glodastrophe is an experimental desktop (and maybe tablet) UI for the gaia email client backend. Its name is an attempt at a clever reference that will not actually seem clever if you understand it. My apologies if you understand it.
User agency in messaging/communication is important. In many ways open source is doing well here, but in many ways it is not.
Nylas N1 is probably the most promising open source client at this time. It's a desktop app developed in JS/HTML/CSS with offline capabilities. It seems to be well engineered and actively developed by a serious full-time team, which is fantastic. The fundamental issue is that it is architected to require an intermediary Python server that you either need to run or trust someone else to run for you (and either pay for that or "be the product", as they say). You can't just point it at the IMAP server you already run for yourself or trust others to run for you and call it a day. This is a significant architectural decision with a variety of cost, complexity, and privacy ramifications. Which may or may not bother you.
Mailpile likewise has the issue of introducing an intermediary Python server but is then a pure webmail UI without the offline capabilities of N1.
The choice for a Python intermediary server is not crazy. Mail clients and mail protocols are hard and there are great python libraries out there, whereas the JS mail protocol ecosystem is somewhat more recent. The Mozilla Messaging experimental "raindrop" mail client many years ago also used Python for this reason too. And there were upsides despite the additional server overhead, etc.
The gaia mail backend was explicitly designed to run on Firefox OS phone devices with existing mail servers and no provision for additional server intermediaries. While the no-extra-servers constraint was in some ways forced, it was also done with the belief that the best way to improve servers is to work with existing open source mail servers like Dovecot and Cyrus instead of creating a new intermediary server. Especially since servers like Dovecot and Cyrus are already able to run at affordable scale. Fastmail's efforts to introduce conversations support in Cyrus and establish the JMAP protocol and implement it in Cyrus is arguably a validation of this hope.
I'm in the process of finishing up an overhaul so we use the following emerging standard stack:
- npm with webpack for packages and bundling. (Previously we used the RequireJS family of volo/r.js/alameda and some loaders, but this ended up being problematic as the JS ecosystem moves towards npm packages and transpiling.)
- react (already used) UI, with redux for UI state management. The email / messaging domain state management is handled by the backend which has a unidirectional flow like flux but is not flux. (There's a whole tasks abstraction deeply concerned with not losing user data and not driving the backend programmers insane.) See www/app/README.md for more on this.
This means that for local development you can do npm start and it will stand
up a server on https://glodastrophe:3000/ after you do the other bootstrap steps
below.
The immediate goals which have not yet been accomplished are:
- Create a Firefox WebExtensions-based addon that can do TCP email stuff once https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247628 is fixed (and which we will help fix).
- Create a web variant that does not include TCP-requiring account types but can talk to servers like discourse or scrape mailing list archives/etc. and be something people can play with. We need the new account types for this.
Make sure you do or have done the following:
- Be using Firefox. We need it for Gecko's TCPSocket implementation.
Alternately, be a very eager contributor where one of the following is true:
- You don't care about TCP and want to help do things with protocols like JMAP or APIs like Discourse's. It probably won't take much to not freak out without TCPSocket, but we may also have some other Gecko-isms that need to be shaken out or shimmed.
- You do care about TCP and want to help adapt us to run as a Google Chrome App. We have to be a Chrome Apps because only Chrome Apps have access to TCP APIs. There are shims for Chrome's TCP API at https://github.com/emailjs/emailjs-tcp-socket that will make this more manageable. The biggie for this is just that some rejiggering will be required to handle the runtime differences if we haven't already addressed this for running inside Firefox as a WebExtension. Namely, the app currently assumes a single page with a single worker. The architecture can absolutely handle the WebExtensions model, but some plumbing is required.
- Clone this repo with "--recursive" because it has submodules. Oh yes, submodules. If you forgot to do this, now is the time to do "git submodule update --init --recursive".
- Do
npm install. Ideally using node 4.x with npm 2.x. I use "nvm" for this, which is also why there happens to be an.nvmrcin the root of the project. - Add a localhost-style entry for "glodastrophe" to your /etc/hosts so you can
get a custom origin. The goal is to isolate the special TCP permission Do this
by adding a line like the following to your
/etc/hosts. The IP does not matter as long as it's in the loopback net; IPv6 loopback stuff is probably also fine.
127.0.2.1 glodastrophe
- Install the extension from https://github.com/mykmelez/tcpsocketpup in your Firefox (preferably nightly) by going to that URL, clicking on "Latest release", then clicking on the XPI download. A door-hanger thing should happen to let you allow the installation of the extension, etc. Do the danger dance and get that extension installed.
- The extension uses a plug icon thing to toggle the permissions of the current site. It may or may not already be in your hamburger menu. If not, or that's not where you want it (I put mine on my toolbar), bring up your hamburger menu and hit customize and drag it onto your toolbar or whatever.
- Browse to https://glodastrophe:3000/
- You should see something boring.
- Click the pluggy icon to give all kinds of dangerous permissions to the glodastrophe origin.
- Probably reload the page so we can make sure that the dangerous permissions are totally available to the code.
- Now you can add an email account! Hooray!