Correo: A new Camino-flavoured mail client
Nick Kreeger has released 
the first version of a new open source email client for Mac OS X, which “blends technology from two popular Mozilla projects, Camino and Thunderbird, to create a polished native Macintosh application”.
The “Welcome to Correo” email waiting in the inbox describes it as “Mac essence, Gecko powered”.
Extra user interface polish is provided by Jon Hicks , who has provided the icons and other bits and pieces.
And it does look nice:
As Nick admits, it is pretty basic at the moment, although multiple POP and IMAP accounts are supported.
It also features a quick switch between the classic “Mail.app” layout and an Outlook-like “wide-screen” view.
He has big plans for the app though:
There are many planned features for the mail client, including plugin capability (to allow development of extensions such as PDA synchronization), tabbed window interface, address book support, keychain access, and various other to-be-determined features.
A roadmap on the app’s wiki gives an additional sense of where the app is headed.
I sense the end of unqualified “Wildebeest’s butt” wisecracks about Mozilla mail clients.
Correo 0.1 is free and available from Nick’s web site .
[Thanks for the tip-off, Bronson!]
Tags: Camino, email, gecko, mac osx, thunderbirdRelated posts
January 10th, 2007 at 2:21 am
This may be a silly question, but I’ve never understood the advantages of using such programs of GyazMail or this program over Mail.app.
January 10th, 2007 at 2:26 am
You are unlikely to get a good argument on this from me. I’m rather a fan of Mail.app myself ;-)
I guess some people just don’t like Mail.app (for a mixture of good and bad reasons). Some people have a faith commitment to open source apps which is unshakeable. Some people just like to try new things. Some people like to think different.
They are all vastly in error, of course, but people are like that. :)
January 10th, 2007 at 4:10 am
I would love to use Mail.app but it never seems to behave with my IMAP account. So I use Thunderbird because it understands my IMAP needs better. Correo looks promising as it will solve my biggest problem with Thunderbird, lack of integration with OS X.
I hope that he fulfills the roadmap!
January 10th, 2007 at 8:53 am
I’m with sliceoflime. Besides anything else buggy pre-release IMAP clients are the last thing I’d throw at my critical IMAP accounts.
January 10th, 2007 at 8:57 am
I don’t like anything as much as I like Mail.app, but this does look interesting.
I suspect Gyazmail makes most sense in the Japanese market it was primarily written for. I always understood that it had good support for far-Eastern languages, but as I don’t know any Mac-using Japanese-speakers, I can’t get confirmation of whether it is significantly better than Mail.app in that respect or not.
As for Correo, I can see the attraction of open-source for some people, but I doubt people with a strong ideological commitment to the FOSS movement would use OS X anyway.
I’d guess that people who use Camino use it mostly because they get the Gecko rendering engine but in something that doesn’t look, as Tim would put it, like a Wildebeest’s butt.
As we all know, the web can be a bit hit-and-miss, and sometimes a site that won’t work in Safari will work in Camino, because it shares Firefox’s rendering engine (and webmasters have to take Firefox into account, as it has about 15% of the browser userbase by now.) I think the advanced functions in GMail’s web interface (which use AJAX) would be an example of something Gecko can handle but webkit can’t.
It seems to me that’s the advantage of Camino. (Or it is *currently* - Safari is adding better JavaScript support as time goes on). So I’m not sure a Camino-like mail client will be attractive to people, because the rendering-engine is the selling-point and mail messages don’t need it. Mail messages aren’t taking advantage of advanced scripting techniques, like AJAX.
So it seems to me Correo will be more something people download to have a look at than for one specific reason. For example, Mail.app’s IMAP support is more robust than it was, but maybe it doesn’t work quite as well as it might with the server someone has to use; so he might decide to try this, which presumably draws on Thunderbird’s IMAP code, which is generally well-regarded.
That’s my guess: people will say “let’s try this”, not “let’s get this because it’s open source” - because if they felt like that they probably wouldn’t be using OS X in the first place and such feelings aren’t, in my view, likely to explain why many people already use Camino.
January 15th, 2007 at 9:34 am
This and that are enough reason to keep me off Mail. I would love to see Correo come to full fruition.
