Mulberry gone, now what?

As you may have seen from http://www.mulberrymail.com/ ISAMET has gone
bankrupt. So now what is left to be a decent Win32 IMAP GUI client?

--
#include <std/disclaimer.h> /* Yiorgos Adamopoulos */

Yiorgos Adamopoulos <adamo@central.tee.gr> writes:

> As you may have seen from http://www.mulberrymail.com/ ISAMET has
> gone bankrupt. So now what is left to be a decent Win32 IMAP GUI
> client?

Thunderbird?

--
David Magda <dmagda at ee.ryerson.ca>
Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under
the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well
under the new. -- Niccolo Machiavelli, _The Prince_, Chapter VI

On 1 Oct 2005, Yiorgos Adamopoulos wrote:
> As you may have seen from http://www.mulberrymail.com/ ISAMET has gone
> bankrupt. So now what is left to be a decent Win32 IMAP GUI client?

For myself, personally, I'm going to continue to use these IMAP
clients:

Mulberry
Pine
Horde/IMP

There's no reason to stop using Mulberry at this point. By the
time Mulberry is truly dead, I bet there will be a good *fast*
powerful browser-based IMAP client. It seems like everyone and
his dog is working on such a thing right now.

Desktop messaging clients are dead!
Nancy

--
Nancy McGough ~ <http://www.ii.com> ~ <http://deflexion.com>
IMAP, pine, procmail, data deflexion, infinity, and more
> > > Please keep the discussion in the group < < <

On 3 Oct 2005, NM Public wrote:
> For myself, personally, I'm going to continue to use these IMAP clients:
>
> Mulberry
> Pine
> Horde/IMP
>
> There's no reason to stop using Mulberry at this point. By the time Mulberry
> is truly dead, I bet there will be a good *fast* powerful browser-based IMAP
> client. It seems like everyone and his dog is working on such a thing right
> now.
>
> Desktop messaging clients are dead!

Here are a couple more of my thoughts about IMAP clients that I
forgot to mention.

* Since you explicitly mentioned Win32, you might want to try
PC-Pine. It's not very GUI, but it supports some GUI things like
being able to right click on a message to change its status. It
supports a lot of things that no other IMAP client supports, for
example you can use 30+ IMAP keywords to help you organize your
messages. (The number of keywords depends on the IMAP server,
e.g., I think Cyrus IMAP can support 128 (or 256?) keywords.)

* The current Opera (8) has pretty flaky IMAP support, but they
are completely rewriting the IMAP part of their
mail/nntp/rss/atom/irc/messaging client. I (and many others) are
hoping that the upcoming Opera 9 will be a decent IMAP client. As
of Sept 20, Opera is ad-free and registration-free.

I'm curious what other people think about current and future IMAP
clients.

Thanks,
Nancy

--
Nancy McGough ~ <http://www.ii.com> ~ <http://deflexion.com>
IMAP, pine, procmail, data deflexion, infinity, and more
> > > Please keep the discussion in the group < < <

On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, NM Public wrote:
> On 3 Oct 2005, NM Public wrote:
>> For myself, personally, I'm going to continue to use these IMAP clients:
>>
>> Mulberry
>> Pine
>> Horde/IMP
>>
>> There's no reason to stop using Mulberry at this point. By the time
>> Mulberry is truly dead, I bet there will be a good *fast* powerful
>> browser-based IMAP client. It seems like everyone and his dog is working on
>> such a thing right now.

I use Solaris at work and was rather dissapointed with the way Mulberry
would lock up when left running for a while. I always hoped these problems
would get fixed and was keeping my eyes open for a non-beta release of
version 4 for Unix/Linux but I guess now that will never happen. There is
no GUI IMAP client out there which has the same geek appeal that Mulberry
had.

>> Desktop messaging clients are dead!

I do tend to use the FastMail web interface quite a bit for my home email
accounts.

If the last, stable Unix/Linux release had been a really solid GTK2 based
app that blended in with the GNOME desktop I may have continued using
Mulberry for a while. As it stands I think it is time to move on.

> * The current Opera (8) has pretty flaky IMAP support, but they are
> completely rewriting the IMAP part of their mail/nntp/rss/atom/irc/messaging
> client. I (and many others) are hoping that the upcoming Opera 9 will be a
> decent IMAP client. As of Sept 20, Opera is ad-free and registration-free.

My experience with Mulberry shows the perils of adopting closed-source
programs. Given that Opera has ceased charging for their product it seems
more likely than ever that they might disappear at any time. I have tried
their current client and thought it was truly awful.

