MUA Geary for UBports

[guru]

A bit triggered by a posting in puri.sm about the mobile Librem5, which is here: https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ and which shows an icon of the MUA Geary, I installed this on my FreeBSD laptop, a screenshot is here:

I'm asking, as geary is available for Ubuntu, and in Gnome for the Librem5, why we could not port it to our UBports system?

[kugiigi]

@guru If that's using GTK 3+??(can't remember the actual version) and there's an arm build then I would think it can already run now natively in mir. You can try if you want

[dobey]

@kugiigi It uses GTK+3 and may be usable under libertine, but the Mir backend in gtk+3 is not very reliable. It might work better when new Mir is in and gtk+3 apps can all use wayland instead.

However, there will still be the issue that the app is not designed for touch interfaces, or the confinement presented in UT. It expect it would likely not work very well.

[TotalSonic]

I just installed Geary via Libertine - it is readily available in the default 16.04 repositories - and I was able to enter my account information and read some emails - but its gui is poor for phones (it is much better suited for tablets, in fact I use it as my email client of preference on a 10.6" x86 tablet) - and it was very unstable and crashed often. Frankly I don't see how Geary gives any advantage over the Dekko2 email client which works very well with a great interface for mobile devices already - but if performance in Libertine could be improved in a future update then Geary might be usable for tablets running Ubuntu Touch.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[guru]

@TotalSonic said in MUA Geary for UBports:

... Frankly I don't see how Geary gives any advantage over the Dekko2 email client which works very well with a great interface for mobile devices already - ...

Best regards,
Steve Berson

I was surprised about your comment re/ Dekko2. I'm on the latest OTA-8 (stable) and Dekko2 version. Having three SMTP+IMAP accounts configured, for me Dekko2 in nearly unusable. I filed bug issue for all these problems:

• it crashes/blocks often on rendering a mail to view (I think mostly if the body is plain text);
• mails to send get queued but not sent; they end up in the Drafts folder; this happens mostly if one is on data mobile and with changed (network) locations; it helps a bit killing dekkod and restarting Dekko2 before creating the mail;
• incoming mails are presented twice in the Inbox when Dekko2 is running when the mail arrives (which is quite normal I think)
• I have around 1.2++ GByte cache now which can not be emptied without loosing the complete configuration of the three accounts;
• there is no pick-up of To: or Cc: addrs from contacts or history (which works nicely with the old Dekko);

For all this I now switched back to use my BQ M10 FHD which still runs the latest OTA of Canonical and the old Dekko. And that's also the reason for looking for alternatives (which Geary of course isn't as I got to know)

Matthias

[TotalSonic]

Guru - sorry you are finding Dekko2 unusable. I've been able to use it despite what are indeed some definite bugs in it currently. As far as the rendering errors (which usually happen on iniital loading for me) / crashes (which happen after I delete a number of emails at one) - a quick refocus or relaunch fixes those problems for me. The messages getting stuck in drafts is a more serious problem (and one I've encountered myself) but it's easy enough to for me to verify if they have been sent and resend as needed. I also run 3 accounts in it as well but have never had to re-enter them - I'm conjecturing that the root of some of your problems might be how large of a cache you are running with it. I am sorry you are dealing with such problems - for me Dekko2 is indeed most definitely usable even in its existing state - and as far as my tests go Geary at this point will get you way worse performance than Dekko2 does. Beyond that - perhaps we could both pool together some cash to offer developers bounties on fixing the bugs in Dekko2 to hopefully speed up this process, as I do wish to have a more stable and more feature filled email client on UT as well.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[Lakotaubp]

To stop this thread heading off in a different direction to that intended I am tempted to lock it.
The original question was certainly about Geary app development and has been answered quite fully for now.
The other points raised are best discussed in their own existing forum threads or another MUA discussion thread could be started in Off Topic and if anything actionable arrises it can then be brought back to the appropriate Forum category Thank you for your understanding.