alt Hacker NewsPenguin Mail – open-source Rust email client for Linux with AI
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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.
The industry standard wording is to suffix the headline with "written in Rust".
Does anyone remember Sparrow?
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.
Tested on fastmail, here’s few notes from 10min impression:
- 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.
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?
Surprised to see a new (large) GTK app, especially in Rust.
Can this be compiled for other operating systems than Linux?
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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.
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.