I am working on a new email client as most of you probably know. I will try to post regular updates here. We might want to split of some threads when there is a singular topic that needs more attention.

And here we go.


normal


conversation view

This is done in QtQuick Controls but is still using the Oxygen icons and theme.

Things that are new:

* done in QtQuick Controls.
-> From now on the code for the mockups will be the code that lands in the actual application

* avatar generated from the sender name
-> the algorithm is fairly stupid but it produces decent results. We just take the first letter from the name and pick the color by looking at the length of the name.

* alternative conversation view
-> I don't know if this will be the default that we are going with, but I like the idea.

Splendid mbohlender! Just splendid stuff so far!

Little update:



Use blue instead of grey to highlight the current item.
This frees grey to be used to mark "read" emails.

I am having some issues with highlighting the current item on the black sidebar. I am not even sure if we want to use black for the sidebar.
Any input?

mbohlender wrote:Little update:



Use blue instead of grey to highlight the current item.
This frees grey to be used to mark "read" emails.

Makes sense to me.

I am having some issues with highlighting the current item on the black sidebar. I am not even sure if we want to use black for the sidebar.
Any input?

We were just discussing sidebar designs in the latest comments on this thread this thread. The dark sidebare looks nice, but perhaps try it with a normal background sidebar and see how it looks. If it doesn't look great and we can't figure out how to make it look great, then you can always revisit the the dark sidebar. In any event, very nice work!

Excellent work mbohlender!

I really like it. I have one question though: Will this support multiple e-mail accounts? If yes, how does one switch between them, did you discuss this at Akademy already?
Also seeing that we make rarely use of sharp edges in Breeze, maybe it would be a good idea to give the avatar icons' edges a 2px rounding.

Sogatori wrote:Excellent work mbohlender!

I really like it. I have one question though: Will this support multiple e-mail accounts? If yes, how does one switch between them, did you discuss this at Akademy already?
Also seeing that we make rarely use of sharp edges in Breeze, maybe it would be a good idea to give the avatar icons' edges a 2px rounding.

And I want to add further questions to the quoted ones: Will it make use of Akonadi? Is it inteded to be a replacement for kmail?

Sogatori wrote:Also seeing that we make rarely use of sharp edges in Breeze, maybe it would be a good idea to give the avatar icons' edges a 2px rounding.

I like the sharp edges but I am all for a unified look so there you go:



Is that round enough or should I make it rounder?

Sogatori wrote:Will this support multiple e-mail accounts? If yes, how does one switch between them, did you discuss this at Akademy already?

Yes! It is on my todo list. I am not 100% sure how we are going to do it though.
Jens came up with the idea of "hiding" folders/accounts for users with a single account who basically only use their inbox folder but making it very accessible if the "advanced" user wants it. It needs some experimentation to see how big of a tradeoff this is. I consider the multiple accounts usecase more important but I might be able to make it both work without a big compromise.

kdeuserk wrote:Will it make use of Akonadi?

Yes. I don't have the time nor the skill nor the desire to write yet another email client from scratch.
This project is about using the matured functionality of Akonadi and building a decent user experience on top of it.

kdeuserk wrote:Is it inteded to be a replacement for kmail?

No. The resulting application will not replace KMail. It is a new separate application.
We will share a lot of code with KMail though. No reason to rewrite what is already there.

The link to the old thread viewtopic.php?f=285&t=122221

mbohlender wrote:Yes. I don't have the time nor the skill nor the desire to write yet another email client from scratch.
This project is about using the matured functionality of Akonadi and building a decent user experience on top of it.

That's nice! That's the answer I was hoping for!
If you would allow me a couple of questions:

1.) Will it support pop3 too?

2.) If you allow pop3, which I hope, will you get rid of the weird "Local Folder" behavior that Kmail currently has and allow proper multi account handling for pop3? That is actually a big mess in kmail. You can work around it if you know how to deal with the necessary akonadi resources, but the average users wont deal with that.
I know this point certainly needs more discussion, but are you open to it? I think now is the right opportunity to rethink this and make a beautiful and easy to use but still powerful mail client.

3.) Do you also aim for more advanced stuff like filters and tagging?

mbohlender wrote:

Sogatori wrote:Also seeing that we make rarely use of sharp edges in Breeze, maybe it would be a good idea to give the avatar icons' edges a 2px rounding.

I like the sharp edges but I am all for a unified look so there you go:



Is that round enough or should I make it rounder?

I'm honestly not an expert on how round the corner in Breeze generally are, but it would look round enough for me.

kdeuserk wrote:1.) Will it support pop3 too?

We can support whatever Akonadi suppots.
My usecase is multiple disconnected IMAP accounts. I don't really care about pop, but we get it "for free" so I see no reason not to include it.

kdeuserk wrote:2.) If you allow pop3, which I hope, will you get rid of the weird "Local Folder" behavior that Kmail currently has and allow proper multi account handling for pop3? That is actually a big mess in kmail. You can work around it if you know how to deal with the necessary akonadi resources, but the average users wont deal with that.
I know this point certainly needs more discussion, but are you open to it? I think now is the right opportunity to rethink this and make a beautiful and easy to use but still powerful mail client.

I was not planning on changing that because it would require extra work from my side. Like I said: I don't really care about pop3. This means I don't see me working on this anytime soon but I am not objecting if somebody else wants to make "propper" multi pop3 accounts happen.

kdeuserk wrote:3.) Do you also aim for more advanced stuff like filters and tagging?

Again. We can support whatever Akonadi supports. Filter support is a low priority but on my todo list.
Tags are currently being worked on inside Akonadi afaik. We can evaluate, if we want to support tags when they work there.

Hi,

Nice work the mail client looks promise.

I'd like to separate the mail client into 3 areas.

the svg file https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/164 ... ewMail.svg

1. Navigation
in the toolbar there are the icons which are useful for every area. Navigation new mail and sync. For the navigation through bookmarks I'd like to separate them because new/unread would be search results, but no problem when you use it like now.

2. Folder
Shows the mails from the selected folder. In the toolbar the search and the sort, view and group icons (could be removed for standard users) and the mails with addressers, header, time, attachment symbol, labels, ... Maybe the generic avatar could get some improvements. It would be cool if you can select what you'd like to show in the folder list, so you can also show the first 200 letters from the mail text as you can see in the mails from last month.
When you copy gmail, please don't copy only the generic avatar, the conversation users is really nice and useful more than the generic avatar.

3. Mail Conversation
As you show. It's still the same. for the attachements you can use the file preview from the file system. looks good and consistent. I don't know how you can use all mail addresses in a nice way (To, CC, BCC) with the avatar.