Penguin Mail – open-source Rust email client for Linux with AI

(penguin-mail.com)

68 points | by kavourias 4 hours ago ago

27 comments

  • mburns 4 minutes ago

    [delayed]

  • slipheen 2 hours ago

    That's a very nice looking app - I like the look of it it gives me Mail.app vibes.

    A mail client is always a tough thing to get right so I'm glad you're working on one

    I love then idea that as the total cost (time/money/attention) of personalizing software continues to come down, more people will be able to encourage a diaspora of options, tailored to each niche.

    • cosmic_cheese an hour ago

      Visually it resembles Mail.app, but if it’s going for a similar level of functionality I think modern GNOME’s hamburger-and-three-dots-buttons approach to menus is going to become a problem.

      This is one of those types of app that really benefits from a proper menubar with several top-level menus so the user isn’t stuck spelunking submenu tunnels.

  • wewewedxfgdf 26 minutes ago

    The industry standard wording is to suffix the headline with "written in Rust".

  • tlhunter 2 hours ago

    Does anyone remember Sparrow?

    I like the idea of a native Linux email client. The UI looks pretty good too. It's really not hard to beat thunderbird.

    Calling it version 1.0 is bullshit though. It's only about a month old: https://github.com/c9dev/penguin-mail/graphs/contributors?al...

    A project with the complexity of an email client cannot be considered stable in a month. There are bugs that will only show up after a year. It has a calendar after all.

    • fooqux 16 minutes ago

      > The UI looks pretty good too. It's really not hard to beat thunderbird.

      I don't understand this mentality. It's an email client. There's not a lot needed UI-wise to make a functioning interface. Display a list of emails, show the full message when you open it, etc. I don't see anything functionally different between this email app and basically every other one I've ever used.

      You've either got insane standards or are using email way different than I.

      • Georgelemental 10 minutes ago

        Thunderbird still doesn't have proper threading

    • Grombobulous 2 hours ago

      1. Being released on GitHub for a month does not mean it’s a month old.

      2. Seems odd to assume instability by default without evidence.

      • rainingmonkey 2 hours ago

        Have you ever experienced stable-by-default?

        If so, I'd love to hear a writeup!

        • Grombobulous 2 hours ago

          Well, I'm trying it out and it seems stable.

          It's missing some features that are dealbreakers for me, but I haven't found anything unstable yet.

          • johannes1234321 20 minutes ago

            So it's probably missing features which should make a good 1.0 mailer.

  • h4kunamata 2 hours ago

    I was 100% interested until crossing "...with AI".

    • OJFord an hour ago

      Then my 'amail' client seems to fit the bill.. (OSS, rust, I use it on Linux and haven't tested elsewhere) ..not really suggesting it – it's pretty barebones and just whatever I've needed, but you're welcome to it obviously! Especially if you have issues/PRs to spur me on to features I've wanted too...

    • Topology1 an hour ago

      If you took the time to read, it is an optional feature and uses local models.

    • billybuckwheat 2 hours ago

      Same here. While I'd rather not have an embedded AI chat window, is there a way to disable it?

      • TingPing an hour ago

        The homepage says “off by default”

  • dvno42 2 hours ago

    Maybe I'm not the target here but an embedded chat ai window is a huge turn off to me. Having a CLI I can give my own agent to access/query the data, if I choose to do that, would have been preferred but if the target was my mother, then a chat window is probably a better option.

  • tamimio an hour ago

    Tested on fastmail, here’s few notes from 10min impression:

    - can’t choose a sender email?! This is major dealbreaker, if you have many aliases or domains.

    - no favico for emails, this is also a deal breaker for me, as I used it to quickly skim and find or check new emails.

    - folders orders is messed up, trying to arrange them made it worse

    - trying to color a folder and it says “server doesn’t support that”

    Also the UI needs more polishing overall.

    • LilBytes 30 minutes ago

      Thank you for testing on Fastmail for us.

      I'll stick with the web UI in that case. Are you using any other clients on Mac or Linux?

      • tamimio 13 minutes ago

        I am using their official linux client, which is basically the web one in app form with notifications.

  • hedgehog 2 hours ago

    This is interesting, I am doing an experimental effort with similar goals. What is your approach to testing? The bug surface of something like this is quite large. Also, do you have a plan for sandboxing?

    • SchemaLoad 2 hours ago

      Sandboxing should be handled externally by something like Flatpak

  • lasiotus 41 minutes ago

    Is there anything like this but in TUI?

  • ranger_danger 2 hours ago

    Surprised to see a new (large) GTK app, especially in Rust.

    Can this be compiled for other operating systems than Linux?

    • comex 6 minutes ago

      It's vibecoded - new, large codebases are par for the course.

      (This used to come at the cost of code quality, but increasingly does not.)