Unfortunately it currently leans differently from what I prefer, but perhaps it is close enough that the source code will form a useful basis for what I prefer (no html (and a decent html>text renderer for the brain dead services that don't provide (useful) text parts), no rich editing, threaded -- not gmail style conversations). At any rate it seems like a more viable (for me option) than eg hacking on prayer (because, I think it's just silly to try and work with something exposed to so much bad user input/data as email -- in C): http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/ http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/
shittyanalogy 13y ago
This is a project for people who like to read and write source code, not for people looking for a drop in g-mail replacement. All the feature requests and UI complaints make no sense here.

218 points by cocoflunchy 13y ago

Ah, the rising tide of open source software. Whatever was done a decade ago will show up in open source. Companies need to invent new things to stay competitive.

mikemoka 13y ago
there is also https://github.com/khamidou/kite https://github.com/khamidou/kite in early development...

coned88 13y ago

What are gmail like conversations? Sorry I don't really use google products so I have no idea.

rjzzleep 13y ago

this is interesting, but in a way it's also really scary from my quick look at it it seems that is sql to store the emails. any reason to use that over mbox, or milder, which you can then easily index? it also implements a small imap client(which may work fine for just reading gmail, but imap is a scary thing, everyone uses it a little differently) https://github.com/naspeh/mailr/blob/master/mailr/syncer.py https://github.com/naspeh/mailr/blob/master/mailr/syncer.py that said i guess it's a nice example for writing a mail client in python. you might want to use mailpile which had it's first release a while back: http://mailpile.is http://mailpile.is but even for that, if you don't care about fancy guis, you're probably still better off running mutt, imap, mu on a shell you have somewhere edit: i didn't pay enough attention, as was mentioned it's using imaplib, which is the same library offlineimap uses. i do believe though that a lot the work that happens is how people deal with the rfcs. i remember reading about frustrations of the offlineimap author with different servers, and clients. but basically imaplib itself is just a basic protocol implementation, everything else happens on top of it. and while you can indeed easily store your terabytes of data in postgresql and you can easily setup full text search, it's still much more portable and easily to handle backup and syncing purposes in different formats. Archiveopteryx looks interesting though, so thanks for the hint. if i never write a service to handle mails for other people i'll revisit it.

naspeh 13y ago
I'm author of Mailr. PostgreSQL has full text search, has transactions and I like working with them :). I had tried mailpile of course, but I don't like their way. I want conversations which really like gmail :). And I want to write less code for that. The first priority to work with gmail, so syncer just work with gmail :). there is a lot of work, as I said in my post
skorgu 13y ago
If you choose your layout carefully SQL should be fine. Certainly you can index on whatever you like that way. You also get the potential to do clever things like storing message bodies or mime parts once and foreign-keying them into individual mailboxes (if I email 30 people a single 1M file I should only really need to store it once). This actually looks almost like what I want out of a webmail client except it's lacking hotkeys. I don't know how people manage email without keyboard shortcuts.
andor 13y ago
it also implements a small imap client(which may work fine for just reading gmail, but imap is a scary thing, everyone uses it a little differently) It uses imaplib from the Python standard library. Doesn't look scary to me.
- tonyarkles 13y ago
  How deep have you gone with the library and with an imap client implementation? There is definitely a lot of variation from imap server to imap server. Things come back with weird and broken encodings sometimes (the server will tell you that a message is unicode and then return invalid unicode), commands that seem to be read-only will have persistent effects, etc. IMAP is nowhere near as nice to work with as its standard and interface imply.
  - naspeh 13y ago
    I know IMAP is hard way, but it most used nowadays. Now I try to work with gmail imap, so it is easier for support just one server for first. BTW. I had seen unicode issues... And yes, there is a lot of work...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

owenversteeg 13y ago

I was enthusiastic about this being able to replace Roundcube/Gmail (what I currently use), but it's rather ugly (no offense to the author.) If nobody else is going to, I may start work on some better styles for it. Also, I'm not really sure why there are two panels and profile pictures; neither gmail nor Roundcube nor Outlook do this. (Gmail and Outlook do put profile pictures to the side of the email itself when opened, however.)

