As promised on our Geary crowdfunding campaign page, we want to know what features our users are looking for in an email client. And in listening to you, we have some good news to announce.
To refresh your memory, these are the features we’re promising to build in Geary 0.4 if we reach our goal:
- As-fast-as-you-can-type searching
- Always-on notification of new email
- Support for all major IMAP servers
- Save and auto-save drafts
I’m pleased to announce that in addition to the above, we promise to add these features as well:
- Transparent GPG integration (digital signing and encryption/decryption of messages)
- Calendar integration (see update below for details)
- Import address book from Google Contacts
This is quite a line-up of features, but again, we’re only promising all of these if we make our target of $100,000. You can help make that a reality.
What if we don’t make it?
While there’s still 19 days left in the campaign, it’s still worth discussing what happens if we don’t make the target. Since this is an all-or-nothing campaign, Yorba will receive nothing if we don’t reach or exceed our goal of $100,000. What then?
Well, we still have a little gas in the tank and can keep working on Geary. We won’t have enough time to develop all of the above features, however, so it would be a pretty limited subset of them. In fact, it may only be a couple, plus some bug fixes. That may be about it.
After that — who knows? There’s a lot of possible futures and it’s not worth speculating which one will develop. In any future, it’s hard to see continued aggressive development of Geary without further funding.
So why contemplate that possibility when you can help create a much better future? Please consider donating today and tell everyone you know who supports open-source and wants to see it flourish!
UPDATE: We’ve received some comments asking what we mean by calendar integration. Our plan is that Geary will allow you to add invites you receive via email to your favorite calendar application. We are not planning to add a calendar itself to Geary.
Regarding rapid searching, including search folders and conversations, have you considered integrating notmuch into Geary?
http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/6725
Hi!
I’m one of the people that have donated to this campaign. Since the very beginning, I thought that the goal of 100.000$ was kind of high (as a campaign), but well…
Seeing how this is advancing now, it seems it would have been a better idea to reduce the amount to 50.000$ (reducing the promises as well). But I think that if after a first successful campaign you can create a 100% usable email client, then you could have started a second campaign of the same or greater amount.
It’s just a shame you don’t receive anything if you don’t get the target. I could donate now directly to you, but I’m not sure if all the people that have donated to the campaign would then donate again (lazyness…).
At my work, we really miss a good email client (we’re talking about 500 workers that use Thunderbird, which is really old-fashioned).
Thanks for all the work you do.
We can’t reduce the target once we start a campaign. And if we could, while $50,000 sounds like a lot of money, we wouldn’t be able to make all the features we’ve promised on it, or even finish up 0.4 properly. As I’ve written before, we didn’t pick that number randomly, but rather we asked how much we needed to make 0.4 a great release and Geary a great email client.
I use google contacts, so integration with that is great. However, I really think integrating with Gnome Contacts would be better, and then let that framework handle the Google Contacts part would be the right thing to do. Then, if we want to support ownCloud contacts in gnome you would get them in Geary too and vice versa.
Anyway, it looks like an interesting project.
We’re going to look closely at the best way to make this happen, but yes, we’re aware of GNOME Contacts and are thinking about how we can work with it.
I think calendar integration is a mistake. Geary is a email client, not a calendar. We already have thunderbird for that.
Geary would lose it main interest with that
When we say calendar integration, we’re not talking about making Geary a calendar application. Rather, when Geary sees that you’ve received a calendar invite or event via email, it will call your calendar application with the invite to add it.
I love geary, it’s so much lighter than thunderbird and evolution, I can’t wait to switch fully. I need a caldendar too, but I’m totally on board with the philosophy you give here.
But.
What am I to use as “my calendar application”? As far as I can tell, there are no FOSS standalone calendars that I can sync with a server, to be had:
http://caldav.calconnect.org/implementations/clients.html
My options seem to be Evolution, Thunderbird (um, but then why use geary for mail?) and Rainlendar, which is an annoying-looking thing that lives on your desktop and isn’t FOSS.
Do *you* know of other options? What do you use? Because this answer doesn’t really work unless there exists a candidate to be “your calendar application”.
Mozilla Sunbird is a standalone FOSS calendar application. GNOME is developing GNOME Calendar and the elementary group is working on Maya. Both are not completed, but they have aspirations to sync with CalDAV servers.
The pickings may be slim out there, but I don’t think that justifies adding a calendar to Geary.
Wow! GPG and Calendar are the killer features, which made me make a donation!
It’s great but I see problems with importing contacts. Thunderbird has a large collection, GNOME Contacts has too. How can we merge all this and make it accessible?
All I want is a “close to status bar” feature. If you gave me that with what all ready exists I would be more than happy.
We’ve always intended to have a way for Geary to run in the background. We just haven’t had time to implement this yet.
Just made a small contribution to the campaign. I would love to see an awesome email client.
By the way, I hope you’ll consider Google Contacts synchronization, not just import (for a future roadmap).
Anyways, best of luck with the campaign, I’m surprised that you can have 3 developers working for 100k.
What is the plan when that money runs out?
Thanks for your contribution!
In the future we’d like to have a much more full-featured contact book integration. We’re not sure how this will work yet. Ideally we want to sync with the system address book (Gnome Contacts, etc.)
We’re not sure what type of fundraising we’ll turn to next. We might do another crowdfunding campaign, maybe something else. It depends how this all turns out.
I seldom comment, however i did a few searching and wound
up here Geary crowdfunding: GPG privacy, calendar integration,
and more | Yorba Blog. And I do have 2 questions for you
if you usually do not mind. Is it just me or does it look like a few of these responses look like
left by brain dead individuals? 😛 And, if you are writing on other online social sites, I
would like to keep up with everything new you have to post.
Would you make a list of all of all your shared pages like your linkedin
profile, Facebook page or twitter feed?
Please, I like so much Geary but I want security to save my passwords. A extension or the own Geary to use a master password to encrypt my passwords or yet Geary use system keyring to security save email passwords, is it possible?
Geary 0.3 uses gnome-keyring to store passwords. In development, it uses libsecret, which also uses a keyring. What are you seeing that tells you it’s not using the system keyring?