 | |
 Geary v3.32 (2019-03) | |
| Original author(s) | Yorba Foundation |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | The GNOME Project,Elementary |
| Initial release | May 4, 2012; 13 years ago (2012-05-04)[1] |
| Stable release | 46.0[2]  / 20 May 2024 |
| Repository | |
| Written in | Vala (GTK) |
| Operating system | Unix-like |
| Type | Email client |
| License | LGPL-2.1-or-later |
| Website | wiki |
Geary is afree and open-sourceemail client written inVala and based onWebKitGTK. Although since adopted bythe GNOME project, it originally was developed by theYorba Foundation. The purpose of this e-mail client, according to Adam Dingle, Yorba founder, was to bring back users from onlinewebmails to a faster and easier to usedesktop application.[3]
Pantheon Mail was afork initiated by theElementary OS community after the demise of Yorba, though it was later rewritten from scratch so that the only remaining references to Geary in the Pantheon code base are in some translations.[4]
from:john,is:read,is:unread andis:starred.[8]Implementation to supportGPG had been started,[11] but is still incomplete as of 2019.[12]
Geary internally uses anSQLite database to store a local copy of emails and for indexing. It uses a fully asynchronousGObject-based IMAP client library. One feature that distinguishes Geary from other open source email clients is its focus on the conversation view. Both Geary and Pantheon Mail are usinggettext for translations.[8]
As of April 3, 2016, Pantheon Mail has not been migrated to WebKitGTK+2 yet. The developers decided first to migrate the code managing the conversation view to use nativeGTK widgets (Gtk.CSS and Granite, a GTK+ library used as part of elementary OS). This offered several advantages, including minimizing the use of webviews, reducing the code, supporting hardware accelerated animations, and supportingRTL languages.[13][14] They also removed the use of custom GTK bars likePillHeaderBar which were making the code complicated and difficult to read.[15][16] Geary uses WebKit2 since at least version 3.32.0.[17]
Historically,Elementary OS directly supported[18] the project and Geary became the default application in thatLinux distribution.
On March 25, 2013,[3][19] Jim Nelson, executive director at Yorba, launched acrowdfunding campaign onIndieGoGo to gather US$100,000 that would have been used to pay the 3 full-time Yorba engineers that were working at that time on Geary.[20] Unfortunately, on April 23, 2013, only US$50,860 were gathered from 1,192 backers. The amount was not met and the campaign failed. According to the rules set by IndieGoGo, Yorba did not receive any of the money that had been pledged.[21][22][23]
After this failure, Jim Nelson declared in a blog post that the crowdfunding campaign was kind of an experiment to see if that route was enough to sustain open-source development. He reaffirmed Geary had been created to improve theLinux experience, and therefore had no chance of being ported tomacOS orWindows platforms.[18]
As theYorba Foundation had stopped its activities andGNOME had not announced any plans about this project at the time, the future of Geary was unclear. As a result, to these uncertainties, due to previous design disagreements with the old Geary team and because elementary OS was actually using Geary as the default mail client (though in a heavily patched version), Danielle Foré, the leader of Elementary OS, decided to fork the project on November 18, 2015 and continue with the development as a fork. The project was renamed Pantheon Mail during the process.[24][25] Pantheon Mail replaced Geary in elementary OS 0.4, which is codenamed Loki.[26]
In March 2016, Michael Gratton applied to become the new maintainer of Geary.[27] His main goal was to try fixing pressing issues like the dependency on the old WebKit1GTK, collaboration with Pantheon Mail, better support for non-GMail servers, mailbox management, the account UI, extending search, etc. Contributing to Geary as a GNOME project requires the maintainer to become a GNOME member. After a discussion with Adam Dingle, Yorba's founder, both agreed to wait for Gratton to fulfill GNOME membership application requirements. In the meantime, Gratton will post his patches to the GNOMEBugzilla instance and Adam will commit them for him.[28]
On May 15, 2016, version 0.11 was released,.[29] Version 0.13 was released on February 18, 2019.[30] In March 2019, with version 3.32, the version scheme was changed to matchGNOME's release schedule (note the difference in even/odd version numbers).[31]
The initial name "Geary" coincides with the name of theGeary Street, because all Yorba's products were named after streets inSan Francisco. However, according to a former Yorba employee, the application was not named after the address where Yorba Foundation was located.[32] That was actually a coincidence. The first beta of Geary was released in May 2012, and Yorba was still located on Capp Street at the time.[33][34]
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