The mail app
ownCloud Mail is making rapid progress. We talked to some of its main contributors to get an idea of the why and how behind this app and of course – how to get involved!
Why ownCloud Mail
Asked about the goal of the ownCloud Mail app and why it matters, the contributors explain that the focus of ownCloud Mail is on integration. Jan explained that “Having Mail just makes sense for ownCloud as an important building block in the big picture of personal data. We already do files, calendar, contacts and more. Mail is another important part for many users”, summarizing the argument nicely. Christoph added that for him, “the primary goal is to have an easy to use, but also powerful web-based mail application”, “something that is tightly integrated into my ownCloud since I already have my files, contacts, calendar and news in it”. Another point is of course that by deeply integrating Mail in ownCloud, a more seamless experience can be created between the Calendar, Contacts, Mail and other apps.
And Mail matters to many users. Steffen, hosting ownCloud at Port Knox, noted that it is the most requested feature there and for him, personally, he likes “to replace Thunderbird and wanna take ownCloud Mail with me”.
How to Help Test
We discussed testing the ownCloud Mail app. The contributors asked some special attention to these areas:
- 1. First run experience: If everything works fine and is understandable for first-timers
- 2. Saving drafts
- 3. Test the issues and pull requests of the current milestone
- 4. Testing different mail setups – there are so many different ones, just trying yours is helpful
- 5. Test support for the Unified Mailbox by using multiple mail accounts
What is Coming
While the coming 0.3 release is mostly a refactoring and bugfixing release (though Image Blocking is one new feature), some cool stuff is coming for 0.4 and 0.5. We asked the contributors for their favorites.
Jan:
- Grouping of conversations / threading
- Folder management and moving mails
- Calendar integration
Christoph:
- Folder management and moving mails
- Grouping of conversations / threading
- Stabilizing the Unified Inbox
Steffen:
- Alias support
- Direct upload of attachments
How to Help Code
These are areas the team thinks are easiest and most interesting to get involved with:
- Link detection
- Ability to ignore conversations
- Better caching
- Calendar integration
- Ability to add attachments from computer (currently only attachments from the Files app work):
- In general the »Priority« and the »feature parity« tags
Issues and PR’s are nicely tagged, so finding interesting things to work on should be easy.
How to Earn Extra Cookies
We also asked what would be nice to have but isn’t planned. Christoph mentioned PHP 7 support would rock – it isn’t there yet. Jan asked for Undo for mail sending and Steffen threw in deep Calendar and Contacts integration and “feature parity with other mail apps”. That’s a big wish, but there’s plenty good stuff to get involved with so checkout the github issue list and get crackin’!
