Yorba, the team behind Shotwell, has started working on a new project called Geary, a lightweight, feature-rich email client for the GNOME desktop written in Vala.
Geary is in very early development stages and it can pretty much only be used to fetch / write new emails and only works with Gmail for now. But there are some quite interesting planned features for Geary:
- Full IMAP support, making email synchronization a breeze
- Tight integration with popular Web mail services, including Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Mobile Me
- Full-featured WYSIWYG editor for composing emails
- Threaded / conversation views
- Lightning fast as-you-type email search
- Desktop notification of new email
- Support for multiple email accounts
- Offline mode
- Full support for popular IMAP servers, including Dovecot
What's even more interesting is that elementary OS guys are interested in Geary (which by the way already features an elementary-like menu/button, as you can see in the screenshot above) and they have contacted Yorba about combining Postler's user interface with Geary's backend:
We’re undergoing talks with Yorba regarding the possibility of combining Postler’s fine user interface with the great backend of Yorba’s super-secret mail client Geary. We've reached out to Yorba and they seem to be just as excited as us; this could become a very powerful partnership and we look forward to the good things to come.
In theory, Geary sounds great, and with help for the user interface from elementary, this new email client for GNOME would surely rock. However, judging from the commit log, the development is kind of slow so if you can help, check out the Geary Project page (here you'll also find installation instructions, but it's kind of tricky due to some dependencies not available in the repos).
