Why I'm Building Spondr
I switched to Linux. Full commit. New machine, fresh install, no fallback.
The first few days were great. Then I tried to check my email.
I went through the list. All of it.
Thunderbird — capable, reliable, and unmistakably a product from 2004 that has been carefully maintained ever since. It works. It just doesn’t feel like software built for how I work today.
Evolution — fine, but heavy. Felt like installing a small office suite just to read email.
Geary — genuinely nice. Also unmistakably unfinished, with a roadmap that moved at the pace of volunteer weekends.
BlueMail — promising on paper. Then I tried to install it on Linux and discovered a maze of workarounds just to get the thing running. Got through that, tried it on my iPhone, and the experience was so bad it made the Linux version seem polished by comparison. A bomb on both platforms.
Mailspring — honestly, I don’t even remember why I ruled it out. I just did. Maybe that says enough.
After running through the whole list, I convinced myself to go deeper. Power user mode. The real Linux email setup.
Lieer + Notmuch + Astroid.
Here’s the thing about Lieer: it syncs your Gmail to local storage. Clean idea. One problem — it has no progressive sync. It’s all or nothing. Sync everything, or sync nothing.
I have a lot of email.
So it would start syncing. And sync. And sync. And then something would break. I’d restart it. It would start syncing again. More breaking. This went on for longer than I care to admit.
Notmuch was actually fine. Indexed everything, searched fast, no complaints. Notmuch gets a pass.
Astroid was where I finally broke.
The pitch was irresistible: open source email UI, fully customizable, do whatever you want with it. Exactly what I’d been looking for.
Then I actually tried to customize it.
Turns out “open source = customizable” means “you can customize it if you’re willing to fork it, understand its codebase, rewrite the parts you don’t like, and maintain that fork indefinitely.” I wanted to change how the reading pane worked. I was looking at a multi-week detour into someone else’s C++ before I could do that.
That’s when the thought crept in:
If I’m going to put in that much work anyway… why am I building on someone else’s foundation?
That’s how Spondr started. Not with a grand vision. With a very frustrated afternoon and a question I couldn’t talk myself out of.
I’m not a professional developer. I have an engineering background, I’ve shipped software before, and I know enough to be dangerous. But mostly I have the problem in front of me every day — and that turns out to be a powerful motivator. When you hit a roadblock, you don’t quit, because the problem that started this whole thing is still sitting in your taskbar, still broken, still waiting. You learn what you need to learn and you keep going.
Whether this was the smartest decision I’ve ever made or the most delusional — I’m genuinely still finding out.
This is post one.