January 15th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Here are some of the big beefs people have with Mail.app:
- Proprietary extensions to mailbox format means once your mail is in Mail, you can’t easily move it around.
- When you have large amounts of mail, Mail is super-slow
- Mail.app silently upgrades and breaks old maildirs or mboxes I don’t remember which.
- Mail.app is a really dumb name.
February 1st, 2007 at 10:03 am
Foobar:
Mail is referred to (outside Apple) as Mail.app because “Mail” is far too common a word to use to identify it.
February 1st, 2007 at 10:46 am
mail.app is dumb… i use it and like it’s simple interface over thunderbird, but mail.app? that’s just dumb. thunderbird on linux and windows rules though…
February 1st, 2007 at 11:08 am
@Foobar
I have always called it (and heard it been called) Apple Mail. Also, What do you consider large amounts of mail? I have about a gig of mail (some 18,000 emails) in it from the past couple years and it’s still very fast at searching.
February 1st, 2007 at 11:12 am
Here’s feature #1 that all email clients are missing….
If you want me to buy this, a one thing first, the ability to save off older email, and re-open archived mail without fiddling with folders. Why automatic history preservation isn’t a part of email clients is beyond me.
I envision a flyour menu something like “Archive old Mail” with checkboxes to save just mail, or mail with attachments. Select a date range then it compresses the whole thing into an archive.
Another flyout menu would have “Search old mail Archive” and allow searching and display without unzipping the entire archive and fiddling around.
That would make me plunk down my Paypal.
February 1st, 2007 at 11:52 am
If he want to take on the big guys, then it’s really simple: Add in everything which is in PINE, for which there isn’t as yet a solid Macintosh version, otherwise it’s just a skin.
February 1st, 2007 at 4:34 pm
I like Mail too, but when are we going to have an easy option to tie into blacklist and such, like Vipul’s Razor? A mail filter for spam is ok, but it is SO out of hand that I’d rather block it BEFORE I have to download it.
February 1st, 2007 at 6:12 pm
I liked mail.app at the beginning, but now I have 5 IMAP accounts and I don’t like how mail.app treats them. I like Thunderbird_style where each of these accounts have separate folders and rules and settings, that way it’s easier to manage all of them. I hope that upcoming mail.app versions will do better and I won’t have to install other mail clients.
February 1st, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Mail.app exports to plain old mbox just fine. It is just that the method is not obvious enough (or at all).
See the howto at MacOSXHints.com: Export Mail to mbox with Save As…
According to DiveIntoMark.org: Mail.app’s “Save as†is broken it has a quirk, but seems to me like it would be trivial to fix with a text editor that supports regular expressions.
February 1st, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Interesting stuff. Having defected from Windows to the Mac at home recently, I have been using the Mail app that comes with OSX and find it’s fine for my use (3 pop accounts and a .Mac account)
I am looking forward to the new version in Leopard though - really just for the todo list integration.
February 13th, 2007 at 3:45 am
I absolutely love Apple Mail, but had to move off it because it doesn’t play well with my company’s SOCKS proxy. It’s an issue that Entourage doesn’t happen, but it had me move to Gmail, which I currently use. With Gmail, I’ve got access to all mail, everything’s sync’d, etc.
While I dig Gmail — and thank god for its keyboard shortcuts — it does have its drawbacks. I hate having to set labels, I don’t like how it handles threading (as much as I liked Apple Mail), I wish I had “folders”, I hate that there’s limited ways to visually distinguish messages, I don’t like the inability to get to an empty inbox, etc.
Methinks I’ll give this app and/or Thunderbird a go.
As for Camino, one reason I went to it from Safari was the speed with which it renders anything from Google. Safari is much slower and doesn’t support many of Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts or rich text editing capabilities. Firefox on my G4 is dog slow and absolutely unusable.
Was never ever a Camino fan at all, but when testing different browsers for Gmail and Google Reader (moved there from Newsfire), I was sold. I do miss FF extensions, and do miss some of the add-ons for Safari, but c’est la vie.
Hope Leopard fixes some of Apple Mail’s current issues and hope that Correo develops well.