It’s a little bit frightening … I guess quite a lot of people will now start using our code.
I’m also proud of having been involved with such a great team of software developers working on Modest and Tinymail.
I think I succeeded at creating a healthy free software project suitable for both commercial and purely free software appliances. People are contributing for and from different angles. Different companies are involved. I am trying to blend the contributions a bit more in order to get more “passion contributions” rather than “just the minimum must work, here’s a quick-fix”-patches. It’s improving, though.
Nokia (however) gave me ‘the’ opportunity to create Tinymail. They allowed me to work on it full time for more than a year. Everything was always immediately free software, and happened completely in the open too. Go check if you don’t believe that.
You can accuse Nokia of a lot of things, but they did great at fostering several free software projects. They made mistakes, of course. In my opinion, the handling of this project was done in a very healthy way: very open minded and very much the way free software can be commercially successful. I hope they learned free software won’t do wonders but that it can help you finding experts in specific fields, working together on the bigger picture: the actual consumer device. Working together with free software inspires a certain kind of passion among engineers. Capitalizing on that is fine, as long as you have respect for the passion. Just like the engineers have respect for the passion of solving the problem of producing and bringing millions of devices to the customers in time. Both enemy and friend know no company can do this better than Nokia.
I don’t think there’s anything controversial in respecting the hardware dudes’s jobs. In the end we humans are all about our passions.
I didn’t succeed at making a release before Modest was thrown to the Maemo users. That should happen very soon now, though. I’m very much in agreement with that “release often, release fast” – meme. But I also only want to call something a one-point-zero if it’s really stuff that works, behaves as expected and has all API that people’s E-mail clients require. The problem is that as an engineer I’ll never think that any of my software is finished. Everything can be better. Living near Eindhoven I grew up with the slogan “Let’s make things better“. I agree with the meme in that slogan.
Neither did I reach a bunch of technical goals. I have so many things in mind that would make Tinymail based E-mail clients by far the best kind of mobile E-mail clients ever created. Although Polymer, damn you Dave Cridland! :-), makes it hard to really be the best. Subjects ranging from pipelining to supporting CONVERT, forward without download, streaming media as attachments, and many more. IMAP has a few interesting limitations that I would like to address too, like Lemonade does. And then you have the IMAP servers … grmbl.
Regretfully a lot of people think of E-mail as a simple subject. They should figure out then why so many teams have tried to write good E-mail clients, yet relatively few succeeded. I’ll spare you the details and I’ll just point out that a lot of ’stuff’ is involved that you won’t expect. But really, if it wasn’t a challenge, I wouldn’t have been interested anyway. I’m not complaining, I enjoyed and I am enjoying a hard task ahead of me.
Meanwhile, I enjoy working on Tracker for Nokia. It was time for something different. Incubation time for Tinymail, perhaps? I’m working a lot with SQLite, who knows what will come out of that symbiosis? Perhaps I learn that it’s not suitable? Perhaps it is? I haven’t had the chance to explore cursors in SQLite. That’s what I’d be interested in most for things like Tinymail.
I should stop thinking about it too much, before I end up hacking until eight in the morning again.
Hi,
let me say that I’ve found Modest very very unstable, at least for me. I’ll explain now all the bugs/problems I’ve found. Just one thing: I’ve a gmail account with IMAP enabled and I’ve 15990 messages in total.
1) When you create the email account and you click on Finish it tryes to retrive the new messages, and you don’t have the possibility to tell it to download only few of them.
2) It tries to download messages even if you’re not connected to internet.
3) If you’re able to stop it (the STOP icon is not very responsive and very often it hangs all Modest), and you’re able to set “Download only latest 50 messages” in the account main tab, it wants to download ALL of them instead (and belive me, 15000+ headers are a lot of stuff :P ).
4) Last time I tried it, all tablet was frozen and I had to remove battery to shut down. I then re-flashed Diablo again without using Modest anymore.
This is my little (not very lucky) experience. I hope that this client will become more stable in the following months because for the moment is unusable, at least for me.
Thanks anyway for your work!
Tinymail does but modest doesn’t really support more than 10,000 items. There are a few things in Modest that block it from performing good enough with that amount of items.
There are a few possible enhancements in Tinymail that would help too, but there was not sufficient priority to implement those.
I can point you to it, though. Just join the mailing list and we’ll together make it work to handle larger E-mail folders.
hey :)
just wanted to say that i have total respect for you working on modest and i think you have created a great piece of software that obviously fits with your needs from an email client … i don’t use it however because of a few (in my opinion) absolutely astounding omissions … namely:
1. no easy way to change the fonts used … for a mobile email solution designed for small screens i would have thought this to be a 100% basic requirement for people to be able to change things to their preferences
2. no way to view all accounts without clicking through several menus … again fundamental in a mobile email solution with small screens … especially since modest is “the best small screen email cleint out there!”
3. no filtering … even crude filtering would be a huge improvement over none
in short (like i said) i have total respect for you as a fellow developer but i have to say that modest is frustratingly useless … because it’s almost awesome but isn’t in any respect
Still, I would like to have mobile email with GPG support. No one does it and asus eee pc is smallest thing which could handle that. But I would love to use N810 for GPG’ed email.
Hey lauren.
I was personally mostly involved with the Tinymail library that Modest is using. Tinymail handles all the lower level things like talking with the POP and IMAP servers.
The three items that you raise are all UI items that would have to be implemented by Modest itself. The best way to raise that to the people who developed or are developing it, is to make a bug about it on Maemo’s Bugzilla.
Hey ppa,
For PGP support there was again insufficient priority to implement this. It would be quite a bit of UI work to implement all the certificate handling correctly, but I’m sure that you could do it in the publicly available code of Modest and that such a patch, if it is of good quality, would likely be accepted and applied.
ps. I think that for item #2, there’s a patch somewhere that does this. This was refused by Nokia’s UI team, though. Perhaps ask the Modest people for that patch and try to figure out why exactly it was refused. Maybe you can rework it to be more of a plugin rather than default behaviour .. which sounds more likely to be accepted (since it wouldn’t be the default behaviour, for which Nokia’s UI team didn’t want this behaviour).
It’s in any case trivial to show all accounts in the left-hand treeview. It’s even actually a little bit more work to show just one, with Tinymail :)
For me modest was a very useful well designed imap-client.
But since I changed to an other IMAP server i can’t access subfolders what would be the sense of IMAP. :)
I wrote it down in https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3191
I do like the program really but without the possibility to subfolders i have to use claws mail (a very feature full programm but unlovely UI).
Ciao jukey
“pvanhoof Says” – I’ve studied it a bit, but biggest challenge would be GPG compiling to maemo, since it does not support dec/encryption at the moment?!
I was wrong, it seems to support PKI encryption ;) NIce…
pvanhoof: please accept my apologies … i didn’t realize you worked mostly on the back-end stuff … i will indeed chase it up with the front-end people and see if there is a way to get those features in as plugins or something
thanks
:)
Hi
Any progress in getting pgp with Modest to work? I really would like to use pgp encryption on my n810.
Best regards
Juergen