Mailr: an open-source webmail client with Gmail-like conversations
pusto.org
pusto.org
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
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:
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.
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.
It uses imaplib from the Python standard library. Doesn't look scary to me.
BTW. I had seen unicode issues... And yes, there is a lot of work...
This means your clients don't automatically update read message stats, which is a pain (most surprising thing I noticed moving to Gmail from hosting IMAP on my home server).
I prefer to say that it is just as horribly awful as it's abomination of a ill conceived standard implies.
Pretty much "everything" is wrong about IMAP, from allowing the use of message sequence numbers that can change under you, to the horribly overcomplicated support for addressing mime parts, to the overcomplicated grammar...
Arnt and Ahbijit know more about the email RFCs than probably anyone else on the planet. Arnt has been involved in writing several RFCs himself. Aox is blazing fast and your mailboxes scale as large as you want. Millions of emails in a single mail folder is not a problem. It's also really nice that it handles deduplication of your mail at several levels.
What irks me is the FAQ entry claiming "If you have trouble with user authentication, edit the pg_hba.conf to allow trust or md5"... I - don't think that this is a good idea?
Trust is not a good idea, in my opinion. But I know that some people disagree with me, and I have better things to do than discuss the issue with them.
MD5 is fine, I think. If you allow randoms from the entire internet to connect, allowing MD5 won't hurt you much more. If you restrict connections to e.g. your own IP addresses using a packet filter or firewall, MD5 definitely will not hurt you.
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
If you do that, synchronizing the index with the data becomes your responsibility. And you're most likely indexing with a database anyway. So the next logical step is to put the message itself in the database, and then you get synchronization for free.
It might actually be better to use ElasticSearch as the datastore for this particular application instead of MySQL or the like.
I do like fancy GUIs and use roundcube as one option. For me,
> it's still much more portable and easily to handle backup and syncing purposes in different formats.
...the portability is very important. I don't want a new MUA to force me into changing my whole mailstore/MTA chain.
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.)
I had probably tried all of possible solutions to get gmail like conversation before starting Mailr from scratch
P.S. I'm an author of Mailr.
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):
BTW. gmail has flat conversations, threads usually have more hierarchy.
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).