Oh yes. I released Tinymail pre release 0.0.5 and TMut 1.1.0 yesterday evening. The reason is that a specific series of bugs got fixed shortly after Tinymail’s pre release 0.0.4. I adapted TMut to leverage those fixes. The fixes also include moving folders and making the TnyGtkFolderStoreTreeModel automatically update. I also fixed a few embarrassing reference count fixes on the accounts and folders. The instances that where leaked where not consuming a lot of memory, but it’s not nice to leak entire objects of course. Especially not if you claim to focus on mobiles, like I do. Refdbg helped me a lot with solving this. Thanks Josh!
TMut now also supports displaying which messages are marked as seen, unseen and deleted. Note that TMut does this at the event of a unsolicited response from the IMAP server. This means that with today’s IMAP servers you’ll get instant updates to your view.
I have started implementing consuming NOTIFY in Tinymail. NOTIFY isn’t very different from IDLE and it actually complements IDLE when you are in that mode. With NOTIFY you specify which events you are interested in. You also get certain events as unsolicited responses about folders that are not currently selected. A few samples of events that you can request are new mailbox creations, mailbox deletions, mailbox renames, subscription changes and status changes. Status changes happen when the total amount of messages change. Regretfully doesn’t NOTIFY at this moment specify telling you when the total amount of unseen messages changed (although an IMAP server can probably nonetheless implement this). But then again, next week we’re doing an IMAP Lemonade interop in Munich. NOTIFY is already on the agenda.
I’m also planning to rewrite the summary storage in such a way that I can selectively retrieve summary information. For example Polymer, Mulberry and Pine retrieve summary information in ‘waves’ (that’s a name for it that I just invented). My claim has always been that this is typical something for an E-mail client that works while you are online, and that Tinymail has a strong emphasis on working offline too. Yet it’s possible to focus on retrieving exactly what the user is looking at the first time he opens a mailbox. A lot of the technical users would be more happy if Tinymail based clients would do this too. Most normal users, who have average mailbox sizes (like 20,000 items or less), are not going to notice the difference that much: once Tinymail has this cached locally, it of course only needs to fetch the new messages’s summary data. It’s not that it’s usual that you have to ‘wave’ download those. It’s rather usual that the amount of new summary data is small enough to fit in one TCP frame anyway.
It’s a technical challenge to get this working, so I will make Tinymail do this too. The most difficult part is making my mmap() based summary store cope with this. The retrieving part itself is rather simple and implementable in five minutes. Mulberry is an example of how such an E-mail client can work both offline and yet do this kind of stuff.