The need for a modern open source email client and Geary’s fundraiser

One of my frustrations with the Linux desktop is the lack of an email client that’s in the same league as GMail or Apple’s mail.app. Thunderbird is ok as far as it goes (I use it for my day-to-day Mozilla correspondence) but I miss having a decent conversation view of email (yes, I tried the conversation view extension — while impressive in some ways, it ultimately didn’t work particularly well for me) and the search functionality is rather slow and cumbersome. I’d like to be optimistic about these problems being fixed at some point but after nearly 2 years of using the product without much visible improvement my expectation of that happening is rather low.

The Yorba non-profit recently started a fundraiser to work on the next edition of Geary, an email client which I hope will fill the niche that I’m talking about. It’s pretty rough around the edges still, but even at this early stage the conversation view is beautiful and more or less exactly what I want. The example of Shotwell (their photo management application) suggests that they know a thing or two about creating robust and useable software, not a common thing in this day and age. In any case, their pitch was compelling enough for me to donate a few dollars to the cause. If you care about having a great email experience that is completely under your control (and not that of an advertising or product company with their own agenda), then maybe you could too?