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.

He’s resurfaced after a Summer internship at Apple, placed in the Interactive Media Group, with news of his adventures and of Kiwi’s progress.

He met the Mail Team at Cupertino, but got some discouraging feedback:

There are other interesting things that happened at Apple, like getting to know the Mail.app team, which is kinda funny considering I work on Kiwi. According to them I’m crazy. A few of them said that Kiwi is too much work for one person, but I disagree, I want Kiwi more than anyone else, and I’m determined to make it a success.

Nevertheless, he says he is pressing on: “Everyday that I am forced to use Mail.app or Thunderbird, I want Kiwi more. So stayed tuned, Kiwi will be completed but not as quickly as I had hope for.”

[Thanks, Michael]mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, imap, email, apple, kiwi

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.IMAP, mail.app, apple mail, email, email clients, kiwi