 In the last few weeks, I have been looking for an alternative to Mozilla Thunderbird as far as a desktop email client. And really what I wanted was a great desktop email client that was free and open source software because I won't run proprietary software as long as there's good free and open source solutions out there. And it also needs to be cross-platform because so many of you guys, especially when it comes to email, many of you guys have machines that run Windows, Mac and Linux. You really need an email client that works on all three platforms. And really other than Thunderbird, there really wasn't a good answer as far as an alternative to Thunderbird out there. Until recently, a few days ago, Melspring announced that they were becoming completely open source. Melspring is a desktop email client. It's cross-platform. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux. And in the history of the YouTube channel, the three years or so that I've been doing this channel, you guys have asked me about Melspring many times to take a look at it on camera. And I've resisted. The reason I resisted is I don't like showcasing proprietary software on this channel. And although the Melspring email client was licensed under a free license, it's GPLed. It has a syncing service built into it called Melsync that is proprietary software. So the client is free and open source software, but the syncing service that's tied to it is a proprietary service. And if it's not 100% free and open source software, I didn't want to give it any coverage on the channel. Well, a few days ago, the Melspring team announced that Melsync, the syncing service that was proprietary before, this was about six days ago. They announced Melsync is now also licensed under the GPL. And because of that, now the Melspring client is 100% free and open source software. So now I actually have an alternative, a free and open source alternative to Thunderbird that is also cross-platform. So today I wanted to take a quick look at Melspring. So let me switch over to the desktop here. I installed Melspring from the AUR for those of you on Arch. I just installed it with Paru or if you guys have Yay installed, just Yay dash capital S Melspring. And let me go ahead and launch the Melspring client here. And this is what it looks like out of the box. Now when you first launch it, it's going to ask you to go ahead and set up an email address. So go ahead and sync to your Gmail account or whatever email account you want to use. Now there are paid versions and free versions of Melspring. So the free version limits the number of emails that you can use as far as accounts. And that kind of sucks because many of us these days have more than one email account. And I think they limit this to four email accounts on the free version. If you pay them $8 a month, so they ask for a subscription of $8 a month, that unlocks some extra features, including the ability to have more than four email accounts tied to Melspring. The other thing you need to know when you first launch Melspring for the first time, other than of course, linking to your email accounts, it's going to ask you to create an account with Melspring.com. You actually have to sign up for a Melspring account. And what is that? Well, I am assuming they ask you to sign up for that because of some of the syncing stuff in the back end and also because they are offering subscription services. That just makes it handy if you already have an account. If you ever decide to pay, then they already have your information on file or whatever. I know some people, especially in the free and open source software communities are going to have a problem giving them an email and signing up for an account. But you know, that's that's just the nature of this. I actually don't mind this too much, especially the fact that they are on a paid model. As far as they offer a free version and they also offer a paid version. I don't mind paying for good free and open source software. And this program is actually fantastic. Just looking at it, you can tell a lot of work goes into this email client and I certainly don't mind them asking for payment and I don't mind giving them a few bucks. If I wanted to use the pro version, I'm not sure if I will end up signing up for it. I'm not sure if the features they offer for the pro version are worth it to me. For those of you wondering what the pro version offers, if I get back into my browser here, the pro version offers a powerful template support. I'm not exactly sure what they mean by that. Rich contact profiles, follow up reminders, read receipts, link tracking, read receipts and link tracking. So that is, I'm assuming if you guys have ever used things like exchange and outlook and stuff like that, you know, sometimes you'll get an email and when you read it, the person that sent it will get a receipt saying that you actually opened that and read it. So that's what a read receipt is. Link tracking is the same thing that you actually clicked on a link, then it'll let somebody know that they, that you clicked on that link, I guess, you know, that you received that document they sent you or whatever. Also some of the other features included with the monthly subscription are the send later feature, company overviews, snooze messages, actionable mailbox insights and much more. Now $8 a month is kind of pricey, right, that's $96 a year. I'm not sure if it's going to be worth it to everybody because does everybody need send later, read receipts, link tracking, snooze messages, probably not. I'm not sure if I necessarily need it, but there are a lot of people that will need it and it's not like this is wasted money. Like if you're giving them $8 a month, what are you getting? Well, you're getting people that are really working on a really nice email client because this thing looks gorgeous out of the box. We have this really four column kind of layout. It's very reminiscent to those of you that have ever done anything and something like Outlook. So, you know, we have our columns over here on the far left. As far as your inbox and trash and archive and send and all of that. And then here is the list of the actual messages. So if I click on this one here from library, this is my latest notification from library that people I've subscribed to have posted something from library. And then this far right hand column here, this is all the messages from this particular email address from library.com. And if I want to show all, you know, will show me all the past messages, you