That's a very nice looking app - I like the look of it it gives me Mail.app vibes.
A mail client is always a tough thing to get right so I'm glad you're working on one
I love then idea that as the total cost (time/money/attention) of personalizing software continues to come down, more people will be able to encourage a diaspora of options, tailored to each niche.
Visually it resembles Mail.app, but if it’s going for a similar level of functionality I think modern GNOME’s hamburger-and-three-dots-buttons approach to menus is going to become a problem.
This is one of those types of app that really benefits from a proper menubar with several top-level menus so the user isn’t stuck spelunking submenu tunnels.
Interesting that they call out Fastmail as a supported provider, but don't support JMAP. Seems like that would have been an easy stretch goal for Claude, and a good way to stand out amongst the competition.
A project with the complexity of an email client cannot be considered stable in a month. There are bugs that will only show up after a year. It has a calendar after all.
> The UI looks pretty good too. It's really not hard to beat thunderbird.
I don't understand this mentality. It's an email client. There's not a lot needed UI-wise to make a functioning interface. Display a list of emails, show the full message when you open it, etc. I don't see anything functionally different between this email app and basically every other one I've ever used.
You've either got insane standards or are using email way different than I.
Can’t speak for others but for me Thunderbird’s UI feels distracting and almost grating in some ways. It’s technically functional but doesn’t feel right.
I know things like that don’t bother some folks and that’s fine, but others like myself can’t turn the visual parts of their brains off and so some software feels like nails on a chalkboard to use.
But from a normal user's standpoint? I don't care. If my email client needs more than a single thread, something's fucked.
I randomly bounce between Thunderbird and KMail and honestly I can't tell the difference except cosmetically. Both are snappy. Neither crash. Both send and receive emails just fine.
> - can’t choose a sender email?! This is major dealbreaker, if you have many aliases or domains.
Ugh, this drives me nuts. It's the same reason why I stopped using my Supernote Nomad for email.
I use iCloud+ email with a custom domain. With that arrangement you authenticate to Apple's servers with your iCloud "primary address", like someone.somename@icloud.com. Then you can send and receive email with your custom domain email address, which is the one you're actually using. But not with Supernote, or apparently Penguin Mail. My Nomad will only send mail with my @icloud.com address, even though that's only used for authentication.
So yeah, I just stopped using it altogether. That's not my address. It's not how people reach me. It's literally just a username.
This is interesting, I am doing an experimental effort with similar goals. What is your approach to testing? The bug surface of something like this is quite large. Also, do you have a plan for sandboxing?
I would love an email client that automatically sorts my mails via a local LLM.
As long as it tries to be the "I" in "AI" and do something useful like automatically detect conversations with my accountant, per project and not per sender mails including somehow labeling mails referring to multiple projects with multiple labels etc.
Then my 'amail' client seems to fit the bill.. (OSS, rust, I use it on Linux and haven't tested elsewhere) ..not really suggesting it – it's pretty barebones and just whatever I've needed, but you're welcome to it obviously! Especially if you have issues/PRs to spur me on to features I've wanted too...
Maybe I'm not the target here but an embedded chat ai window is a huge turn off to me. Having a CLI I can give my own agent to access/query the data, if I choose to do that, would have been preferred but if the target was my mother, then a chat window is probably a better option.
Also it is made by pivotd ? What is it ? What is the end game ?
Genuinely curious as I am in the mail space with klar.im
A mail client is always a tough thing to get right so I'm glad you're working on one
I love then idea that as the total cost (time/money/attention) of personalizing software continues to come down, more people will be able to encourage a diaspora of options, tailored to each niche.
This is one of those types of app that really benefits from a proper menubar with several top-level menus so the user isn’t stuck spelunking submenu tunnels.
I like the idea of a native Linux email client. The UI looks pretty good too. It's really not hard to beat thunderbird.
Calling it version 1.0 is bullshit though. It's only about a month old: https://github.com/c9dev/penguin-mail/graphs/contributors?al...
A project with the complexity of an email client cannot be considered stable in a month. There are bugs that will only show up after a year. It has a calendar after all.
I don't understand this mentality. It's an email client. There's not a lot needed UI-wise to make a functioning interface. Display a list of emails, show the full message when you open it, etc. I don't see anything functionally different between this email app and basically every other one I've ever used.
You've either got insane standards or are using email way different than I.
I know things like that don’t bother some folks and that’s fine, but others like myself can’t turn the visual parts of their brains off and so some software feels like nails on a chalkboard to use.
But from a normal user's standpoint? I don't care. If my email client needs more than a single thread, something's fucked.
I randomly bounce between Thunderbird and KMail and honestly I can't tell the difference except cosmetically. Both are snappy. Neither crash. Both send and receive emails just fine.
2. Seems odd to assume instability by default without evidence.
If so, I'd love to hear a writeup!
It's missing some features that are dealbreakers for me, but I haven't found anything unstable yet.
- can’t choose a sender email?! This is major dealbreaker, if you have many aliases or domains.
- no favico for emails, this is also a deal breaker for me, as I used it to quickly skim and find or check new emails.
- folders orders is messed up, trying to arrange them made it worse
- trying to color a folder and it says “server doesn’t support that”
Also the UI needs more polishing overall.
Ugh, this drives me nuts. It's the same reason why I stopped using my Supernote Nomad for email.
I use iCloud+ email with a custom domain. With that arrangement you authenticate to Apple's servers with your iCloud "primary address", like someone.somename@icloud.com. Then you can send and receive email with your custom domain email address, which is the one you're actually using. But not with Supernote, or apparently Penguin Mail. My Nomad will only send mail with my @icloud.com address, even though that's only used for authentication.
So yeah, I just stopped using it altogether. That's not my address. It's not how people reach me. It's literally just a username.
I'll stick with the web UI in that case. Are you using any other clients on Mac or Linux?
As long as it tries to be the "I" in "AI" and do something useful like automatically detect conversations with my accountant, per project and not per sender mails including somehow labeling mails referring to multiple projects with multiple labels etc.
Not that I think this mail client can do that...
Can this be compiled for other operating systems than Linux?
(This used to come at the cost of code quality, but increasingly does not.)
https://terminaltrove.com/herald/
https://terminaltrove.com/matcha/
And this is the one I use with Gmail, Outlook, Yandex:
https://terminaltrove.com/aerc/