Postcard is a new email client for GNOME sporting a modern design reminiscent of Geary.
The app is the work of a solo developer, gxanshu on GitHub, who is upfront about using AI coding tools to bring this “modern mail client” to life.
Postcard is written in Python with GTK4/libadwaita. It uses imaplib and smtplib for networking, a local SQLite index for searching, WebKitGTK for rendering HTML and libsecret for keeping passwords safe. It’s also open source, so the code is inspectable.
Visually, Postcard should look familiar to fans of the Geary email client, as it uses a similar multi-column design: folders in a (resizable) sidebar on the left, a message list in the middle and a reading panel on the right:
It supports email providers using IMAP and SMTP, but there’s no mention of POP and support for Exchange Web Services is, per the developer, not planned. Gmail access is provided via GNOME Online Accounts, so if you’re signed into an account there, Postcard can pick it up.
You can add multiple email accounts to Postcard, but it doesn’t currently offer a unified inbox for viewing all mail from all accounts in one super-lengthy message list.
Other features are the minimum you’d expect: notification on new mail, adjustable sync, threaded conversations and search tools. A basic mail composer offers rich text formatting, subject, Cc and Bcc lines and support for adding attachments.
The application’s UI is said to follow the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) closely.
A signature can be defined in the (modest) Preferences dialog, alongside toggles to block remote images in mails (like tracking pixels) and keep the app running in the background when closed (which is needed to keep the mail connection alive).
There’s no PGP/GPG key setup, no built-in calendar, no client-side mail filters and so on. While power users are unlikely to be tempted by an app like this, suffice to say: for mail management, established clients like Evolution or Thunderbird fit better.
Postcard is under active development – 5 updates in 2 weeks this month alone – which the project README notes, advising users to trial it for a few weeks rather than rely on it as their sole mail app.
Vibe coded conundrum…
AI coding tools like Claude make it easy to create 80%-there personal projects. Enthusiasm wanes when the bug reports from users expecting the other 20% pile in.
This is why AI-aided software – definitions on the degree of artificial assistance which merits the ‘vibe coded’ are welcome in the comments – has a reputation for being drive-by slop.
Flathub banned AI-assisted submissions this year and some post-ban research checking the status of rejected “vibe coded” apps found three-quarters had since been abandoned (on other people’s infra; Codeberg no longer hosts vibe-coded software because of rising storage costs).
In a sense, I find it reassuring that Postcard‘s developer has been upfront about the involvement of AI (assuming the Claude Design Aesthetic™ website didn’t give it away to folks) in the software.
“In a world…” of relentless hollow marketing spiel and vibe-coded obfuscation, a bit of human honesty is worth something.
Install Postcard GTK email app on Ubuntu
Postcard is available to install on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions as a Flatpak, but not from Flathub (for reasons alluded to further up).
If you want to try it, you can add its dedicated Flatpak repository:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists postcard https://postcard.gxanshu.in/postcard.flatpakrepo
And then install it:
flatpak install postcard in.gxanshu.postcard
A .flatpakref file is available to download from the project’s GitHub releases page if you’d rather. You can open that in Flatpak software managers like Bazaar (available in the Ubuntu repos) or GNOME Software. It won’t work in App Center.
Will you use this?
Postcard is not the only new email client to spring up in recent months. There’s Post, another Geary-inspired client, and Vireo, which offers a richer sounding feature set. Said gap for GTK-based email clients is now being plugged with the help of AI1.
Vibe-coded timers, to-do lists and other disposable tchotchkes. If they break, no big deal. But entrusting my entire email history? I’d prefer a developer with some stakes in the game, not a “blame the AI” excuse.
I used Geary as my email client on Ubuntu for a long time. Its last major update was in 2024 (development was hardly a sprint before then). I also switched to Fastmail, and I find their web UI perfect (Fastmail got a Linux desktop app last year, an Electron-y thing I don’t use).
But, hey: many have been crying out for a modern GTK email app, and Postcard has arrived – let’s just hope it doesn’t require a ‘wish you were here’ of its own in a few months, should the developer get bored and move on to something else shiny and new…
- Or said gap will be filled with abandoned codebases. ↩︎