Hey all,

I’m going to be moving on to my next project and have been thinking about doing an email client. I like Thunderbird, but the search is terrible, and I also want to tackle something that needs pretty high performance for processing emails etc.

Any suggestions or considerations I should think about?

I’ll focus on just getting SMTP going in a CLI then I’ll introduce some sort of frontend using Qt.

  • teotwaki@lemmy.world
    1·
    9 months ago

    I think you’re misguided about the APIs. Gmail supports IMAP and SMTP. Proton supports those too if you run an encryption bridge on your computer. Fastmail supports IMAP/JMAP/SMTP (they invented JMAP to try and innovate).

    Email providers most likely must provide SMTP and IMAP due to compatibility requirements with Apple Mail and other clients.

    • onlinepersonaEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      I tried setting up KMail, Thunderbird, and another email client whose name I can’t remember, to use gmail, but they refused to work. Back then the thunderbird doc said something about using APIs instead IMAP+SMTP because google had deactivated “insecure apps”. Maybe they undid that? Dunno. Was about a year ago. Possibly because it was locked down at org level, but that would be a valid usecase for using API.

      Proton’s bridge is 10€ a month or something, but there’s API access to proton regardless of price. Didn’t know Fastmail had SMTP/IMAP.

      CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

      • teotwaki@lemmy.world
        1·
        9 months ago

        First sentence on the first hit when searching for “Gmail smtp imap”:

        For non-Gmail clients, Gmail supports the standard IMAP, POP, and SMTP protocols.

        https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap/imap-smtp

        What you’re referring to is the fact that GMail has apparently disabled authentication using username + password for SMTP/IMAP. I would assume that application passwords still work fine as a workaround, even if they don’t mention it specifically.

        • onlinepersonaEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          What you’re referring to is the fact that GMail has apparently disabled authentication using username + password for SMTP/IMAP. I would assume that application passwords still work fine as a workaround, even if they don’t mention it specifically.

          Oh, yes that might be it! There is a hope again to using a third-party email client! The gmail web client is decidedly not my favorite.

          Thanks!

          CC BY-NC-SA 4.0