The light email app has just received some new options

Sep 21, 2014 19:13 GMT  ·  By

Geary, a lightweight email program designed around conversations and built for the GNOME desktop by the Yorba software group, has reached version 0.8 and comes with a ton of new features.

Geary is a relatively new entry in the world of email clients. The Linux ecosystem is dominated by Thunderbird, but there are a few other solutions available. One of the main reasons Geary has been getting more and more popularity is its simple and efficient interface, which seems to be a lot less cluttered.

New features and various changes

The developers have made a series of important improvements. The application is light and easy to use, but that's because it also lacks a number of features that are now just becoming available. For example, signature support has been added and now the application will automatically insert a signature in the design of the email, whether it's a new one or replying to another, the mail composer has been redesigned and now it looks a lot more modern, and the database speed and IMAP connection stability have been improved as well.

Also, saving drafts to server can be disabled, the interface is now using GtkHeaderBar and modern widgets, the connection handling and reestablishment has been improved, attachments lacking a Content-Disposition is now shown, numerous bug fixes have been implemented, and a few translations have been updated as well.

There is a good reason why this isn't at version 1.0 just yet. The application lacks some features that we take for granted in other email clients, like the ability to set filters for the incoming email or to automatically move email from one IMAP folder to another.

Where to get the latest Geary

You can download a source package for Geary 0.8, but the developers provide for Ubuntu users a stable build via a PPA for all the supported versions of the operating system from Canonical. All you need to do to install the latest version is to enter these commands in a terminal near you (root is required for this to work):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yorba/pp sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install geary

The software is developed by Yorba, the same team responsible for Shotwell, a photo manager that is the default application in major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora. Geary is now part of the GNOME project and it’s slowly becoming a very powerful email client, which is a category of software that is sorely missing some good competition.

Remember that Geary is still not considered a stable release and you might encounter bugs and other issues. It's not recommended that you use this application on production machines.