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Written by Tom Albers
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Friday, 29 December 2006 |
You might be wondering what Mailody is. It is a mail client. But it is not a full mail client like KMail is. It only talks IMAP. So if you are a POP user, you can not use Mailody, unless you install a local IMAP server. Which is not that hard to do, but it is not yet described on this site.
The year before starting Mailody I got generally annoyed by all available mail clients. There are a bunch of email clients available, but none seems to fit the way I work with email.. There are a bunch of things I need, some implemented by some mailclients, some by others:
- I only work with 'online' IMAP. i've no need for the offline / disconnected one or pop3. So that should work fast, reliable and sensible (fetching a complete message should only be done once imho).
- I work a lot with shared email folders. Messages in those folders can be moved, answered or deleted by my co-workers. The last one is where KMail fails. It will not show deleted but not expunged emails which might be unread (giving you a a wrong count of unread messages after each mailcheck).
- I have an archive which I need to access regulary, the server side IMAP just isn't really suitable for quickly finding messages when I have a customer on the phone. I would like to have a simple database backend to do that in.
- There is a feature to tag emails. Mozilla Thunderbird has implemented that, messages get a color when you tag them (numpad 0-5 to tag). The good thing is that it is server-side stored. While working with a bunch of people on a folder you can quicly devide the work and scream at your co-workers to hurry up with the blue stuff.
- I need a way to make a quick internal comment on messages. Does not need to be server-side stored, but if that's possible, that would be great. Thunderbird has a (not-so-user-friendly) plugin for that.
- Store replies with the original message. It makes no sense at all to store them in a separate folder. Who on earth decided that was the way to go. There is nothing so convenient as having the reply I wrote next to the message it replied to.
I first tried to get KMail to do what I wanted, but soon I noticed how lost I felt while looking at the code. Probably my lack of thorough c++ knowledge. But it prevented me to start implementing the things I need in KMail.
Thunderbird was also doing an ok job, but had some minor issues (not so handy keyboard shortcuts, stupid dragging of threads, deleting mailboxes instead of messages when the focus is wrong, not so good kde integration).
That is what motivated me to start Mailody. I did not want to make 'yet another mail client', I wanted a mail client that fits my personal needs. Then I decided that I could put up the tarball somewhere because others might find it usefull.
Still reading? O Ok, now what can Mailody do from that list above?
It can talk IMAP and it can tag messages with colors similar to Thunderbird (keys 0-5). It saves the messages in the folder where you started the message, so there are no local folders like 'send mail', 'drafts' or 'outbox.
I've also implemented tabbed email reading, so you can read a mail in one tab, open up a new tab and open another mail in another folder. Great when you want to check out the new mail while working on a mail with todo's. Another cool feature which is missing in most mail clients is the the ability to sort on the youngest item in the thread. So not the date of the thread opener counts, but the latest message in a thread counts.
You can look at the screenshots for how Mailody looks.
Mailody is GPL software, written in C++ and uses the QT-toolkit. It depends on kdelibs, sqlite and QCA (for TLS/SSL).
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Last Updated ( Monday, 01 January 2007 )
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