Puremail and Pure Writer for Haiku

A native Haiku mail client: IMAP and SMTP, a CalDAV calendar, document preview and an address book with CardDAV, in one package.

PureWriter - full - featured document processor with broad OpenOffice (odt) and MS Word (docx) compatibility supports also LYX, RTF 1.91, PDF, ePUB, DOC, MD, inserting of ODS/XLS/XLSX into documents and few other formats.

Free and Open Source under permissive MIT License.

Scroll down for features and FAQ section.

Double-click the .hpkg in Tracker and HaikuDepot installs it, or run in Terminal: pkgman install ./PureMail-1.2.3-157-x86_64.hpkg

Everything the package needs is part of a standard Haiku installation (OpenSSL, SQLite, hunspell, ICU, the Noto Color Emoji font); HaikuDepot fetches anything that is missing.

PureMail / PureWriter appears in the Deskbar under Applications.

PureWriter for Haiku is an application written specifically for Haiku OS to provide full word processing capabilities compatible with both OpenOffice ISO standards and MS Word. It handles most tasks you know form Word or OpenOffice Writer and adds some extra capabilities on top. It does not support macros or XForms.

PureMail for Haiku is an application written specifically for Haiku OS to provide full featured and modern Mail Client.

It borrows some concepts from PureMail but it is a Haiku OS native application, not a partially integrated port from Linux or Windows.

It does not store eml files on the disk due to performance concerns, but integrates tightly with Haiku OS for many other tasks (2 Tracker Add-Ons, handling of know formats from Tracker or browser email links, selection of browsers on opening links in an email, UI responding to color changes, dark/light modes for UI and HTML content, People two-way synchronization and many more). Calendars come over CalDAV, address books import/export to and from online CardDAV accounts, and the notifications window can live on the Desktop as a replicant. Its main strengths are performance, stability and rich set of features, including HTML without browser.

At the first start the Preferences window opens with an empty account. Enter the account name, your name, the e-mail address and the password; for most providers the incoming and outgoing servers, user names and passwords are filled in from the address. Check the Incoming Server and Outgoing Server pages if your provider is not known, then press Test to check the connection and Save. Synchronization starts at once. Later accounts: File > Preferences > Mail Accounts > Add New.

Everything is in ~/config/settings/PureMail/puremail.db (messages, bodies, calendar, contacts, settings) and the attachments under ~/emails/<account>/<folder>/. Nothing else is written outside these two places, apart from the vCard mirror in ~/People and the temporary files under /tmp/PureMail while something is viewed.

About one and a half times the size of your mailboxes: the messages themselves, the attachments as files and the full text index. The database is one file; back it up together with ~/emails.

PureMail asks once and pins the certificate if you accept it; the account page shows "Certificate of this server was accepted permanently". A changed certificate is asked about again. For calendars and online address books there is a switch "Accept an unverifiable server certificate" on the setup form.

Any IMAP/SMTP server with a password login: your own server, Kerio Connect, Axigen, Zimbra, Nextcloud/ownCloud with mail, Fastmail, GMX, web.de, mailbox.org, Posteo, Yahoo, iCloud, Gmail with an application password. Outlook.com and Exchange Online need OAuth2 and do not work; Proton needs its Bridge, which does not exist for Haiku.

Eight by default, four for Gmail and Outlook-style servers, up to 30 per account and 50 in total (Preferences > Application Settings). "Test concurrent connections" on the Incoming Server page opens connections until the server refuses one and proposes half of that number; remember that your phone and web mail share the same allowance.

INBOX and every folder marked "Check on new mail" (folder popup) are checked every check interval; every folder is synchronized fully every full sync interval (both in Application Settings). Server > Synchronize now starts a full run, Server > Check for e-mails a quick one. The status line at the bottom shows what runs, and File > Error Log and Tasks lists the queue and the errors.

Type into the search field and press Enter; the scope next to it switches between this folder and all folders. Words without a prefix are searched everywhere; from: to: cc: subject: date: month: year: attachments:yes attachment: type:email|event|notification restrict a term to a field, dates are written the way Haiku shows them. The arrow next to the field opens the advanced search with one row per field, a date picker and choice lists. Clear the field and press Enter, or select a folder, to leave the search.

Right-click the folder and choose "Never download"; it stays in the tree but its messages are not fetched. "Hide" takes the folder (with its sub folders) out of the tree into the "Hidden Folders" section at the bottom; "Show" there brings it back. "Hide This Account" on an account does the same for a whole account.

Drag the selected rows onto a folder of any account (Shift at the drop moves, else copies; a confirmation can be switched off), or use "Copy to folder..." / "Move to folder..." in the message popup. Between servers the messages are uploaded to the target; copies appear at once, moved originals leave the list immediately.

Remote images are blocked until you press "Load images" above the message. Add the sender to the safe senders or its domain to the safe domains (address popup in the header, or Tools > Safe senders and domains) and their images load at once. Inline images that travel with the mail are always shown.

