An overview of the IMAP client Trojitá

Encryption

GnuPG and S/MIME play an increasingly important role in the encryption of private communications. Trojitá cannot handle S/MIME, but it does work with PGP. Nonetheless, you will not find any pertinent button that lets you protect the text of an email you have written from people who want to snoop.

The technology is used for the first time in the current version and is played up in the release notes as an important advancement. Even so, as the notes themselves point out, the function is only available for received messages. Provided you have already installed GnuPG, then the encryption process works smoothly. Handling messages that carry digital signatures also works without a hitch. To date, only external tools are available for administering the key.

In some ways, the Trojitá's current behavior is reminiscent of the first SMS-capable mobile phones from more than 20 years ago. These phones could receive and display short messages but were not able to send them. It took the next generation of devices to solve that problem. Therefore, there is room for hope that the Trojitá developers will likewise add to the existing functions in the future.

The software also offers a spam filter, which in actuality consists of an option for manually marking emails as spam. However, the function merely marks the corresponding messages. The application does not move these messages to the appropriate folder. It also does not have a filter that applies a spam filter to the view.

It became clear during testing that the software is incompatible with various desktop themes. This is particularly true when Gtk widgets were used to help Qt create the interfaces. Problems occurred in displaying colors under these conditions.

The information about encrypted email appeared in white print and was barely legible against a light yellow background. It seems that the developers made a mistake when modifying the KDE theme Breeze. There are express references to the innovation that these modifications are intended to represent in the release notes for the latest version 0.7.

Conclusion

Given its austere functionality, we have reservations about recommending Trojitá for everyday use. But if you are a user who wants to avoid the stress of Thunderbird or KMail, then this program can give you a reprieve. The interface has a lean and logical design with the caveat that the software cuts corners when it comes to convenience. However, its speed more than compensates for the lacking features.

The mail client landscape in the Qt ecosystem is sparse. Trojitá already integrates well into desktops like LXQt and KDE. There is cause for optimism now that the application source code is in the KDE Git repository and project presentations are found in Bugzilla and the KDE UserBase wiki. Perhaps Trojitá, especially under KDE, will become a more viable alternative with the connection to Akonadi and its potential successor [4].

At this time, the incomplete implementation of GnuPG is a drawback. You can choose to either do without this tool or wait for future development. While it is possible to encrypt a message before sending it, actually doing so turns out to be more cumbersome than convenient.