IMAP client for coders

http://www.hajomail.com/

by fxtentacle • 13 years ago

71 84 13 years ago

hajomail.com

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

If you're also working on IMAP / mail clients and want to discuss the technicalities, feel free to drop me a line at

mail at hajo (dot) me

tonyarkles2• 13 years ago

I've been knee deep in imap for the last month or two. As a curiosity, which imap library are you using? I've had to contribute a few patches to ruby's net/imap already to get it to successfully parse all the mail I've accumulated over the last 10 years :)

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

I started with patching the IMAP parser from Google Go, then i re-wrote parts of it to make my email collection work.

I still cannot successfully MIME-parse all of my emails, but the ones that fail are spam (and also don't work in Outlook 2011) so i'd say it's the email's fault.

I can recommend Google Go for tasks such as IMAP because of its concurrency model. You can run a go-routine for each IMAP connection and their idea of agents communicating through channels worked really well for my IMAP client.

julian372• 13 years ago

Hi Hajo, this looks great! I'm an Emacs addict though, and the main reason I'm not using Gnus anymore is that I haven't found a IMAP syncing solution that "just works" (last time I've checked). Since it sounds like you've solved this problem, is there any chance the syncing module can be run standalone? If so I'll most definitely chip in on your Kickstarter.

BCM43• 13 years ago

I'm currently using offlineimap and notmuch. Have you tried that?

p4bl02• 13 years ago

Emacs user here too. I'm using offlineimap which works great, and then I use mu and mu4e [1] to read my email in Emacs.

[1] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

Sorry to disappoint you, but i did not find a solution to make IMAP sync correctly. I circumvent the problem by running a gateway that will be continuously connected to the IMAP server. The clients that connect to the gateway, which can do proper syncing :)

So syncing between my mail client and mail clients from other people will be as frickle as ever. What this project aims to do right is offline mode and syncing between multiple instances of my mail client.

ante_annum3• 13 years ago

I've also been writing an imap client for the past few months with exactly the same goal as this, in go. This looks great.

I'd like to keep my front-end as absolutely light as possible, so I'm foregoing gwt/bootstrap and going with mostly just handwritten jquery.

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

Interesting coincidence :)

This project is also written in Go. I have IMAP go-routines which will send changes on the IMAP server to a gateway multiplexer which stores those changes in a synchronize-able DB. The Webgui will listen for changes from the DB and present them to the user. I chose to go this route such that i can run the gateway and the webgui on different computers both with a local copy of the DB and have them synchronize when network connectivity is present.

I've opted for GWT because i like static typing. From a performance perspective, i've never really found much difference between GWT and hand-written JS.

zaius3• 13 years ago

Looks awesome! Nice work.

I don't know how I feel about the closed source -> kickstarter -> open source model. Why not just put it on github now and get people using it?

Unrelated to the product, but I'd change your highlighting on the site to something other than blue - ux wise it makes me think it's going to be a link.

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

thanks :) the GUI is mostly Twitter Bootstrap + Font Awesome + GWT

I was also not so sure about using Kickstarter for source code, but then i stumbled upon Light Table, which is a coding tool sold there.

I'd really like to continue working on it to make it more polished and for that i need some way to get money out of it. I could, of course, try to sell it as a SaaS project, but that would block people from hacking it.

dfc5• 13 years ago

I'm all for open source and all for you having a roof over your head. I think its a great model. I wish you the best of luck.

zaius3• 13 years ago

Definitely still do the kickstarter. What I meant was I think you'll have better luck on the kickstarter if it's open source to begin with. I'd feel uneasy giving money to a kickstarter project that could stay closed source.

I think you should also offer it as a SaaS once you get it up and running. Being open source doesn't stop you from doing that. Then you get the best of both worlds.

evoxed2• 13 years ago

If you offered a license for web hosts to use this, I think I know a whole bunch of coders and designers who would gladly pay for a hackable IMAP client. Kickstarter isn't a bad idea, but you should also try polling people to find out if you could set up SaaS at the same time or some other scheme. There are many possibilities...

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

The program is structured in a way that you can use it both as a hosted webmail AND as a locally running client. I needed that so i can use the web version from my iphone and sync my laptops for offline use.

But for web hosts i think they would prefer a solution for multiple users. This is designed for one person with multiple email accounts, so they would need to start the webgui program multiple times to host multiple users.

