Geary With Gmail, (Mostly) Without GNOME

Geary is a lightweight email client for GNOME, but it can run on other desktop environments. Most modern desktops, as long as you have some app for contacts and some keystore (KWallet seems to work as well as gnome-keyring), will handle most of the issues in the Geary FAQ. I’m running Geary and GNOME Contacts quite happily on LXQt.

Some email providers require OAuth login, and Geary uses GNOME Online Accounts for that. You can install gnome-online-accounts without a full GNOME desktop (at least on some distributions – I’ve used it with Alpine Linux and Arch. And it works fine in the background…but you can’t configure it without a full GNOME environment. Even if you install the Gnome Control Center by itself, it refuses to run under other desktops!

So the roundabout solution:

Install and start GNOME.
Configure Gmail (and any other accounts you want to connect for GNOME Apps – like Nextcloud for syncing contacts and/or calendar, or an Exchange server, etc.[1]) using Gnome Settings->Online Accounts.[2]
Switch back to your preferred desktop.
(Optional): Uninstall GNOME except for gnome-online-accounts. (But see update below.)

I’ve got this running perfectly on two desktops. The only GNOME packages I have on them are geary, gnome-contacts, and gnome-online-accounts, plus one uses gnome-keyring and the other uses KWallet.

Update (June 6): If the Gmail, Microsoft, etc. sessions expire, you may not see an error message in Geary. It just silently fails[3]. And you’ll need to re-install GNOME in order to see the errors in Gnome Settings and re-authorize them.

[3] This is made worse by the fact that Geary doesn’t offer manual sync on the grounds that you shouldn’t need it if everything works, and doesn’t show any indication of when it last synced an account successfully. Very much of the “You won’t want to open the windows with Breathe-O-Smart!” style of design, and has a similar failure mode:

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
– Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

This has long been one of my peeves with macOS and (to a lesser extent) Windows, and I really hate when it creeps into Linux too.

Though at least quoting Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy makes it appropriate that I’m adding the word “Mostly” to the headline!