GNOME Keyring integration to store passwords for email accounts.
Implementation to support GPG had been started, but is still incomplete as of 2019.
Technical information
Geary internally uses an SQLite database to store a local copy of emails and for indexing. It uses a fully asynchronous GObject-based IMAP client library. One feature that distinguishes Geary from other open source email clients is its focus on the conversation view. Both Geary and Pantheon Mail are using gettext for translations. As of, Pantheon Mail has not been migrated to WebKitGTK+2 yet. The developers decided first to migrate the code managing the conversation view to use native GTK widgets. This offered several advantages, including minimizing the use of webviews, reducing the code, supporting hardware accelerated animations, and supporting RTL languages. They also removed the use of custom GTK bars like PillHeaderBar which were making the code complicated and difficult to read. Geary uses WebKit2 since at least version 3.32.0.
History
Historically, Elementary OS directly supported the project and Geary became the default application in that GNU/Linux distribution. On March 25, 2013, Jim Nelson, executive director at Yorba, launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo to gather US$100,000 that would have been used to pay the 3 full-time Yorba engineers that were working at that time on Geary. Unfortunately, on April 23, 2013, only US$50,860 were gathered from 1,192 backers. The amount was not met and the campaign failed. According to the rules set by IndieGoGo, Yorba did not receive any of the money that had been pledged. After this failure, Jim Nelson declared in a blog post that the crowdfunding campaign was kind of an experiment to see if that route was enough to sustain open-source development. He reaffirmed Geary had been created to improve the Linux experience, and therefore had no chance of being ported to OS X or Windows platforms. As the Yorba Foundation had stopped its activities and GNOME had not announced any plans about this project at the time, the future of Geary was unclear. As a result, to these uncertainties, due to previous design disagreements with the old Geary team and because elementary OS was actually using Geary as the default mail client, Daniel Foré, the leader of Elementary OS, decided to fork the project on and continue with the development as a fork.; the project was renamed Pantheon Mail during the process. Pantheon Mail replaced Geary in elementary OS 0.4, which is codenamed Loki. In March 2016, Michael Gratton applied to become the new maintainer of Geary. His main goal was to try fixing pressing issues like the dependency on the old WebKit1GTK, collaboration with Pantheon Mail, better support for non-GMail servers, mailbox management, the account UI, extending search, etc. Contributing to Geary as a GNOME project requires the maintainer to become a GNOME member. After a discussion with Adam Dingle, Yorba's founder, both agreed to wait for Gratton to fulfill GNOME membership application requirements. In the meantime, Gratton will post his patches to the GNOME Bugzilla instance and Adam will commit them for him. On, version 0.11 was released,. Version 0.13 was released on February 18, 2019. In March 2019, with version 3.32, the version scheme was changed to match GNOME's release schedule.
Trivia
The initial name "Geary" coincides with the name of the Geary Street, because all Yorba's products were named after streets in San Francisco. However, according to a former Yorba employee, the application was not named after the address where Yorba Foundation was located. That was actually a coincidence. The first beta of Geary was released in May 2012, and Yorba was still located on Capp Street at the time.
