Oeps, some people are blogging that Modest is available. I guess that means that there’s no more escaping it. Its code is indeed available at http://modest.garage.maemo.org.
I would like to warn though, that both Tinymail and Modest still need a lot of work. It will not yet replace your Evolution. Whether or not it will eventually do that, depends on you wanting to invest time in this.
This is indeed an invitation for the community to get involved in creating both a framework for creating E-mail applications on mobile devices, and an E-mail client on top of it that might someday be used on both your desktop and your mobile device.
People are working on the IMAP code and Lemonade, on the POP3 code, on the code for handling the local cache and summaries, on language bindings. At FOSDEM I announced my plan to build-up a network of competence around the project. Nokia is interested, OpenMoko is interested, the One Laptop Per Child project seems to be interested. Igalia did some work, Kernel Concepts did some work. A large list of contributors did some work.
So, let us make this another success story like the Telepathy framework is for VoIP. And what can you do? A lot!
Maybe integrate Telepathy/Galago with an optional tinymail component like a summary and/or message view? Integrate a calendaring application? A contacts one? Enable the integration in Modest? Or maybe you prefer to do a language binding and write your own mail user agent? Or use the existing Python language binding for that? Maybe write a ui for timsieved (a daemon for deploying Sieve scripts) and that way make it possible for normal people to have server side filtering of messages into mailboxes, configurable with their cellphone? Maybe write a SyncML observable for the Push E-mail features of tinymail? Help me implementing more of the Lemonade IMAP enhancements? Help me with improving the summary code? Maybe integrate it with an existing desktop searcher and indexer, making searching E-mail on your phone possible? Melting E-mail, MMS and SMS together? Porting to WinCE? Why not?
There really is a huge to do list. It’s simply not doable for one person to ever finish all of the possibilities of what E-mail can and should offer to mobile users.
Oh, by the way. Implementing something that plays a sound when a new message arrives (a Push E-mail event) with the current API (just to show what tinymail can already do for a mobile device like a cellular phone):
public class OnMsgArrivesBeeper
implements Tny.FolderObserver
{
public void update (Tny.FolderChange change)
{
Tny.FolderChangeChanged c = change.get_changed ();
if (c.ADDED_HEADERS)
Phone.PlayRingTone (RingTones.NewMsg);
}
}