As for SaaS i'd rather have the users host their own version on Heroku or EC2 than having to manage all those clients.

evoxed2• 13 years ago

Sorry, I realized after posting that my phrasing was pretty bad. The current setup looks good for the sort of thing I do– I would pay for it (one time probably)– but if you then made it super easy to set up for multiple users, even if it was a simple shell script or some kind of interface, you could do some sort of tool-subscription (pay once or subscribe for updates). By webhosts I was thinking primarily of people like me who manage a couple servers and do everything server-side for our clients except plug in the fiber...

X-Istence• 13 years ago

Check out Roundcube if you are looking for an awesome webmail client.

AceJohnny2• 13 years ago

Don't coders use Mutt ? :]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(email_client)

IheartApplesDix3• 13 years ago

Considering Mutt supports PGP, and this doesn't seem to, yes.

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

You're correct on that one. I built this client to make my work with email better. I'm not sure if i have ever received an email with PGP and i'm pretty sure that it would confuse half to all of my colleagues ...

dfc5• 13 years ago

I always had trouble with the lack of a folder list in mutt. My friend is close to convincing me to give the mutt-patched package in debian a chance.[1] All I need to do is find a decent muttrc that is not super tweaked like my friend's config and then stumble along until I figure out what I need to change. For some reason I have always been confused/overwhelmed/putt-off by the coloring schemes when I have used mutt in the past.

[1] Patch: http://www.lunar-linux.org/mutt-sidebar/

[2] Screenshot: http://screenshots.debian.net/screenshots/m/mutt-patched/456...

spindritf• 13 years ago

Walk-through for mutt configuration https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4597156

jason_slack• 13 years ago

I have always wanted to run the mutt-patched on my osx machine but can never get it configured correctly. Any chance there are binaries or better instructions?

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

well i heard about it at university but i dislike it since it's not appropriate for those graphical emails that i get

leephillips• 13 years ago

It is when you use muttils, that I describe at http://lee-phillips.org/muttheaven/

icebraining• 13 years ago

I prefer Alpine.

npsimons2• 13 years ago

Yes, even on my N900 where I have Emacs+Org-Mode, I still SSH in to my mail server and run mutt. Mostly because I'm lazy, but also because every other mail client I've ever tried has just sucked more :)

zoidb• 13 years ago

> I obviously can't afford to give my work away for free

Why is that obvious?

acchow2• 13 years ago

He seems to be confused seeing as he also built it with FOSS like bootstrap and GWT.

piqufoh• 13 years ago

Obviously those tools aren't given away for free! oh.

fudged71• 13 years ago

The Bootstrap framework can't be used for commercial purposes?

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

The main difference here is that the people who wrote Bootstrap and GWT were employees and they were PAID to work on those open source projects.

I'm not employed for working on OS software. I did less contract work (and thus now have less money) so that i could spend my time on preparing a solution which works well for me.

However, if i need to spend more time to make it work well for other people, that would be a stupid decision for me if it means that i lose more money.

But if you look above, i'm not set in stone about the OS / not-OS debate. I'm just wondering if people would be willing pay me for polishing it if the source is already available.

If not, this could very quickly turn into one of those highly ambitious, yet dead, open source projects as soon as i'm forced to work on other projects.

arrrg• 13 years ago

I don’t quite understand your entitlement.

The usual case is that people have to be paid for their work. If that’s sometimes not the case then that’s a bonus, not something you can expect and be angry if it doesn’t happen.

You don’t want to pay for it? Fine, that’s great. You are free not to. It’s also not appealing for me personally. But complaining about someone wanting money for work? Sorry, that’s wretched.

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

OK those words were badly chosen.

I'm a freelancer and as such i don't have an employer paying me to contribute to open source projects. This means that i need money to be able to afford to spend more time on this project.

benatkin2• 13 years ago

> I obviously can't afford to give my work away for free, but for you to get maximum benefit out of it, it needs to be open source.

Who is it obvious to? This is the first time I've heard of you. For all I know you could afford to give it away for free. And often in the case of open source, you reap the benefits later.

