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The Internet The Almighty Buck IT

Mulberry Creators File for Bankruptcy 135

Posted by CowboyNeal from the calling-it-quits dept.
kRemit writes "Isamet/Cyrusoft International, the producer of the much-beloved email app Mulberry, has announced on its website that it has filed for liquidation under Title 11, Chapter 7. On a sidenote, Mulberry-mastermind Cyrus Daboo doesn't think it will be possible to release the source, because of third party implications and the overall complexity of the program. Also, there's already plenty of open source mail apps around. Goodbye, it was great while it lasted."
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Mulberry Creators File for Bankruptcy More

Mulberry Creators File for Bankruptcy

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  • Huh? (Score:1, Troll)

    by BHearsum ( 325814 )
    Never heard of it.
    • I think it's a Macintosh thing.
      • It's available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. I only know this because my university, Ohio U, makes it available freely to Fac/Staff/Students. I tried it for a while, but was not too impressed with it. I thought it was slow even compared to KMail. I thought it felt a lot like Eudora did back in '96.

  • Best IMAP client (Score:5, Informative)

    by akac ( 571059 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @10:55AM (#13693487) Homepage
    I used to use Mulberry as it was frankly the fastest and best IMAP client ever. Even today Thunderbird, Apple's Mail, and anything else just doesn't compete. Not even close.

    Mulberry's biggest failing was its user interface which was too hardcore and too unweildly. I think they greatly improved this in the end, but by then it was too late.

    I used Mulberry for many years. Sadly the last time was also several years ago.
    • What good is a fast IMAP client if it has usability issues? I did use it from time to time, but I certainly didn't *enjoy* using it when I did.

    • I first tried it 5 months ago (Score:5, Funny)

      by subtropolis ( 748348 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @11:09AM (#13693541)
      I'd heard very good things about it for a while and decided to check it out. It crashed hard on Fedora. And the interface was... well, pretty sad. But by most accounts, it was, indeed, a very good IMAP client. Except the interface. And the crashing.

      • Sliced Bread (Score:4, Funny)

        by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @12:19PM (#13693836) Homepage
        There is this absolutely fantastic car I know of... Well, except for the doors that open backwards, the solid orange windshield glass, the foot pedals located in the trunk and the fact that the steering wheel is square. Other than that, it's the swiftest car since, well, sliced bread!
    • Its not mentioned in the (oldish) O'reilly Imap book, by the Mullets (not a joke, but the two authors names)

      I'm not quite sure how an 'email client' competes against the big hitters of exchange, and notes, and groupthingy in the corporate world.

      So Ive never heard of it, and we do use IMAP servers to store email. very 'under the radar'.

    • alternatives (Score:5, Interesting)

      by l2718 ( 514756 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @11:20AM (#13693584)

      I mean, there exist many fast IMAP clients. Certainly Pine [washington.edu] is fast, some (e.g. myself) find it very convenient, and it should be easy to recompile for OS X. It is not free software though.

      More seriously, today's software market is such that selling a small app for money is not likely to be profitable. Too many people will write email clients, editors, OS kernels ... and give them away at no cost ("free as in beer"). Most of that software is actually Free Software (TM), but that's beside the point here. This is not dissimilar from the period in the 80s and early 90s when anytime someone would start selling a nice utility Microsoft would bundle similar functionality into DOS or Windows (anyone remember SideKick?). Today that means taht if your piece of software does something not too complicated, and many people would like to have this functionality, then someone will develop a free alternative. When it comes to web-browsing or e-mail reading, you have to content with massive efforts like the , which is even worse. [mozilla.org]

      This is not to say there's room for commercial software today -- but it's in a different market. Since the cost of distributing software is now about zero, and the cost of writing it is effectively small (in the sense that many projects find many people are willing to donate their effots), to charge for software it must embody something more -- some kind of expensive research or expertise that is difficult to duplicate in a community project.

      For example, GCC [gnu.org] is a great cross-platform compiler, but if you need a good optimizing compiler you will pay for the real thing: 's ICC, or Sun's [intel.com]compilers [sun.com]. In a different field, there is little competition for AutoCAD [autodesk.com].

      • More seriously, today's software market is such that selling a small app for money is not likely to be profitable.

        You're correct, but off-target. Mulberry was anything but small. That was its biggest problem: you could go crazy figure out all the different things it did.

        A smaller app would have been much more popular. Most people just want to send and receive email, and aren't interested in all the bells and whistles. But, as you point out, such an app probably wouldn't have been profitable.

      • Actually... contrary to what you might believe, GCC *is* a good optimising compiler. Sure, it doesn't pull all the tricks that ICC does, for example, but then, it has dozens of different frontends (i.e., support for different programming languages) and backends (i.e., support for different architectures), which is something that definitely cannot be said about ICC.