troels 13y ago
It seems quite similar to gmail in it's overall design. With a bit of css handycraft, I'm sure it could be made to look reasonably pretty?

iuqiddis 13y ago

If anyone wants to use a desktop client with gmail-like conversation view, this add-on for Thunderbird does a great job: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/gmail-conversation-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/gmail-con...

naspeh 13y ago
Here is another one https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary I had probably tried all of possible solutions to get gmail like conversation before starting Mailr from scratch

dfc 13y ago

Does gmail-like conversations mean "threaded email"?

naspeh 13y ago
It means conversations really similar to gmail conversations BTW. gmail has flat conversations, threads usually have more hierarchy.
rgeorge 13y ago
I believe it means "flat" threaded email. You care about all messages that are part of a conversation, but you are not concerned about the exact structure of a conversation, so you list all messages of a thread in time-received order.
- dfc 13y ago
  That is what I was afraid of. It did not make any sense to me why one would advertise to the HN crowd that even though the mail client may not provide the best threaded message display at least it does not provide the worst case scenario of flat sorted by date emails. I really wanted to like mailpile, but the email threading is terrible for serious use with mailing lists.
giovannibajo1 13y ago
One additional difference between GMail/AppleMail "conversations" and Thunderbird/Evolution "threading" is that the formers do merge conversations from different IMAP folders (as long as the auto-threading rules kick in), and do merge duplicate mails automagically (e.g. if you have the same mail in "Sent" and in "Mailing List Foo", they will not be displayed twice in the conversation). This for instance allows to have full conversation for emails in Inbox, which is usually not working in Thunderbird since the emails are usually split between Inbox and Sent. IOW, a "conversation" is displayed in any folder that contains at least one message which is part of it, and contains all messages that are logically part of it, even if they're not stored in that folder. A "thread" is a visual arrangement of the emails in the specific folder, but doesn't cross the folder limits. Another important point of the user interface is the "mute" button, that hides (archives) the conversation and doesn't allow it to popup anymore even if new messages arrive (in any folder).

erikb 13y ago

I think the killer feature of Gmail is the priority box view. It is your personal todo list, your second stage spam filter, etc. Would be great if that could be implemented in a mail client. I would instantly use it!

Semaphor 13y ago
Sanebox [0] is in my opinion better than the priority inbox. I used it back when I used gmail and I use it now with fastmail. [0] http://www.sanebox.com/ http://www.sanebox.com/

otikik 13y ago

I think I will wait for https://www.mailpile.is/ https://www.mailpile.is/ instead.

nor-and-or-not 13y ago

There's an existing webmail project which is already using the name Mailr (http://mailr.org/ http://mailr.org/, https://github.com/lmanolov/mailr https://github.com/lmanolov/mailr), although development seems to be on hold.

naspeh 13y ago
I saw this, but before it I had chosen name for working version and then I used it for publishing. Maybe I will change it one day.

plumeria 13y ago

Great! Feature request: support for Markdown syntax!

currysausage 13y ago

+1 for the possibility of merging conversations. I have wondered for so long why you can't do that with Gmail.

naspeh 13y ago

Just wanted to mention. The source of this link is http://redd.it/22bvy4 http://redd.it/22bvy4. I have posted link only to reddit and then it appears here. There are some my answers on questions which can be simular to this thread. P.S. I'm an author of Mailr.

e12e 13y ago

I welcome this new mailclient. Unfortunately it currently leans differently from what I prefer, but perhaps it is close enough that the source code will form a useful basis for what I prefer (no html (and a decent html>text renderer for the brain dead services that don't provide (useful) text parts), no rich editing, threaded -- not gmail style conversations). At any rate it seems like a more viable (for me option) than eg hacking on prayer (because, I think it's just silly to try and work with something exposed to so much bad user input/data as email -- in C): http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/ http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/

shittyanalogy 13y ago

This is a project for people who like to read and write source code, not for people looking for a drop in g-mail replacement. All the feature requests and UI complaints make no sense here.