Sounds like a great project, and the screenshots are promising.

ajross3• 13 years ago

It's ransomware, yeah. Historically this is never (I mean, literally never AFAIK) been a good way to start a successful open source project. This might fool a few people (who like source in principle, but who don't want to muck with it themselves) into thinking it's "almost as good as open" and contributing. But it's deeply, deeply disrespectful to the community you will actually need to build if you want this to succeeed. Basically the funders end up being dupes; there's no community and probably never will be.

I agree it looks cute, and I'd love to try it if it were available. But I certainly won't be funding it.

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

That seems to be well-reasoned criticism.

I think i would need to further polish it before people will invest time on their own accord into keeping the open source project alive. To achieve that, i need some money to pay to pay for work and design.

Giving software away for free and asking for donations doesn't seem to work well. At least i got like 500 support requests but no single donation yet for my last email project: http://tentacleworks.net/Site/Nostalgy_4_Mail.app.html

So i thought that the best way to make this work would be to ask interested users to pay for the development costs, like Light Table:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table

Do you have any experience / suggestions on how to launch this?

raphman• 13 years ago

Maybe I am not representative of the general audience but I'd be happy to pay for a good IMAP client and even happier if I can fix small annoyances myself.

npsimons2• 13 years ago

While I can appreciate your misgivings, I might point out a counter data point: Blender. Now, I'm not saying this software is Blender, but if it can be ransomed into OSS for an equitable price, why not?

SwellJoe• 13 years ago

I've used a ransomware model a few times in the past. It worked out OK. The source got released, the coder got paid (never me, it was always stuff I was contracting out to well-known hackers within the community where the work was being done and I was contributing about half of the money...the ransom was to sweeten the pot), everybody was happy. And, I've contributed to ransoms as an outsider, as well.

I don't think it's "deeply, deeply disrespectful" to anyone. It's asking for money so someone can work on what they want to (and presumably some others want them to do the same). No one is forced to participate or contribute. The only way it is disrespectful is if the code doesn't get released or proves to be shoddy after the funding is raised.

jamesaguilar• 13 years ago

If gmail makes you sick, I'm afraid I don't have much faith that you know what I might like in a mail editor.

Andrex2• 13 years ago

Nor good design. With a little tweaking, Gmail is absolute minimalist nirvana.

http://i.minus.com/ib0I7hmj8fzm2b.png

(User stylesheet here: https://gist.github.com/4650448)

zaius3• 13 years ago

How do you apply a custom stylesheet? Do I have to use greasemonkey?

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

That might be correct. It's pretty hard to read people's minds before meeting them ;)

I really like the GMail editor and their table view. That's why my inbox view looks so much alike :)

What i, however, honestly dislike is their overall sluggishness. GMail seems pretty slow and last time i tried, their offline mode didn't work well enough so that i could use it to work on a train.

So i try to use the good GMail editor and combine it with the somewhat OK Outlook offline mode. But as a complete package, i hate working with both of those.

patangay• 13 years ago

Looks great! But, here is the problem.

Medium to large companies, they need some sort of calendaring and meeting room booking system. This is where outlook (more importantly exchange) comes into the picture. I don't think it's the best solution out there, but it's a solution that works reasonably well.

I also don't really like that email and calendaring are tied together, I'd love to see a robust solution that works across Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Yishan Wong wrote about this a few years ago.[1]

So, this would work great for personal email and small companies, but I don't see it replacing the email client of the larger ones. I'd love to see gmail and microsoft give some of these search/indexing features.

[1] http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/great-unsolved-problems-in-com...

AmericanOP• 13 years ago

We're trying to make that whole experience better. Thanks for the link.

Drop me a line if you want to chat danny (@) outlook.com.

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

Yes, Outlook is great for time planning .. if all of your team uses it. However, most people that send me emails use GMail or other web mailers and thus Exchange is not really a benefit in that regard.

Before i started my work on this client, i used Outlook 2011 and i'm still paying for hosted Exchange so yes, i think they are both reasonably designed products.

It's just that Outlook doesn't suit my workflow of dealing with email. And it can be pretty slow at times. And it sometimes doesn't sync well after offline mode.