        Furthermore, while ICC *is* better at optimising for Intel (!) chips, that shouldn't really be a surprise, considering that it's written by the *
        • no it's not better at optimizing for intel chips, it purposely cripples compiled output for non-intel chips.

          that might be in AMD's suit... i haven't read all the details.

          like microsoft purposely crippling competitors software, it is a widely known phenomena, except a lot of slashdot shills make it seem like intel is not at fault.
          • I think you'll find the point was that it's better than GCC at optimising for Intel - that much has nothing to do with whether or not output for non Intel chips is purposely disabled.
      • While I agree, I'm going to add in a different point of view:

        some kind of expensive research or expertise that is difficult to duplicate in a community project.

        ...or, something else that you don't necessarily get from a community project: mainly coherent, unified design. For example, Transmit [panic.com] and Unison [panic.com]: FTP and Usenet software for Mac OS, respectively. Now, most people would ask themselves, why create utiliities that do what so many utilities have already done? Well, Panic takes those utilities, and

      • Re:alternatives (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        [re: Pine]
        > It is not free software though.

        Oh give me a fucking break
      • In a different field, there is little competition for AutoCAD

        My dad, a mechanical engineer, would probably take exception to that statement.

        Ever since I was a kid, he's hated that program. Apparently a lot of the way it works is still based on the old (e.g. Apple IIe-era) versions, which don't make sense anymore.

        His company uses SolidWorks, and I know there are a lot of other CAD packages out there.
      • ... and almost on all points.

        Microsoft in the 80/90's didn't really clone small utilities and bindle things quite like they are now. Only in it's recent versions you see things like built-in zip file support, a picture viewer (the "preview" - not paint), a fax client, a media player and all that stuff. They're getting into EVERYTHING lately, often making poor clones/copies/versions of it. They make software in just about every field: digital imaging, finances, encyclopedias, server stuff, office suites, pro
    • what market is this for? MACs?
      I've never even heard of this, and neither has enybody I asked. Perhaps they need some marketing.

    • As a technical support individual who has supported this piece of software to only 75 individuals, all I can say is: WooHoo! (homer style)

      The guys were very imaginative, bright, and wrote good code, but the human interface of this seems to be geared towards Computer Science and Engineering majors. Mulberry was one of those amazing IMAP clients that could do everything. No really, everything.

      The downside, is it is email, I don't want it to do everything, I just want it to send and receive email, perhaps

      • You should pray for Qualcomm's Eudora, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Entourage, Outlook death too.

        So you are happy that a company with dedicated customers is out of business. Let me guess, those people happy with commercially,professionally coded program which has actual support won't go and install Thunderbird, they will look for another commercial solution.

        I have seen Eudora managing 10.000 mails in a support center because of some bug at SQL database has diverted 1000 support peoples mail to single mailbox with
    • Ugh, I already posted to this story, but now your post is the first thing people see when hitting the link. And it's crap!

      Mulberry was DEFINITELY NOT THE FASTEST IMAP CLIENT except in VERY UNUSUAL CIRCUMSTANCES (such as being on the same gigabit Ethernet LAN as your mail server).

      And while "best" is obviously not something you can hash out a consensus about on Slashdot (or most other places for that matter), you should try and defend that statement if you want it taken seriously.

      Q: For example: which apps lo

  • "overall complexity of the program" ? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by KlausBreuer ( 105581 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @10:58AM (#13693501) Homepage
    So?
    Cut the third party stuff out, and drop the messy endresult into our lap.
    Let's see what we can do with it, even if it's just learning something new!

    • Re:"overall complexity of the program" ? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Maybe that's a metric fuckton of work for someone who really doesn't want to put the time into it. Don't just assume that "wanting to opensource something" means "wanting to spend lots of effort to opensource something".

    • Cut the third party stuff out, and drop the messy endresult into our lap.

      While I'm certainly no expert in banckrupty laws, I'm pretty certain that it is illegal for a company to purposefully devalue its assets during it by, for example, giving source code away. I think that is the "third party implication" mentioned. Didn't read the article, never heard of the program or company before, could be wrong.

      • Re:"overall complexity of the program" ? (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        If anyone actually wants the program's source, now is the time to start raising money or pledges to buy it. If you move quickly, you can get enough money in the pot to discourage any competeing bids from other companies.

        Also, an effort that was collecting money would likely stop the code from simply being lost forever in the chaos, as people would track it as a potential asset. The source code to Dragon Naturally Speaking was almost lost under similar circumstances, and I believe this is what happened to t
    • Besides, I seriously doubt it's more complex than, say ... Mozilla, GIMP, Open Office, or any of a thousand other sophisticated open source applications.

