Poodle

Experimental email client with social features

Poodle produces and consume messages that contained structured JSON data. This enables rich features that email normally lacks, such as likes, and editing messages after they have been sent.

Prerequisites

Poodle reads and composes messages. Currently it relies on external programs to actually fetch and send messages. Because of these dependencies, Poodle works well on Linux and OS X, but is not likely to work on Windows.

You will need three additional pieces of software:

• Something to download email to the local filesystem. Must use Maildir format. The author uses offlineimap. There is another option called isync/mbsync.

• notmuch, which indexes mail stored in Maildir format.

• msmtp to send mail

It is handy to have offlineimap (or equivalent) running in the background all the time. Notmuch does not run in the background - but you do need to run $ notmuch new whenever you get new mail to add the new messages to the index. You can run that manually, or get offlineimap to run it whenever it syncs changes.

All of these programs are probably available in your favorite package manager.

A good source of information for configuration is the Arch Wiki:

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/OfflineIMAP
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Notmuch
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Msmtp

To build Poodle you will also need Node.js v4.2 and npm v2. Use nvm to install those specific versions together:

$ nvm install 4.2

Poodle is not yet set up to build with npm v3.

Detailed setup guide for OS X

(This guide is a work-in-progress)

pre-reqs: git, homebrew, node.js

• Clone Git repo: git clone git@github.com:hallettj/poodle.git
• cd poodle && npm install
• brew install offlineimap
• brew install notmuch
• mkdir -P ~/mail/personal
• touch ~/.offlineimaprc
• edit ~/.offlineimaprc to look like this:

[general]
accounts = personal
ui = ttyui

[Account personal]
localrepository = personal-local
remoterepository = personal-remote
status_backend = sqlite

[Repository personal-local]
type = Maildir
localfolders = ~/mail/personal
# Spaces in pathname are bad. Lets use `archive` which is a simple word
# Besides, we only need `All Mail` folder.
# Sup would manage mails on its own.
# If your GMail language setting is not English, you can execute
# `offlineimap --info` to find out the name of folder which is
# translated and encoded after your account is configured.
nametrans = lambda folder: {'archive': '[Gmail]/All Mail',
                            }.get(folder, folder)

[Repository personal-remote]
# IMAP with hardcoded GMail config
type = Gmail
# The path of ca-certfile might be different on your system.
sslcacertfile = /usr/local/etc/openssl/cert.pem
# Remember that GMail requires full mail address as username
remoteuser = YOUR-EMAIL@gmail.com
remotepass = YOUR-PASSWORD
nametrans = lambda folder: {'[Gmail]/All Mail': 'archive',
                            }.get(folder, folder)
folderfilter = lambda folder: folder == '[Gmail]/All Mail'
# Or, if you have a lot of mail and don't want to wait for a long time before
# using sup, you can archive all your old mails on Gmail and only sync the
# inbox with the following line replacing the previous `folderfilter` line:
# folderfilter = lambda folder: folder == 'INBOX'

Note: If you have 2-factor auth for gmail enabled, you will need to create an "App-Specific Password." You can set those up here.

• Run offlineimap. If it is configured correctly, you should see:

$ offlineimap
OfflineIMAP 6.5.7
  Licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or any later version (with an OpenSSL exception)
Account sync personal:
 *** Processing account personal
 Establishing connection to imap.gmail.com:993
 Creating folder archive[personal-local]
 Creating new Local Status db for personal-local:archive
Folder archive [remote name [Gmail]/All Mail] [acc: personal]:
 Syncing [Gmail]/All Mail: Gmail -> Maildir
 Copy message 1 (1 of 127831) personal-remote:[Gmail]/All Mail -> personal-local
 Copy message 2 (2 of 127831) personal-remote:[Gmail]/All Mail -> personal-local
 Copy message 3 (3 of 127831) personal-remote:[Gmail]/All Mail -> personal-local
 ...etc

• Create ~/.notmuch-config file: touch ~/.notmuch-config
• Edit ~/.notmuch-config to look like this:

[database]
path=/Users/HOMEDIR/mail
[user]
name=YOUR-NAME
primary_email=YOUR-EMAIL
[new]
tags=unread;inbox;
ignore=
[search]
exclude_tags=deleted;spam;
[maildir]
synchronize_flags=true

• Run $ notmuch new

Running

From the project directory, run:

$ make run

Configuring

In addition to configuring the external utilities, you will need to enter some details in the Settings view (accessed via the menu button in the upper-left of the Activity Stream view). The somewhat complicated detail here is that you need to specify a directory for sent mail that is an existing directory in your maildir. That is, it needs to match up with an existing IMAP folder.

The sent mail directory setting is not required. But if you do not set it, when you send messages you will not see updates in the UI until you do a mail fetch and reload the UI.

Heads-up for Gmail users

If you are not using 2-factor authentication with your Google account, it is likely that Google will block offlineimap from accessing your mail. If this happens, you will get an email from Google warning you that a "less secure app" attempted to access your account. This is because Google would prefer that people use OAuth to authenticate with IMAP instead of a username and password.

Poodle will switch to OAuth eventually. But at this early stage Poodle requires username & password authentication.

To turn on access for less secure apps, follow these instructions: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6010255?hl=en

Developing

The npm start command runs a build step and then runs Electron. Because of the requirement for a build step, reloading the Electron window will not load changes you have made to source files when you start the app this way. During development it is better to run a watch task to automatically rebuild individual javascript files whenever they are modified.

Instead of npm start, follow these two steps:

make watch  # runs continuosly, builds javascript automatically on changes

and in a separate terminal:

node_modules/.bin/electron .  # runs Electron, assuming build step has run

Note that javascript source files are in the src/ directory. Everything in build/ is generated by the build step, and will be overwritten.

Do not make changes to files in build/! Edit the files in src/ instead!

License

Copyright 2015 Jesse Hallett

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.