IheartApplesDix3• 13 years ago

Roundcube and Zimbra are efforts toward this.

tonybaroneee2• 13 years ago

What HTML editor do you use for email composition? (e.g. TinyMCE, CKEditor)

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

I wrote my own simple editor which is based around content blocks. So for example every headline is a Text-block with style "Headline".

https://github.com/fxtentacle/hajo-page-editor

tonybaroneee2• 13 years ago

Interesting, I'll check this out some more!

javert• 13 years ago

claws-mail is really nice. Highly recommended if you don't mind fiddling to get things set up the way you want.

jcoder• 13 years ago

> I've been using it since november, which was three months ago. That's why i consider this mail system > battle-tested

A very small battle. More a skirmish, really.

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

Correct. I'd wager that "skirmish-tested" doesn't sound as good, though ;)

What i mean to say is that i'm very confident that it works good enough for a more-or-less public beta. Of course, much work still remains to make it compatible with every IMAP server out there, but as a single person i won't have the time nor the resources to get there.

tillk2• 13 years ago

Quote from the page:

> I obviously can't afford to give my work away for free, but for you to get maximum benefit out of it, it needs to be open source.

Meet others who can afford to give away their work for free:

http://squirrelmail.org/ http://roundcube.net/ http://www.xuheki.com/ http://www.horde.org/apps/imp

And there is more — google: webmail client open source

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

I honestly wonder how they do it.

I'm a freelancer and if i work for free, i do not have any money. So for me to be able to develop and share this freely, i would probably need some big corporation that is willing to pay me for working on it.

I'd also be interested in how those projects come up with the money to pay a professional designer. Roundcube looks very sleek, as if it was designed professionally.

BTW, what i'm developing isn't exactly a webmail client. It is an server-side IMAP gateway and a client so that you can use it completely offline.

tillk2• 13 years ago

> I honestly wonder how they do it.

Have you ever heard of open source? :)

I've contributed to this project and various others and I frequently had people either hire me to add features to a certain project I worked on/released or bought me a book or so off my Amazon wishlist.

Though one time a company actually paid me to work on open source, this is nothing that pays my rent (currently) and also not my motivation to work on open source in the first place. My main driver is that I use open source and I decided to give back. It also helps my resume though I never really needed that either.

As for RoundCube's design — thank you. I am not a 100% sure right now if "money" went towards the design, but feel free to drop us a line at hello~at~roundcube~dot~net.

p4bl02• 13 years ago

IMAP client for coders? Let me review: not open source, web based, html emails, no PGP support, IMAP client tied to MUA, no mention of keybindings…

Nope. Not for coders. Even less for "hackers" as the webpage say.

And that's just technicalities, but as others already said, "I obviously can't afford to give my work away for free"… well, sigh.

I'm not saying everyone should use Mutt or read their email in Emacs, but I'm a little sad that this link got so much upvotes.

fxtentacle19• 13 years ago

"not open source" This post is here to discuss options for changing that.

"web based" I'd say that is a plus, because you can have the same GUI running locally (and fast) on your computer and running remotely (and slow) on your web server. I know that WebKit has a huge overhead compared to emacs or mutt, but since about every second email that i receive is HTML anyway, i won't be able to avoid WebKit / Gecko.

"html emails" I have to write email to normal people too. I know it's sad, but most of my friends prefer HTML emails with pictures. That said, some of my existing beta testers are using it to send around HTML newsletters.

"no PGP support" correct. I've never used it and (see below) the PGP signatures seem to irritate some people.

"IMAP client tied to MUA" correct. I chose to go this way to finally have fast and working offline mode with synchronization

"no mention of keybindings" I implemented CMD+I for INBOX and CMD+S for search. Since i didn't miss anything else, i didn't implement them.

I consider myself a coder/hacker and i built this to suit my workflow, so i thought that description to be accurate.

"I'm a little sad that this link got so much upvotes" I'd say this is a good thing because it gives us the possibility to discuss what you dislike about my email client or email in general.

BTW, i'd be interested in what solution you currently use. Maybe that'll also help others that drift here to find their new perfect mail client.

cies• 13 years ago

i think this with good indexing/search capabilities, and tagging (like gmail) and PGP support with a clean web-UI that supports multiple screen sizes (devices) is an ABSOLUTE HIT!

run one on my phone! and/or over https on _MY_ server. then build calendar-chat-etc in.

wow..

antifuchs• 13 years ago

Fascinating. What do you use to sync emails to the offline mirror? (-:

ante_annum3• 13 years ago

This is an imap client + local database + web interface to local database

IMAP client for coders

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