      My interpretation of his remarks is more along the lines of: "this is a typical 100,000+ line closed-source hack with two, maybe three comments in the whole thing, and we're not about to let anybody see the crap we were pushing on them for so long". Besides, where's his motivation for releasing it? Just out of a sense of pure, unadulterated goodness? I d
      • Have you used Mulberry? I've been using it for over five years. It is very standards based, works well, and is cross-platform, running on Linux/UNXI, MacOSX, and Win32. It also lacked the cartoony Edura style UI that even seems to have rubbed off onto Thunderbird in small ways. I would be suprised if the code base is a "closed-source hack with two, maybe three comments in the whole thing." Cyrus was very responsive to input from sane users too.

        I was very disapointed yesterday afternoon when a friend of

  • Right on the heels of... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GenKreton ( 884088 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @11:01AM (#13693510) Journal
    And this is right after the new thunderbird 1.0.7 announcement. I never personally used Mulberry myself but it warms me to see opensource thriving so well in areas where everybody needs the applications (as opposed to extremely niche apps).

  • The death of software. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    " Also, there's already plenty of open source mail apps around. Goodbye, it was great while it lasted.""

    Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the future of "software as a product". Hello to "software as a service". Oh wait! [slashdot.org]
  • I'd never heard of it until I saw this story. Their website seems to be devoid of much information now.

    A Google Image Search [google.com] shows a pretty interesting-looking client, and seems to show it running on Windows, MacOS, and what I presume to be a *nix variation of some form.
    • I wasn't very encouraged when i tried the linux client last spring. I was willing to ignore the look (ah, the things we'll accept to use linux...) but the interface was also less than intuitive. Supposedly, it's internals were top-notch and so i hoped the front-end might catch up.

      Then it crashed and i removed it.
  • I was actually advised to fetch this down today when I asked about email clients to use with ancient Macs (SE/30, System 7.5.5) that might support SMTP AUTH. So right up until the end people were being advised to look at it.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  • Much beloved? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Idaho ( 12907 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @11:06AM (#13693531)
    ..producer of the much-beloved email app Mulberry..

    Much beloved? I've never heard of it. I wonder what's so special about it? No wonder they went bankrupt if you ask me, I'd say the market for mailclients is (a) rather saturated (plus, every OS already includes at least a halfway decent free-as-in-beer client anyway), and (b) more and more people switch to webmail clients, such as gmail and the like.
    • The interface was different. (Some really hated it.) Separate windows for everything, unlike all the all-in-one clients you see today. Very useful for reviewing three-four old messages while working on the current one.

      It supported IMAP, completely.

      It had separate identities, which could be tied to folders. An identity could have different signature(s), quoting preferences, set any header. Reply to a message in a folder and the reply would automatically get the identity. (Wonderful for mailing lists.)

      P

      • I'm a data packrat and a voracious reader, and subscribe to tons of mailing lists for all the open source daemons I use. I don't know of any other mail client (including Thunderbird) that can manage this load as effectively, while allowing me to keep the mail in folders on the server so that I can view it from both home and office.

        I initially switched from Evolution to Mulberry because I wanted a system that allowed me to preserve my filtering rules when changing mail clients. The result was my use of pro

        • Re: And it lacks Mulberry's novel separation of the concepts of identity and account.

          That's one of Mulberry's unique features that's made it trivial to use dozens of mail addresses in several domains with different accounts. Is there any IMAP client (for OS X in particular) that has that sort of identity/account separation? If/when I'm forced to abandon Mulberry (e.g. buying an Intel-based Mac in a few years) I really hope by then there's an IMAP client that doesn't require creating "dummy" accounts ju
          • Thunderbird: Tools -> Account Settings... -> Manage Identities

            Yes, it does tie identities to an account, but that doesn't really mean much, since when you send mail, you can choose between all of the addresses anyway. It also is intelligent enough to figure out the from address from the message you are replying to in most cases.

        • Only Mulberry can quickly check dozens of folders for new mail without subscribing to all of them.

          What benefit is there in checking for new mail in folders that you do not subscribe to? If you need to read the new mail in those folders, surely you would be subscribed? Otherwise what is the distinction between subscribed and unsubscribed folders?

      • Got to back this up, this was a great application. I'll be sorry to see it go.

        For me (and I understand thatI'm different) it just worked - and more importantly it worked exactly how I worked. It was designed by people who knew what it meant to spend the entire day reading and writing email.

        A single UI that was the same across Windows/OS X and Linux. Oh, and no crappy three paned windows rubbish that everyone else seems to want. I have a window system, why don't I let it manage the window placement ?

        Greate I

    • Much beloved? I've never heard of it. I wonder what's so special about it?

      It had a shitload of features. I found it a few years back when I was googling for email clients with IMAP [wikipedia.org] support. This was the middle of the Open Source boom, and everybody and his uncle was working on an email client — but almost all of them only supported POP3 [wikipedia.org]. I downloaded a trial, found it much too difficult to use, and lost interest.

