automatic for the people

Ok... the modest email
client has been available for months, but finally today we're making downloadable packages available for OS2008/Chinook: click here, or visit our website which has instructions.

That means that you don't have to compile things yourself anymore¸ but simply click & install - hurray!

Some important notes:

• this is an early bèta which contains bugs; this is not production quality yet; we will be making frequent updates though;
  
• modest will not replace the official email client, and many things (like search and send-as-mail) use the official email client; new-mail notifications should work though;
  
• in the menus, modest is called 'E-mail' and uses the same icon as the official email client does... be careful not to confuse the two;
  
• modest works nicely with GMail (both IMAP and POP), just make sure you enable POP/IMAP in your GMail settings on the web, and use user@gmail.com and not just user as your user name.
  

Having said that, I feel very good about what we've accomplished so far. I'd like to thank the talented hackers at Igalia for all their inspiration and perspiration (read the Igalia/modest news), the inimitable Philip Van Hoof for his work on Tinymail. Also, the fine people at Openismus made important contributions, as did Vivek, Mox and many of my colleagues at Nokia in different areas.

In a previous blog entry, I already discussed some of the features modest offers. I think it's pretty cool. Maybe not as cool as Canola2, but definitely a lot better for reading/writing email :-)

Remember, modest is 100% open source software, released under a BSD-like license. It's not perfect, but we're working hard to make it the best mobile e-mail client. Patches are welcome, as are suggestions -- post them on the feature request tracker. Even bugs are welcome in Maemo Bugzilla, and make sure you use Communication/Modest (don't use Communications/Email, that's for the stock email client). Specificy as clearly as possible the problem, and how we could reproduce it, thanks.

In some future blog entries I will discuss various cool features in Modest, but try it out yourself, and let us know what you think!