poodle

Experimental email client with social features. Poodle is in very early stages of development, so functionality is limited!

Building and running from source

Prerequisites

Running from source is supported on macOS and Linux. You might have success with the Linux Subsystem on Windows.

You must have these programs installed:

• g++
• Node v8 or later
• tmux
• yarn v0.26.0 or later

On macOS you can get g++ by installing the Apple Command Line Tools Package. On Debian-based Linux systems you can get it by installing the build-essential package.

The easiest way to get the current version of Node is to run the nvm install script. Follow the instructions printed by the installer, and then run these commands to set the current stable Node release as your default node:

$ nvm install stable
$ nvm alias default stable

If your package manager does not have a recent version of yarn available you can get the latest version by following instructions on the yarn installation page.

On Linux you also need some development libraries installed for building npm modules with native dependencies. On Debian-based systems the required dependencies are:

• libgnome-keyring-dev
• libsecret-1-dev

Running

In the top level directory run the command:

$ yarn && yarn start

Design

Poodle is a mono-repo divided into two indepedent NPM projects, packages/main/ and packages/client/. Both run locally when the app is installed. main is a background Node process that manages all interactions with the email provider. main provides a GraphQL service that client connects to via inter-process communication (IPC). client is a React app that runs as an Electron renderer process.

Here is an architecture diagram of the main package:

Poodle uses code generation to generate TypeScript based on a GraphQL schema and operations. The generated code ensures that client GraphQL queries keep in sync with schema used by the main process. The schema is in packages/main/schema/schema.graphql, and client operations are defined in packages/client/src/documents/operations.graphql. Each of the main and client packages has a yarn codegen script that updates the generated code. Make sure to run these scripts after making any changes to either graphql file!

Some GraphQL types are mapped to TypeScript types in hand-written code. See packages/main/codegen.yml to see how types are mapped.

sync.ts gets updated state from an IMAP server and updates the local cache accordingly. It is designed according to recommendations in RFC 4549 - Synchronization Operations for Disconnected IMAP4 Clients. To avoid prematurely undoing optimistic changes to local cache state, we wait for pending upstream operations to complete before running a sync. This is accomplished by scheduling a sync via queue/ and giving it a low priority.