Kiwi: New IMAP e-mail client in the works
Matt Ronge is working a new open source IMAP email client for OS X.
Called Kiwi, the client is a Cocoa app, built with MailCore 
, a Cocoa email framework, and LibEtPan , a C-based library for working with email protocols.
In an email, Matt explained to me how it will beat the pants off existing email clients that support IMAP:
Kiwi is a new e-mail application built from the ground up to support IMAP and the latest Mac OS X features. It features a native, Cocoa-based interface, and an engine designed for high performance (Kiwi is currently able to handle folders containing up to 60,000 messages).
Most other clients were designed for POP3 with IMAP support as a later patch, but IMAP is a totally different paradigm. So to truly take advantage of it, an application needs to be written around it and Kiwi is being written specifically for Kiwi. Kiwi’s goal is to provide the best IMAP experience on the Mac OS X platform, and best of all it’s going to be open source so everyone can contribute their great ideas.
Kiwi has a web site , where you can read more about it and will be able to download the beta when it is released. He says that the beta is still “some months away”.
Matt has also written a post on his site, setting out what’s wrong with IMAP support in existing clients (Mail.app is “slowly getting better”, he says) and suggesting some other ways in which it could be done.
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June 15th, 2006 at 2:41 am
Is that a good idea calling it Kiwi? Kiwi = flightless bird (or a New Zealand person).
June 15th, 2006 at 5:37 am
Wow, this could be a great app.. I’m aiming for testing this asap… Would go nicely with my Courier IMAP server and Roundcube…
June 15th, 2006 at 7:36 am
Looks very promising. My current setup has me using Mail for my POP account and Thunderbird for IMAP because of Mail’s poor IMAP support (specifically the lack of prefix support which makes accessing my public mailboxes impossible). This looks like it would be faster and more integrated than Thunderbird, which would be nice.
However, if this program claims to be open source, why can’t I download it or get the source code?
June 15th, 2006 at 8:05 am
Ignore my above allegation that the source code is not available. http://www.svn.theronge.com/
June 15th, 2006 at 9:10 am
To people in the US (perhaps anyone outside of the Pacific?) a kiwi isn’t a bird or a NZer, but a fruit. I suspect this is the meaning that is meant, given the green colour at the top of the website. No different than using “Apple” as a name.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:14 am
Even tastier, perhaps? :)
June 15th, 2006 at 9:15 am
Yup, same in UK/Europe. Still tho, I’m always gonna be thinking of NZ and flightless birds when I see that name. :)
June 15th, 2006 at 10:25 am
Christian, the name started out as a code name for the project. I had to come up with a name for the project, and I had a Kiwi (as in the bird) icon on my desktop at the time. So I named it Kiwi. The name just stuck, and yea, I put the green on the website because of the fruit. Also, the code is available as posted, but it’s not really for public consumption right now and the repository might break at anytime.
June 15th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
Well let’s hope yours isn’t flightless Matt. ;) Look forward to using it.
June 16th, 2006 at 4:32 am
The possibility of a more “ideal” IMAP-supporting OS X mail client in the foreseeable future is intriguing, though I’m cautiously skeptical about such a project regardless of its claims. Obviously Kiwi will be challenged to avoid joining the growing list of similar projects that start out ambitiously then end up in a relatively “flightless” (a.k.a. unusable) state of perpetual development and obscurity — that resting place for virtually extinct software.
Saying “I’m working on a new mail program” is guaranteed to attract attention and expectation, some which can be negatively distracting rather than productive to design/development. To help focus the project and gain helpful contribut(ors|ions), I hope Matt will keep defining his intended goals and user base for Kiwi as early and clearly as possible. Having a better idea of what Kiwi won’t be is as important as knowing what it wants to be.
Personally, I’d be foolish to anticipate any upstart MUA immediately replacing Mail, Thunderbird, or other more functionally mature product. But certain attributes (reliability, usability, uniqueness) could make it worthwhile sooner, at least for supplementary usage.
If “Kiwi’s goal is to provide the best IMAP experience on the Mac OS X platform”, virtual mailbox support would be high on my list of features towards achieving that purpose. I’d like customizable views of arbitrary collections of messages to reduce the dependency on fixed boundaries of traditional mailboxes for organization. An upcoming version of MailTags with IMAP support looks like one way of partly implementing that within Mail. Can message tagging successfully supersede message filing within an IMAP universe?
June 16th, 2006 at 4:35 am
Hmm, just noticed my final comments seem more appropriate for discussion in Mail.app without folders (or tears).
June 16th, 2006 at 4:39 am
sjk:
Yes, you a correct in that it is a very ambitious goal, and when I state that I want to provide “the best IMAP experience on Mac OS X” that is the long term goal of Kiwi. Your right in that the first version aren’t going to perfect by any means, there is alot of development work needed to catch up with Thunderbird and Mail.app, in fact I would say alot is an understatement. However, I want to get off of Thunderbird as soon as possible, and that really drives me to get Kiwi up and running.
June 16th, 2006 at 7:07 am
Sounds encouraging, Matt. I’ve got a few questions about Kiwi’s design to ask you later if I can’t figure out the answers.
June 16th, 2006 at 7:20 am
sjk: Please e-mail me, my e-mail address is listed on the Kiwi site. I’d love to hear your questions on Kiwi’s design.
June 17th, 2006 at 10:49 am
I can’t help to be very excited about this project. The reason for that is because although I really like the interface and principally, the integration of Apple Mail w/the rest of the OS (specially the Address Book), I get irritated by the bad implementation of IMAP on it. Nowadays I’m stuck under an awful 33.6 Kbps dial-up connection here in Cuba and it can be very slow to download the messages from my IMAP e-mail provider. Also, although not mentioned in this project, I hope it will address the problems I have when sending messages that uses characters not included in ASCII (like the accentuated characters from my native language, Portuguese, as á, ë, ü, ã, ç, ê…).
All those problems I mentioned above don’t happen on Thunderbird, but the problem is that it —as the other e-mail clients— doesn’t realize how important is the integration with Mac’s address book (well, there’s an excuse for Thunderbird because of it’s multi-platform nature). Also, since I started using the Mac platform, I got spoiled by it’s user interface: uncluttered and very functional. Compare the overload of options and configurations you find under Thunderbird w/the useful simplicity of Mail.
Since I started using Mac, my e-mail gap hasn’t been filled completely. Although Thunderbird can address all my technical problems w/e-mail (including it’s threading system that works similar to Slashdot comments for example), still on the Mac I stick w/Mail because the Mozilla’s lack of integration w/Address Book and interface (which even in Linux, although it is my default e-mail client, I prefer the Kmail and Evolution GUIs).
Still, I was waiting something to happen from Mozilla. I wander how nobody came up with the idea of doing a fork on Thunderbird and do something like Camino: keeping the core of what is good and doing a work to make it more Mac like (including heavy work on interface and integration). Thunderbird has some many nice things like RSS and usergroup integration, the threading system told before, extensibility (allá Firefox), a solid and reliable implementation of IMAP and top-notch support for other languages (not even mention the best of all advantages, which is it’s open source). Why can’t the Mac users enjoy it in the full glory of cocoa likeness?
I really hope Kiwi project will have great success, because at least it’s getting some very important things right (stellar IMAP support and AB integration) and Matt Ronge seems very focused on doing this right.
June 20th, 2006 at 2:18 am
One thing I would absolutely love to see is a WebDAV interface to an Exchange server so I can finally dump Entourage at work :-)
October 22nd, 2006 at 8:47 am
[...] Five months ago I posted about Matt Ronge who is working on a new open-source email client called Kiwi, designed from the ground up for IMAP. [...]