Developer (and sometime TUAW commenter) Matt Ronge has announced he's closing the source of the upcoming IMAP email client Kiwi he's been working on. It's a decision that's been a long time coming, he says, and most of the feedback he's gotten has been positive towards closing the source, so he's going ahead with it. MailCore and libetpan, the two code frameworks Kiwi is built on top of, will both remain open source, so the possibility of someone else building an open source client off of MailCore is still there.The question is, will Kiwi be worth paying for? The answer, as usual, is "depends." Ronge has some great ideas for how a well built IMAP client could work, but the proof is in the pudding, and right now, all we've got are some screenshots. Kiwi promises Address Book and Spotlight support, LUA customization, and good performance and scalability. If Ronge can make his app do all that, most users will be happy to pay for his hard work.
[ via Brent Simmons ]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-11-2007 @ 4:40PM
derek said...
but... Mail already supports IMAP...
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7-11-2007 @ 5:26PM
Michael said...
but... Mail is steaming pile of dog crap...
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7-11-2007 @ 7:10PM
Pete said...
Is it going closed source or commercial? They really aren't the same, you know...
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7-11-2007 @ 10:35PM
Blair said...
@Michael:
What do you dislike about Apple Mail? I'm genuinely curious... I find it to be streamlined, useful and speedy.
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7-11-2007 @ 11:31PM
Newtonick said...
Mailcore is built on top of libetpan, and Kiwi will be built on Mailcore (just making that clear). Mailcore is Free (devloped by ronge himself).
Mail.app with IMAP is slooooowww (in my experience with the number of emails I get) and not does not fully support IMAP protocol. That might change some in leopard though. Mail.app currently lacks many features that IMAP supports.
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7-12-2007 @ 1:35AM
michel. said...
i dont like mail for imap either,
i am using mulberry, imap implementation is great, but interface and setup is not easy and not mac like, stil best imap client for the moment (actually alpine is the best, but mulberry is the best GUI client)
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7-12-2007 @ 5:32AM
Michael said...
"What do you dislike about Apple Mail?"
I'm not that Michael, although I'm called Michael, too. :-)
However, I'll throw in a few ideas.
I can see there could be a place for a mail client that implements IMAP really well. Mail does it OK, but its implementation is not particularly full or particularly good. I don't myself use an offline mode with it, but it still needs to sync to display the current view on the server and that can be slow or even hang with Mail. I don't find that happen with Mulberry or even Thunderbird.
Some Mulberry users manage several IMAP accounts with large numbers of folders server-side with no hiccups and no crashes and their client can search server-side very fast and efficiently, too. Mail.app seems not to "scale" every well, and really its searching is based around the idea of searching locally using Spotlight.
When it comes down to it, it really seems more of a POP client, based around POP ways of doing things, with IMAP tacked on as an afterthought.
And here are two glaring omissions:
1. With Mail you cannot subscribe to IMAP mailboxes and only display those; it's all or nothing.
2. Mail has no provision for using user-defined IMAP flags:
http://deflexion.com/2006/09/one-click-tagging-in-mulberry
People have tried to write scripts to get around the first omission, but those can themselves cause problems. To get around the second you can add third-party software, but really you shouldn't have to.
That reminds me--this isn't relevant to IMAP, but in a similar way you have no integration with PGP/GPG with Mail.app. OK, you _can_ add a plug-in from Sente, but Sente themselves say they're tapping into a private unpublished API, and that's not an ideal solution.
I like Mail.app well enough myself, but I would like a client built specifically for OS X and integrating well with the OS and also designed from the ground up to do IMAP thoroughly and well. And I'm not even a heavy mail user: as I say, I think Mail doesn't "scale" well, so I'd think very heavy mail users would like to see something like that even more than I do.
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7-12-2007 @ 9:39AM
Chris said...
Any viable alternative to the sorry mess that is Apple Mail will be well worth the money. I'm at my wit's end with this program. I look forward to a release.
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7-12-2007 @ 3:43PM
pixelslut said...
@Michael(#7):
Agree 100%. Its definitely built POP. IT works with IMAP, but poorly at best. Its slow, forget trying to access your mail effectively if you have the mailbox open on another machine is polling is faster than every 5 minutes (i have mine set to 2), and it lacks full imap feature support (some have been documented above), and if one of your folders has a tone of messages... forget it. I keep everything on my server instead of my local machine so this is a big deal for me - my archive folders total almost 5GB - granted i dont have to go in those much but when i do its a big headache in mail. I always try it for a couple days everytime its updated, just to see... but it never works out.
Im hoping all this is improved given the push imap support on the iphone and integration with 10.5... but we'll see.
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