14 DAY TRIAL // The elementary OS team has forked the now dead Geary email client, and they have announced the launch of Pantheon Mail.
Geary was an email application developed by a group named Yorba, but they disbanded almost a year ago. Their email client was really good and on the right track to becoming something special, but now it's dead. The beauty of open source means that anyone can pick up the pieces and either revive it or fork it.
Geary was already made available in elementary OS, so it wasn't really a stretch for the team that builds the famous operating system to pick up where Yorba left off. In fact, the new application fits right in with their plans, since they want to have control over the main applications integrated into the OS.
Enter Pantheon Mail
The elementary OS team made some changes to the application so that it better integrates into the operating system and you can now refer to it as Pantheon Mail. It will be a while until it becomes default, which in this case it's elementary OS 0.4 Loki.
"We’ll continue to clean up old code, fix bugs, and add new features to get it ready. We’re pretty excited about having more control over the future of this particular app. Mail is an essential part of many people’s daily workflow and has recently become a space that many people are innovating in with apps like the late Mailbox, N1, and even Google’s Inbox," Daniel Foré explained.
It's also important to mention that Pantheon Mail will continue to coexist with the existing Geary installation, so it won't be a problem for the users who want to try them both at the same time. Also, for now, Pantheon Mail only comes with IMAP support, but the developers are saying that they are going to port it to Evolution Data Server.
You can check the Launchpad entry for the new project if you want to give it a go.