know, and then I could click on one of those and, you know, read that, which is crypto coins reposted my content from whenever that was. I don't know that could have been weeks, months ago. I didn't check out the date on that. It's a really attractive, sexy, modern looking email client. That's one of the things I really like about it. The other thing I like about it is the theming. So you can create your own themes. It has some built in themes. So let me change the theme by default. It's the light theme. If you want to, there is a built in dark theme as well. And the dark theme, the dark theme looks really good. But I do have a problem with it. Let me launch my doom Emacs. So this is a doom Emacs. And I wanted to, you know, do something in doom Emacs. This is the standard theme, the doom one theme for doom Emacs, which is a dark theme, but it's not like a gray and black theme. I just got some bluish hints to it. Same thing with my terminal color scheme, because I patterned my terminal color scheme after the doom Emacs doom one theme. And my email client being almost black, you know, this dark, almost black theme, I wanted it to match my terminal color scheme and my doom Emacs color scheme. So what I did is I created a theme here called doom one. And I called it mail spring doom one. And now my mail spring theme, you know, matches my terminal color scheme and my doom Emacs theme. You know, I adjusted the colors and this was really easy to do. By the way, those of you that want this doom one theme for mail spring, what I did is I went ahead and created a repository over on my GitLab. So if you go to my GitLab at GitLab.com slash DWT one. I've got a bunch of repositories there. Look for mail spring doom one. I just pushed this like 15 minutes ago. You guys will find the styles here. All you need to do is get clone that repository and then go into edit, install theme and then navigate to where that repository was cloned. So in this case, it was mail spring dash doom one is what I called it. Just choose that. And when you choose that, then go back into edit, change theme and you should see mail spring doom one available as a theme. If you have any messages that you've replied to or you've gotten multiple messages about an issue. For example, this is somebody that opened up issue on my GitLab. He sent me three messages about this particular issue. You know, you get a thread. So you get everything all in this one column here. So that's really nice, especially if you end up with a long conversation that you've had with somebody. If you both have responded many, many times. Of course, we have our contact information over here and this far right hand column. I can hide that, by the way, but you see the hide sidebar there. Most people probably won't need that far right hand column information very often. I know typically I probably wouldn't use that very often. Typically, I mean, if I need a person's email address or their name, it's already in the message. That's mainly for maintaining a contact list. Some other information you have in this top tool bar include things like this is for sharing. This is the snooze and again, the snooze. I don't know if it will work when you first sign up. If it does, it's probably a limited time because that's one of the features that's supposed to be available only in the pro feature. You also have move to folder, mark as unread. Of course, we have the star. We have the trash and we have the thumbs down icon, which is a mark as spam. All in all, I'm pretty happy. You know, just a couple of hours I've spent with Milspring today. I'm pretty happy with it. The only downside with it is the fact that it is a subscription service. You do have to sign up for an account, even if you're going to use their free service. You do have to have an account with mailspring.com. And most of us, I know, are going to have more than four email accounts. So if you have more than four email accounts, you're going to have to sign up for the $8 a month subscription service to use Milspring. But honestly, I think it's probably a worthwhile for many of us. I certainly wouldn't mind giving them eight bucks a month. I think it's worth it. And at the very least, at least, you know, your money is going to something. I mean, they're obviously putting in a lot of work on this particular product. And as long as they keep, you know, delivering great software, I don't mind paying for a really good free and open source software. The other reason I wanted to give Milspring a chance is because I it's very rare that these companies release proprietary software and then open source it. And I just wanted to spotlight somebody that's done that. And I wanted to show you guys that we don't hold grudges in the free software communities, right? That's like a lot of people hold grudges with these proprietary software companies, companies like Microsoft, for example, Microsoft has done a lot of really bad things over the last 30, 40 years. But you know what? At some point, you got to forgive. You know, Microsoft is doing a lot more stuff in the open source community now, right? They're they're actually releasing open source software occasionally. And if Microsoft puts out a great piece of open source software, I'll take a look at it. Same thing with Milspring. I've known about Milspring for years. It's always been proprietary and I've always avoided it. I've never installed it on any of my equipment because I just didn't want to give it the time that it because it was proprietary, right? But now that it's open source, it's like, hey, all is forgiven. And I think that's important. I think those of us in the community that really are passionate about the free software movement and the open source software movement, this is something that we need to be able to do, right? We need to be able to forget the past and just move forward as far as the future. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show, Absi, Dallas, Devon, Fran, Gabe, Lou, Corbinian, Mitchell, the Commie, Arch, 5530, Chris, Chuck, David, the other David, Donnie, Dylan, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, Pick, Veeam, Scott, Wes and Willie. They are the producers of the show. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode about the MailSpring email client, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. These are all my supporters over on Patreon, because without you guys, the DistroTube channel wouldn't be possible. You'd like to support my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.