Dekko for Ubuntu Touch¹ may be going nowhere, but the re-written, Snap-based version is already starting to shine.

And better yet: it’s available for testing right now.

Development Snap builds of Dekko are available in the beta and edge channels of the Ubuntu Snap Store, should you fancy following along with progress on the app as it works its way towards a full stable release later this year.

Because Snaps are pretty cool it’s super easy — and relatively safe — to install Dekko on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or later.

Dekko also makes use of the introduction of the ubuntu-app-platform snap.

This is a big ol’ bundle of common dependencies, libraries and run times that other apps can use, meaning Snap apps like Dekko don’t need to include everything with them (and thus reduce their overall download size.

And with Delta snap updates on the way it’s likely that future updates could get even smaller!

Dekko Email Client: Features

Although Dekko is under active development it’s perfectly usable in its beta form.

Dekko lets you add multiple accounts and supports all the common web-mail providers, including Gmail, and you can easily enter custom IMAP and SMTP (POP3 is considered experimental) details.

A unified inbox lets you to see all your mail in one view, though you can quickly switch to view e-mail on a per-account basis too.

Smart Folders make organising e-mail a touch more efficient, as does the basic contacts feature that ships built-in.

Other standard features you’d expect are (mostly) present, including a e-mail composer, custom account names, multiple views (all, unread, starred, forwarded, etc), search, starring, Gmail labels, and a UI for searching and viewing attachments.

There’s also plugin framework for developers to use to build on and extend Dekko’s features.

Don’t forget that Dekko is a convergent application: as you resize its window all the user interface elements will realign and move so that they better suit the available space.

Future Features

Features on the roadmap for future releases include:

[one-half]

Calendar plugin

Notes plugin

Smart folder editor

HTML signatures

[/one-half][one-half last=y]

HTML & markdown composer

Audio and video meme types

Threaded conversation view

GPG support

[/one-half]

Install Dekko Snap (Edge) on Ubuntu

[box style=”alert”]Dekko is under active, ongoing development. It should not be considered stable. You will encounter bugs. Emails may get eaten.[/box]

To install the Dekko Snap on your Ubuntu (Unity 7) desktop you need… Nope, you don’t need anything; you’ve got everything you need already.

Pop open a new Terminal window and run the following command to install the ‘ubuntu-app-platform’, a Snap that provides the bulk of Dekko (and other apps) dependencies:

sudo snap install ubuntu-app-platform

With that fully installed you can move on to installing the latest development build of Dekko itself:

sudo snap install --edge --devmode dekko

Once installation is complete (a progress bar in the Terminal will keep you updated as install status) you just need to ‘glue’ the two together:

sudo snap connect dekko:platform ubuntu-app-platform:platform

You should be able to find Dekko in the Unity Dash, though this is sometimes slow to refresh its cache. If you don’t see it after a couple of minutes you can run the app manually using this command:

snap run dekko

The first time you run Dekko it walks you through the process of adding a supported account (be it Gmail, or custom IMAP, etc). After this is added it will perform an initial sync. This can be on the slow side (same in any mail app) so don’t be too quick to file a bug!

After that you’re free to explore the accounts and preferences dialogs to tailor the app to suit your workflow.

Future features image: Dan Chapman

Thanks Michael T.

¹ Ubuntu Touch is Vivid + Click based. Ubuntu Personal, which will form the basis of future phones, is Xenial + Snap based.