People ask me what the state of Mailody is. There are no new releases, no blogs, no microblogs, the website is dated and there are hardly any commits. Is it dead?

Nope, not at all. The reason the development has stalled the last year or so is simple. Mailody relies completely on Akonadi. That means that the backend of Mailody is no longer a sqlite database, but based on Akonadi. Akonadi is also responsible for fetching the mail messages from an IMAP, POP3, Exchange or whatever seerver.

And that is where the problem lies. The first implementation of the Akonadi IMAP-resource was based on a library I wrote and used for Mailody3. The great hackers from KDAB looked at it, probably laughed very loud and told me kindly that it was not good enough. But that was not a surprise to me, I wrote it as one of the first things after learning C++, and I told people in the early stages before the move to Akonadi that someone with a lot of experience should carefully review all code.

Anyhow, KDAB offered to write a new IMAP resource and from what I heard it is starting to shape up nicely the last few weeks. As soon as it is ready, I will start using it. That means Mailody4 is usefull again, and I will pick up the development again. It is so much easier to work on something if you use it daily and also get daily reminders about the area’s to improve.

I’m actually looking forward to using Mailody as it has cool stuff like Nepomuk tagging – and searching – of mail messages, a quick reply function, html-mode for the composer, kontact integration, marble intgegration (always wanted to know where that mail came from?) and lots more.

So, conclusion: Mailody is not dead, it’s just waiting for the cool new IMAP resource in Akonadi to become usefull again.