Geary is a
free and open-source
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
email client
An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email.
A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...
written in
Vala
Vala or VALA may refer to:
Religion and mythology
* Vala (Vedic), a demon or a stone cavern in the Hindu scriptures
* Völva, also spelled Vala, a priestess in Norse mythology and Norse paganism
Fiction
* Vala (Middle-earth), an angelic being in ...
and based on
WebKitGTK. Although since adopted by
the GNOME project
GNOME Project is a community behind the GNOME desktop environment and the software platform upon which it is based. It consists of all the software developers, artists, writers, translators, other contributors, and active users of GNOME. It is no ...
, it originally was developed by the
Yorba Foundation
Yorba Foundation was a non-profit software group based in San Francisco, and founded by Adam Dingle wanting to bring first class software to the open source community. This organization had been created to answer people thinking open source brin ...
. The purpose of this e-mail client, according to Adam Dingle, Yorba founder, was to bring back users from online
webmail
Webmail (or web-based email) is an email service that can be accessed using a standard web browser. It contrasts with email service accessible through a specialised email client software. Examples of webmail providers are 1&1 Ionos, AOL Mail, G ...
s to a faster and easier to use
desktop application
A desktop traditionally refers to:
* The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor)
Desktop may refer to various compu ...
.
Pantheon Mail was a
fork
In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods ei ...
initiated by the
Elementary OS
elementary OS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu LTS. It promotes itself as a "thoughtful, capable, and ethical" replacement to macOS and Windows and has a pay-what-you-want model. The operating system, the desktop environment (called P ...
community after the demise of Yorba, though it was later rewritten from scratch so that the only remaining references to Geary in the Pantheon code base are in some translations.
Features
* Supports
Gmail
Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP an ...
,
Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! Mail is an email service launched on October 8, 1997, by the American company Yahoo (2017–present), Yahoo, Inc. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. Business email was previously av ...
,
Outlook.com, and popular
IMAP
In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by .
IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...
servers.
* Mail organized by conversations.
* Support for sending as another identity.
* Full-featured
HTML mail composer.
* Support for reading
TNEF
Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format or TNEF is a proprietary email attachment format used by Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server. An attached file with TNEF encoding is most often named ''winmail.dat'' or ''win.dat'', and has a MIM ...
attachments.
* Fast keyword search with values like
from:john
,
is:read
,
is:unread
and
is:starred
.
* Desktop notification of new mails.
*
GNOME Keyring
GNOME Keyring is a software application designed to store security credentials such as usernames, passwords, and keys, together with a small amount of relevant metadata. The sensitive data is encrypted and stored in a keyring file in the user's ...
integration to store passwords for email accounts.
Implementation to support
GPG had been started,
but is still incomplete as of 2019.
Technical information
Geary internally uses an
SQLite
SQLite (, ) is a database engine written in the C programming language. It is not a standalone app; rather, it is a library that software developers embed in their apps. As such, it belongs to the family of embedded databases. It is the most ...
database to store a local copy of emails and for indexing. It uses a fully asynchronous
GObject
The GLib Object System, or GObject, is a free software library providing a portable object system and transparent cross-language interoperability. GObject is designed for use both directly in C programs to provide object-oriented C-based APIs ...
-based IMAP client library. One feature that distinguishes Geary from other open source email clients is its focus on the conversation view. Both Geary and Pantheon Mail are using
gettext
In computing, gettext is an internationalization and localization (i18n and l10n) system commonly used for writing multilingual programs on Unix-like computer operating systems. One of the main benefits of gettext is that it separates programmi ...
for translations.
As of April 3, 2016, Pantheon Mail has not been migrated to WebKitGTK+2 yet. The developers decided first to migrate the code managing the conversation view to use native
GTK
GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and propriet ...
widgets (Gtk.CSS and Granite, a GTK+ library used as part of elementary OS). This offered several advantages, including minimizing the use of webviews, reducing the code, supporting hardware accelerated animations, and supporting
RTL languages.
They also removed the use of custom GTK bars like
PillHeaderBar
which were making the code complicated and difficult to read.
Geary uses WebKit2 since at least version 3.32.0.
History
Historically,
Elementary OS
elementary OS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu LTS. It promotes itself as a "thoughtful, capable, and ethical" replacement to macOS and Windows and has a pay-what-you-want model. The operating system, the desktop environment (called P ...
directly supported
the project and Geary became the default application in that
Linux distribution
A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...
.
On March 25, 2013,
Jim Nelson, executive director at Yorba, launched a
crowdfunding
Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...
campaign on
IndieGoGo to gather US$100,000 that would have been used to pay the 3 full-time Yorba engineers that were working at that time on Geary.
Unfortunately, on April 23, 2013, only US$50,860 were gathered from 1,192 backers. The amount was not met and the campaign failed. According to the rules set by IndieGoGo, Yorba did not receive any of the money that had been pledged.
After this failure, Jim Nelson declared in a blog post that the crowdfunding campaign was kind of an experiment to see if that route was enough to sustain open-source development. He reaffirmed Geary had been created to improve the
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
experience, and therefore had no chance of being ported to
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
or
Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
platforms.
As the
Yorba Foundation
Yorba Foundation was a non-profit software group based in San Francisco, and founded by Adam Dingle wanting to bring first class software to the open source community. This organization had been created to answer people thinking open source brin ...
had stopped its activities and
GNOME
A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...
had not announced any plans about this project at the time, the future of Geary was unclear. As a result, to these uncertainties, due to previous design disagreements with the old Geary team and because elementary OS was actually using Geary as the default mail client (though in a heavily patched version), Danielle Foré, the leader of Elementary OS, decided to fork the project on November 18, 2015 and continue with the development as a fork.; the project was renamed Pantheon Mail during the process.
Pantheon Mail replaced Geary in elementary OS 0.4, which is codenamed Loki.
In March 2016, Michael Gratton applied to become the new maintainer of Geary.
His main goal was to try fixing pressing issues like the dependency on the old WebKit1GTK, collaboration with Pantheon Mail, better support for non-GMail servers, mailbox management, the account UI, extending search, etc. Contributing to Geary as a GNOME project requires the maintainer to become a GNOME member. After a discussion with Adam Dingle, Yorba's founder, both agreed to wait for Gratton to fulfill GNOME membership application requirements. In the meantime, Gratton will post his patches to the GNOME
Bugzilla
Bugzilla is a web-based general-purpose bug tracking system and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project, and licensed under the Mozilla Public License.
Released as open-source software by Netscape Communications in 199 ...
instance and Adam will commit them for him.
On May 15, 2016, version 0.11 was released,.
Version 0.13 was released on February 18, 2019. In March 2019, with version 3.32, the version scheme was changed to match
GNOME's release schedule (note the difference in even/odd version numbers).
Naming
The initial name "Geary" coincides with the name of the
Geary Street
Geary Boulevard (designated as Geary Street east of Van Ness Avenue) is a major east–west thoroughfare in San Francisco, California, United States, beginning downtown at Market Street near Market Street's intersection with Kearny Street, and ...
, because all Yorba's products were named after streets in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
. However, according to a former Yorba employee, the application was not named after the address where Yorba Foundation was located.
That was actually a coincidence. The first beta of Geary was released in May 2012, and Yorba was still located on Capp Street at the time.
References
External links
Gearyin a
GNOME
A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...
wiki
*
{{Email clients
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