It’s all just 1’s and 0’s…

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about creating a new mail client. Now I’m getting into some other discussions online (which I’ll talk about later) and the need for a proper email client pops up again.

The current email clients available for MacOS X just don’t cut it:

• Mail.app Looks pretty nice, has a nice clean interface. It isn’t very good at IMAP, it makes it very hard to do SSL/TLS, multiple accounts are available through a hidden feature that doesn’t seem to work for me and support for multiple accounts is not very good (it insists on keeping all inboxes above all other folders.)
• Thunderbird Is very nice, does about the best job in handling email the way I want it, but the interface is pretty klunky and I keep running into small quirks that are very annoying.
• Eudora It might be very nice, but it has taken years for it to get proper IMAP support. And the interface has a natural tendency to turn into a cloud of windows.
• Entourage Has a very bloated interface, with lots of colours and things to display threads, which are not displayed in a very clear way (first email and then one indent level for subsequent emails). The idea of having delimiters for today, last week and before that is nice, but not well exectued.
• Outlook…. does about everything wrong that there is in the standards about email (and there aren’t that many and they’re not very long).
• MailsmithCosts money. I haven’t used it, but from what I’ve heard of it, it’s not that great.

That about sums up the main players I think.

I think there’s room for improvement, which is why I’m starting up PyOMai. It’ll be written in Python, to show that Python is a mature language. I’m going to use lots of Extreme Programming techniques, test-first coding, stories, incremental design, etc. And I’m probably going to release versions that can do interesting stuff under the MIT license. Partly, because I don’t want to impose on you what you can do with the software that I’m publishing and partly because I want to have the option to move this to a commercial product if it really is a success ;). Watch this space for more updates….

As for the name: It is from the Sopranos, the main character has a horse called Pie-O-My and I wanted to have a name that contained both “Py” and have some form of email in its name to show what it is.