Ecliptic Mail moves from reading to writing.

A day of progress on writing and sending mail, keeping drafts, and making the everyday desktop a little more predictable.

October 16 was mostly about making Ecliptic Mail useful for the work that follows reading a message: replying, starting a conversation, saving a draft and sending it when it is ready. There were smaller improvements to software updates and the app grid, too.

Writing, with room to change your mind

Ecliptic Mail gained a plain-text writing window for new messages, Reply, Reply all and Forward. It supports attachments, signatures for each account, address suggestions from earlier correspondence, and opening an email address link with its fields filled in.

Drafts are saved on the computer as you write and copied to the account’s Drafts folder. You can close a message and carry on later. Sending it clears the draft instead of leaving an extra copy behind, and the sidebar shows how many drafts are waiting.

Send now goes through an outbox with a short Undo window—ten seconds by default. Undo brings the message back for editing before it leaves. If the server cannot be reached, the message waits and tries again. If the server refuses it, the outbox keeps it with a reason and a way to edit or retry.

Mail that keeps up with the desktop

Folders can be watched for new mail alongside the Inbox, which helps when server rules file incoming messages elsewhere. Unread counts update during a long first sync, and the dock’s count is restored when the dock starts after the mail service.

Accounts can be folded in the sidebar. A folder’s right-click menu can mark its messages as read, with Undo for that change. Picture attachments were also corrected to show the whole image in the right orientation.

The mail window can reopen itself after an update, returning to the same workspace and conversation without taking focus from another app. Closing the window received a crash fix as well.

Account testing and everyday checks

Google sign-in was connected and exercised with a real Gmail account in development. Label handling was checked so one message does not become a separate copy for every label. Real sending was tried with Outlook, and hands-on use of the writing window led to fixes for Gmail sending and reopening drafts.

Automated tests covered replies and attachments, draft saving and cleanup, Undo Send, waiting for a server to return, and handling a refused message. Safeguards were also added to keep automated tests from writing real mail settings. These are development checks, with more everyday use still needed.

Smaller improvements outside Mail

Ecliptic Software’s Install all flow was changed to reuse one password authorization across a batch instead of asking again for each app and the system update. Each pending system update also gained its own Install action, with its needed package updates checked before confirmation. Both paths were exercised in a virtual machine.

The app grid’s New badge now follows when an app was first seen and whether it has been used. Updating an app no longer makes it look newly installed, and opening it from the dock, a shortcut or a terminal can clear the badge too.

What remains

Ecliptic Mail is still being built and tested. It is not yet the default mail app included with a fresh Ecliptic installation. Gmail testing still uses a development registration, and signatures and address suggestions need more hands-on checks. This update records progress through October 16, rather than announcing a finished mail client or a public OS release.