A year ago more or less, I started to work on a project called Modest that aimed to become the e-mail client for Nokia Internet Tables like the N800/N810. Other people from Igalia joined the team later like Dape, Berto, Felipe, Javier or Juanjo, and some of them are still working on the project. And yesterday the first Modest beta release was announced. I’d like to thank all of them for their effort and their commitment.

More or less at the same time I began to contribute to the Tinymail project leaded by the unique Philip van Hoof. Thank you Philip for providing us the APIs we wanted, for reviewing our patches and for your long e-mails plenty full of decorators, bodystructures, IMAP IDLEs and so on ;-)

And finally I’d like to thank Dirk-Jan because it’s a pleasure to work with you.

Talking a little bit about Modest, these are the features I specially like

• Modest is asynchronous: this means that the UI does not block while network operations are taking place, the UI is fully responsive while Tinymail performs the network stuff in the background
• Easy Setup: as Dirk said once, Modest is for humans. Just tell Modest where you are, your ISP and provide an username and a password and Modest will do all the hard server configuration stuff for you
• Connection specific SMTPs: when you're at work, you access the Internet through your ultra-high secured intranet which allows you to do almost anything. You can only send e-mails using your company's SMTP for example. But when you're at home you want to send it through your ISP's SMTP. Do you need two configurations? No, Modest can detect the network where you are connected to and use the proper SMTP for you with almost zero configuration.
• In Rome do as Romans, so if you're human use your thumbs don't use stylus!
• And finally Modest can be used as a desktop e-mail client as well. I don't recommend it to you though right now, because it's a little bit unmaintained but it's been designed to be used in both Hildon and GNOME desktops, so be patient (and send us your patches)

So stay tuned, more about Modest is coming soon. BTW download and try it!