Story behind OMail: An email client with automatic mailing list management on Android

I still remember the old days when Opera browser is a kind of Emacs in browser world. You have a mail client integrated which you can manage your emails, there is a IRC client which you can chat over different chat rooms. Also the Emacs fans can use Emacs shortcuts in Opera, which is great if you are a user of Emacs editor, since most of your favorite shortcut works out of box, and you can use it either in browser, email editing or IRC chat, and you don’t need to install any extra plugin for that.

Opera Browser add multiple type of accounts

Time flies, Opera change to follow the Chrome browser kernel after version 12. It also make the email client a standalone program, but sadly they also stop the support of this great software. I would not argue whether it is correct or wise decision for Opera to follow this path, since in my opinion, popularity is neither good or bad, it is just popularity. As a pioneer in browser software industry, Opera left us a lot of innovations like tab view, speed dial, mouse gesture etc. And unlike other company, which use patents to make law suit against others, Opera only use patent as a protection for themselves, but do not abuse patents to stop innovation. Opera may fail one day, but all these are the valuable assets Opera left for the world.

Although Opera Mail has this and that problems for opera mails, but I still like this software so much that I wish they could continue to improve it. So for example, the following is an example a lot of mailing lists with only a random number as prefix but are actually the same one.

Mailing list with random number

Although this is quite a easy problem to fix, I also report this to them but got no reply. And it seems that the software is indeed dead in his life cycle. Sigh :(.

As a long time Blackberry fan, I also tried the the mail client on the Blackberry OS 10 system, I would say it is quite a excellent platform and email client, every time when message get into my inbox, it is pushed to my blackberry client almost instantly. I think it is really good for people who wish to stay online forever, and would like to get notification as soon as possible, but it is just not my flavor. And Blackberry is smirking at the iPhone X’s “there’s never been a better way” to interact with your phone. At least it is there back to 2013 when Blackberry release the Q10 device. Not to mention all later innovations like keyboard as track pad, swipe to select and delete text in other Blackberry devices. As Opera, Blackberry also almost fails in the mobile world, but it also does not mean either their product or software are bad or not, maybe just a lack of lucky.

Blackberry Q10 gestures.

But here is the good part to be as a programmer, if you really want something, but there is nothing meet your needs, you can try to build it yourself. That’s why during the last several months, I try to learn and build an email client on Android which do have the similar features as Opera Mail.

It is my first Android application, and I have mixed feelings during the adventure. I have never develop any app previously. At beginning, I want to use some cross platform approach like Xamarin to do this project, since it seems to be promising to just write one software but can run on multiple platforms. But I found that the Xamarin is extremely buggy and most of my time are spending on searching the strange error message just because I update the framework. And even the sample projects offered with Visual Studio does not work. In the end, the Xamarin is like an white elephant to me for developing application. It may have some showcases to build some toy like project which can run in multiple platforms, but if you want to build any real project, it will give you a lot of troubles.

Then I just decided to stick to the Android platform. Although it also has problem and bugs behind, but the experience is much much more smooth than Xamarin. So I started learning the basic block of building android application. Start to do the project bit by bit, solve any problem during this procedure.

After months of work in my spare time, I am proud to announce the initial release of OMail and OMail Pro. It is an email client on Android which have the some of the most important feature as Opera Mail, like

It does not have the feature like customized tagging in Opera Mail, because the custom tags can only store locally, but I would like everything can be synchronized between all email clients. So I implement star as the only tagging method for message since it is supported by most of the mail providers.

It also do not do full sync like what Opera Mail do in the desktop, but does incremental sync, which may let some old emails in different state(like you move a very old message to another folder). But it offer the user customized sync which can let the user to sync message during an time range.

The OMail & OMail Pro also will prefer to save plain text email instead of save all mail information like what Opera Mail did. That is because I want to limit the use of storage on a mobile device and also plain text are enough for most programmer is the group who use mailing list the most, and they normally prefer to discuss in an plain text format(Take how popular markdown is nowadays into consideration). And also most html mail are promotion related.

If you’re programmer or any professional work with large amount of mailing lists, and you’re tired of add more and more filters in your email account every time you find you miss some filter, you’re welcome to give OMail or OMail Pro a try, and also you’re welcome to give feedback for any problem or future improvements of these application.

m00nlight 20 October 2018
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