About
A mail client built to be understood
Pagkugi is a graphical mail client built on open standards. It treats mail as text, composes existing tools instead of replacing them, and favors long-term maintainability over feature count.
What Pagkugi is
Pagkugi reads, writes, and organizes mail. It converts HTML to a clean, readable text representation instead of rendering it, so a message is something you read rather than a page that runs.
Behind that are open standards: MIME, IMAP, SMTP, RFC 3676 flowed text, iCalendar, Sieve, and CommonMark for Markdown. Messages are kept in open, inspectable files.
Proportional text, with fixed width where it belongs
Pagkugi does not set plain-text mail in a fixed-width face by default. Ordinary prose is set in a proportional face — the kind a book uses — because it reads more comfortably and fits more words on a line, so messages wrap less.
The fixed face is not wasted, though: much of email genuinely depends on its grid. Code, patches, stack traces, tables, and ASCII art are recognized and shown in a fixed-width face to keep their alignment, while everything around them stays proportional.
What Pagkugi is not
Pagkugi does not aim to be a browser, a groupware suite, a provider platform, or a plugin host. HTML is not rendered by a web engine.
There is no online account, no activation, and no telemetry. A license is a file you keep.
Migrating from another client
Back up your mail before you move anything. Pagkugi keeps mail in standard Maildir folders, so there is no import step and no lock-in. The recommended route is an IMAP account: if your mail lives on (or is synchronized with) an IMAP account, add that account to Pagkugi and let it synchronize. Pagkugi then keeps the local Maildir and the account in step, and the other client keeps using the same account, so both sides converge through the server.
You can also point Pagkugi at the Maildir directly, with IMAP sync turned off, and let a Maildir-aware client read the same store. That is less recommended unless you really know what you are doing: two programs writing one Maildir, and the Maildir++ layout, flags, and synchronization state, all need care. Pagkugi does not include an importer or a migration tool, and it does not take over a store another program owns.
Migrating to another client
Back up your mail before you move anything. The recommended route is the same in reverse: keep your IMAP account, let Pagkugi synchronize so the account holds your current mail, and point the other client at that same account. Both clients then converge through the server.
You can also point a Maildir-aware client at the same Maildir directly, with Pagkugi's IMAP sync turned off. That is less recommended unless you really know what you are doing: two programs writing one Maildir, and the Maildir++ layout, flags, and synchronization state, all need care.
Small enough to reason about
The project prefers concrete implementations over premature abstraction, plain text over rich integration, and simple designs that satisfy the contract over elaborate ones that do not. Every feature carries a long-term maintenance cost and has to justify its existence.