At the moment I using mostly Pine supplemented by webmail and Evolution.

I would like a GTK2 based program that implements the best elements of
Mulberry in a rock-solid fashion. As I am too lazy to code this I
shouldn't be too upset that no-one else wants to either ;-)

--
Stephen Chadfield
http://www.chadfield.com/

On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Stephen Chadfield wrote:
> My experience with Mulberry shows the perils of adopting closed-source
> programs.

I have a mixed-view of that issue. I have a decades-long preference for
open source, from long before the time that Richard Stallman started the
GNU church.

On the other hand, if a closed-source program is truly compelling, I
wouldn't refuse to use it just because it is closed-source.

The big problem of the 1980s was of non-portable software, and hardware
vendors who locked you into their hardware through their software. For
all our criticism of Microsoft, the evil empire did us all a invaluable
service by breaking that lock forever. We still see the last dying
remants of hardware-locking -- most notoriously Apple -- but those vendors
are fighting a doomed battle and we won't mourn their ultimate defeat.

The problem today is that there is no "truly compelling" GUI IMAP client
today, either closed or open source. Pine is truly compelling, but it is
not GUI.

I think that this establishes that it is difficult to write a "truly
compelling" GUI IMAP client.

I'd like to think that the open source community will eventually produce
one; but the scale of development costs suggest to me that it isn't going
to happen. I also don't see much interest or motivation. Sadly, the open
source community does very little that's new; instead, it reimplements
existing software that is either not open source or insufficiently
compliant with the church's liturgy for open source.

Closed source developers have a different set of problems. Small vendors,
such as the late ISAMET, don't have much of a chance of recovering
development costs of email clients, much less making a profit. Large
vendors, such as Microsoft, can do email clients as loss-leaders but such
programs have to support other goals of the company (Outlook is is not an
IMAP client; it is an Exchange application that does IMAP too).

I don't think that academia will do it either. Academia operates on a
pendulum, and the current swing is heading in the direction of the late
1970s when academia abandoned software development like villagers fleeing
from a tsunami. There are a few holdouts (Pine is one) but in general I
fear that it will be several years before we once again will see academia
producing much software for external consumption.

I would be very happy to have this gloomy view proven wrong, but I don't
see much sign of it in the near term.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.

On 3 Oct 2005, Stephen Chadfield wrote:
>
>>> Desktop messaging clients are dead!
>
> I do tend to use the FastMail web interface quite a bit for my home email
> accounts.

I read a lot of discussion groups/blogs about messaging and the
majority of people who think about these things are moving to
browser-based messaging tools. Unfortunately, a lot of them are
moving to Gmail, which at this point is not an especially open
system.


>> * The current Opera (8) has pretty flaky IMAP support, but they are
>> completely rewriting the IMAP part of their
>> mail/nntp/rss/atom/irc/messaging client. I (and many others) are hoping
>> that the upcoming Opera 9 will be a decent IMAP client. As of Sept 20,
>> Opera is ad-free and registration-free.
>
> My experience with Mulberry shows the perils of adopting closed-source
> programs. Given that Opera has ceased charging for their product it seems
> more likely than ever that they might disappear at any time. I have tried
> their current client and thought it was truly awful.

I agree that the current Opera IMAP client is awful. The Opera
developers seem to agree with that too. It, like almost all
messaging clients other than Pine and Mulberry, was not designed
*from the beginning* with IMAP in mind.

But, there is nothing inherently perilous about a closed-source
program. As long as it uses open-standard protocols and
open-standard data formats, users aren't locked in and can easily
move to another program that uses those standards. For example,
it should not be too hard for Mulberry users to switch to another
IMAP client. I use multiple IMAP clients every day and do not
feel locked in at all to any operating system or messaging
system.

Also now, thanks to del.icio.us, I use multiple web browsers on
multiple platforms every day and my bookmarks are available
everywhere.

My goal when choosing any software -- messaging, browser, or
whatever -- is that I am not locked in. If Opera goes under, it
doesn't matter because my del.icio.us bookmarks are available
everywhere. If Mulberry or Pine or Horde/IMP go under, it doesn't
matter because my IMAP messages are available everywhere. The key
is to support the standards and the people and companies who
produce standard-based software. That is what I have been trying
to do for years at Infinit Ink, e.g., my IMAP service providers
page.

