Geary 44 is Out With Conversation List & Headerbar Tweaks

Geary should (I’d hope) need minimal introduction. This relatively lightweight, user-friendly app offers an accessible, and more casual approach to managing your e-mail than the likes of Evolution and Thunderbird on Linux.

Email protocols IMAP and SMTP are supported by Geary, and the app can be effortlessly setup to pull in mail from popular webmail services like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and whatever Microsoft’s email service is called (Outlook? Or is that its email app? I forget).

The key USPs of Geary are its threaded conversations, speedy email search, and support for tags and folders. Plus, Geary looks and works beautifully on the GNOME desktop (not a surprise since. y’know, it’s a GNOME project app).

Geary 44: What’s New?

As there’s no change-log attached to the Geary Flathub listing for this update I had to take a sift through Geary’s Gitlab page to pull a few highlights. The change-log is short but potent with 2 key changes — alas a GTK4/libadwaita port is not yet among them:

• New conversation list
• Reworked headerbar

I’m going to assume the ‘new conversation list’ is more of a lower-level change than a user-facing one as, to my eyes, I don’t see much difference when looking at Geary 43 and Geary 44 side-by-side — perhaps I’m being blind.

I also couldn’t find an issue or merge request pertaining to this to enlighten me so if you can, please do so in the comments.

The reworked headerbar is more noticeable. A new “select” button now sits next to the search button, while message view toolbar icons have been re-ordered. You can see the differences in this graphic (icon/color theme differences are due to top pic being taken on Ubuntu):

Of note to those using the app on mobile (or in narrow portrait mode on the desktop): the toolbar that previously appeared the bottom of the conversation list view is no longer there, but the one in the message composer view remains. Juts a heads-up.

Other changes:

• Fix network detection issues
• Suspend engine on system suspend
• UI translation updates
• Bug fixes
• Smaller UI improvements

Interested in taking it for a spin?

You can get Geary on Flathub.

You’ll also find Geary available in the repos of most major Linux distributions, but keep in mind those versions might not be the very latest, and lack some of the changes mentioned in the post.