A link that leads to another domain than the sender's can be phishing, so PureMail shows both domains and asks. "Always allow" remembers the pair; Tools > Safe senders and domains > Allowed web links withdraws it. Links to the sender's own site open without a question. The link popup also offers the browsers installed and "Copy link address".

The composer's "Plain text" button switches the message; the formatting is lost, quoted text becomes ">" lines. Templates and signatures are inserted from the Template button; "Remove quoted" takes the quoted original out of a reply, level by level.

Save (Ctrl+S) writes the message into the account's Drafts folder, locally at once and on the server in the background. Double-click a draft to continue it. A message that could not be sent stays in Drafts marked "Send errors"; open it to try again.

File > Save as EML writes the selected messages as .eml files with all attachments. An .eml file opens in PureMail's message window when the file type is registered (Preferences > Integration with Haiku). The Attachments tab shows every attachment, converted office documents included, and saves or opens them.

Preferences > Calendars > Add New, or Tools > Calendar > Calendar menu > Add calendar. Pick "Use credentials from" a mail account, or enter the server URL and login yourself, then press the search button: PureMail tries the provider's known roots, the well-known URL and the usual paths on the usual hosts of your domain (up to two minutes, the title shows where it is), lists the calendars found, and you pick one, give it a name and a colour. Kerio Connect, Nextcloud, Axigen, SOGo, Radicale, Baikal, Google, iCloud and Fastmail are found this way.

A meeting request in a mail shows a banner with Accept, Decline, Accept tentatively and Open in Calendar; the answer goes to the organizer and marks the mail replied. Invitations addressed to one of your own addresses are put into the matching calendar at download time; others offer "Add to Calendar". From the calendar an event can be forwarded as mail, a new time proposed, a conference link joined.

At the event's own alarm time, or 10 minutes before it when it has none, as a Haiku notification and in PureMail's notifications window (from the reminder time until 30 minutes after the start). A click opens the event. Recurring events do not remind.

Calendar menu > Import reads every .ics file of a folder into one calendar (events the calendar already has are left alone); Export writes the events of a date range as one .ics file each. A single .ics file opens in the event editor when the file type is registered.

Tools > Address Book (Alt+K). One contact holds any number of e-mail addresses and other channels, each address can be tied to an account. The Identity contact is you: it has one address per mail account, and the name and greeting stored with each address are used when writing from it.

Tools > Gather Addresses in the address book reads the Sent folder of an account and adds the people you wrote to. "Add to Address Book" in the popup of any name in a message header adds one. Import from an online address book brings a whole CardDAV book in. Addresses you removed are remembered (Tools > Deleted Email Addresses) so that the gatherer does not bring them back.

Address book > Online Accounts > Setup Online Accounts: Add opens the same form as the calendar's, with the same search (Kerio's /carddav/, Nextcloud, Axigen, Google, iCloud, Fastmail and the well-known URL). Then Online Accounts > Import reads the book into the address book, and Export Selected writes the selected contacts to it. Both match by UID, then by e-mail address, then by name: pairs that match and differ are shown in a merge form where you choose per row to merge, take the other side, skip or add as new; what matches nothing is added, what matches and adds nothing is skipped.

Select both (Ctrl-click) and choose Merge Selected - the one selected last keeps its name - or run Find Duplicates, which groups contacts sharing an address or a phone number and merges each group into the contact you pick.

Yes: every contact is mirrored as a vCard in ~/People with the standard People attributes. Cards edited or added there are read back at start and whenever the folder changes; the database stays the source of truth.

View > Show Notifications (Alt+I): every unread message outside Junk, Drafts and Trash by account and folder, and every event from its reminder time. Double-click opens, the popup offers reply, forward, mark as read, flag, dismiss and delete for the selection; the popup on an account or folder acts on everything below it. "Stay on top" pins the window. Application Settings decide whether it opens on new mail and closes when empty.

Switch on "Show replicants" in the Deskbar menu, then drag the handle in the corner of the notifications window onto the Desktop. The replicant keeps working while PureMail is closed: a small helper, PureMailNotifier, checks the INBOX of every account and the due events and offers Mark as read, Flag, Dismiss and a "Start PureMail" button. The handle in its corner moves it and offers "Remove replicant".

Preferences > Integration with Haiku, one switch each: .eml, .vcf and .ics files open with PureMail; the Tracker add-ons "Send with PureMail" (the selected files as attachments) and "Use as text in PureMail" (a .docx, .rtf or .txt file as the text of a new message); mailto: links from browsers; the Deskbar icon with the unread count and a small menu; start at login. Every switch can be turned off again and puts things back as they were.

The add-ons are links in ~/config/non-packaged/add-ons/Tracker named in the Haiku system language. Open Preferences > Integration with Haiku and press Save: the links are checked and repaired. Tracker shows every add-on for any selection, so "Use as text" refuses anything but a single .docx, .rtf or .txt file.

The Language menu in the main window switches between English, German and Polish at once, without a restart. The first start follows Haiku's preferred language.

File > Error Log and Tasks shows