Nancy

--
Nancy McGough ~ <http://www.ii.com> ~ <http://deflexion.com>
IMAP, pine, procmail, data deflexion, infinity, and more
> > > Please keep the discussion in the group < < <

On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, NM Public wrote:
> I read a lot of discussion groups/blogs about messaging and the majority of
> people who think about these things are moving to browser-based messaging
> tools.

There is no doubt that browser-based messaging tools have a place; but I
see these as complementary to IMAP-based tools rather than as a
substitution. There's a lot good to be said about browser-based tools,
not the least being the rapid prototyping of the UI and not needing to
install software on each client.

However, I believe that there is a long term future for IMAP-based
messaging tools, especially for heavier-duty tasks. I've observed that
I'm not alone in using both browser-based and IMAP-based messaging tools;
this indicates that the two types of tools must interact and interoperate
seamlessly.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.

On 4 Oct 2005, Mark Crispin wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, NM Public wrote:
>> I read a lot of discussion groups/blogs about messaging and
>> the majority of people who think about these things are moving
>> to browser-based messaging tools.
>
> There is no doubt that browser-based messaging tools have a
> place; but I see these as complementary to IMAP-based tools
> rather than as a substitution. There's a lot good to be said
> about browser-based tools, not the least being the rapid
> prototyping of the UI and not needing to install software on
> each client.
>
> However, I believe that there is a long term future for
> IMAP-based messaging tools, especially for heavier-duty tasks.
> I've observed that I'm not alone in using both browser-based
> and IMAP-based messaging tools; this indicates that the two
> types of tools must interact and interoperate seamlessly.


Mark, from what you wrote above, it seems that your view of
messaging clients looks like this:

+---------------+ +---------------+
| | | |
| IMAP | | browser-based |
| clients | | clients |
| | | |
+---------------+ +---------------+


My view is this:


+---------------+
| |
| IMAP +--+---------------+
| clients | | |
| | | browser-based |
+------------+--+ clients |
| |
+------------------+


And all I'm saying is that many people seem to be moving to using
the browser as their platform. This *includes* heavy-duty IMAP
tools that run in a browser. I wasn't implying that IMAP has a
short-term future, although that might be the case given this
movement to the browser-as-platform. Possible replacements for
IMAP include DAV, SOAP, Atom, or something else. I don't have a
strong opinion about what are the best messaging protocols for
this browser-based future. The main thing I care about is that
there are standards and that data, including metadata, never gets
locked into any system.

Whatever happens, it is certainly interesting to be watching
right now!

Nancy

--
Nancy McGough ~ <http://www.ii.com> ~ <http://deflexion.com>
IMAP, pine, procmail, data deflexion, infinity, and more
> > > Please keep the discussion in the group < < <

NM Public wrote:

> Mark, from what you wrote above, it seems that your view of
> messaging clients looks like this:
>
> +---------------+ +---------------+
> | | | |
> | IMAP | | browser-based |
> | clients | | clients |
> | | | |
> +---------------+ +---------------+
>
>
> My view is this:
>
>
> +---------------+
> | |
> | IMAP +--+---------------+
> | clients | | |
> | | | browser-based |
> +------------+--+ clients |
> | |
> +------------------+
>
>
> And all I'm saying is that many people seem to be moving to using
> the browser as their platform.


I think, but could be wrong, that you NM and MRC are using the word
"browser" in two different ways. I think that MRC is using the word
"browser" as "doing the job through HTTP(S)", while NM may be talking
about a client which really talks IMAP as well as HTTP(S).

I'm sure that everyone here knows that the main advantages of using HTTP
for mail over using POP are things that IMAP does better. As far as I
can tell the *only* thing that gives the HTTP systems an advantage (and
it appears to be a whopping advantage) is the familiar user interface.

In the early days of IMAP, Pine and Simeon where the choices. Pine
wasn't GUI, and Simeon had stability problems. Then, probably the worst
thing to happen to IMAP, was the introduction of clients, Netscape,
Outhouse, etc which did what I can only call "POP over IMAP". The
extent to which the community "didn't get it" wrt to IMAP surprised me
at the time. Even now, I've had a friend complain to me that her
university is switching from something that does IMAP just fine (and
where she happily uses Pine) to a webmail system, that really doesn't do
IMAP.

On the whole, I think that MRC is right. Universities are no longer the
driving force for innovation in software. Commercial attempts to create
really good IMAP clients have not gone well. And most of the Open
Source stuff seems to stop at "good enough" when it comes to mail
clients. (Though unlike MRC, I don't see that as a systemic problem
with open source, but it does seem to be true in this case.)

-j