      In hindsight, it seems obvious the developers threw in IMAP support not because they

  • I think not (Score:2, Funny)

    by garat ( 899448 )
    "much-beloved" huh? That's some tough loving...

  • Multi-Purpose Explanation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @11:17AM (#13693570) Homepage Journal
    ... doesn't think it will be possible to release the source, because of third party implications and the overall complexity of the program...
    Which is also why nobody adopted this program. Lots of great features, but they didn't fit together in a useful way. The developers threw in every feature they could acquire or develop — but they never thought through the product as a whole.

    I've said it before [slashdot.org]: an app is more than a collection of features.

    • Which is also why nobody adopted this program. Lots of great features, but they didn't fit together in a useful way. The developers threw in every feature they could acquire or develop -- but they never thought through the product as a whole.

      And that makes it different from most Linux apps how?

      (And let's see how many clueless mods mod this as flamebait or a a troll when it isn't....)
      • Your comment is factually correct, but pretty off-topic. Mulberry bore little resmeblance to a typical Linux app. It was a commercial/closed-source, multi-platform app. There was a Linux port, but they didn't particularly focus on Linux. Or any other platform for that matter — they supported a lot of different platforms. Which certainly helped drive them into bankruptcy.
      • And that makes it different from most Linux apps how?

        And what happens with crappy linux apps? They don't get used. There's a mountain of unused crap on Freshmeat.

        And let's see how many clueless mods mod this as flamebait or a a troll when it isn't....

        Because there's no -1, Irrelevant Nitwit mod.

    • Re:Multi-Purpose Explanation (Score:5, Interesting)

      by minkie ( 814488 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @12:31PM (#13693876)

      I was an early adopter of Mulberry, first on Mac, later on Linux. I really am sad to hear that the Cyrusoft folks couldn't make a go of it. Over the years, I got to know Cyrus and some of other people there; they were all nice folks, and the company was a pleasure to work with. That being said, this news really isn't that surprising, for two reasons.

      One is that while each new release brought more features, it also brought more complexity. It got to the point where I was never quite sure I understood how to configure it any more (to be fair, the same is true of most mail clients these days, including Pine).

      To a certain extent, some of the complexity was difficult to get away from, because IMAP itself is very complex. IMHO, one of the worse design decisions in IMAP was to not standardize how mailboxes are named. This means different servers export different sets of names, and this non-uniformity is visible to the user. It's especially annoying when you're using one client to connect to multiple servers. One of Mulberry's failings was to expose all of the underlying complexity to the user.

      The second reason is that it's really hard to sell something into a market dominated by free software. They got squeezed in both directions. On the one hand, they had to compete with the Outlook jaugernaut, but people who rejected Outlook also had plenty of other choices for free.

  • Open sourcing it (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @11:24AM (#13693595)
    I understand the third party implications with open sourcing it, but complexity? They've got to be kidding. There's office suites, entire operating systems, databases, and tons of other stuff that's probably way more complicated then their mail client. I think it's probably just that their code is so bad, that it's shameful for them to release it to the public.
    • "I think it's probably just that their code is so bad, that it's shameful for them to release it to the public."

      Ha! Have you look at the source of many open sourced projects lately? (Actually I get your point, but sometimes I think the difference between open and closed source programmers is that the former has enough confidence to allow someone else to look at their crappy code, not that one type of code is inherently worse than the other. In my experience, depending on the maintainer's outlook (particu
      • I suppose some other company might buy it just to scrap it for parts, or to simply kill off the competition. Although a relatively unknown email client - I don't see MS getting too worried about that hurting their Outlook sales.

        I'm not sure what would happen if the code is never sold? Maybe it remains in some kind of limbo and nobody can legally touch it?
    • Now they've declared Chapter 7, if the liquidators can get even $10 for the codebase, they're going to sell it to pay off the creditors. Companies in Chapter 7 bankruptcy aren't in a position to give away their spare staples, let alone the codebase that constituted their only actual product,
  • It was a pretty nice IMAP client. I did find problems using the Solaris version where the windows all turned into empty grey boxes which never got resolved.

    Every release seemed to bring bugfixes, a bunch of new features and a load of new bugs. It seemed like they never released a feature complete, stable and bug free version.

    The Unix/Linux clients were built with a custom toolkit which looked out of place on every desktop. You couldn't even change the default grey colour of the UI to match whatever theme yo
  • Anyone got any suggestions for webmail replacments for silkymail?

    The webclient, silkymail, was also by cyrusoft.
    Looks like it was based on IMP.
    well, guess some admin is going to have to download the dependencies and build it themselves, rather than a single package.
  • Since their FTP server seems to be /.ed, here's a mirror of what I managed to pull down so far [lassitu.de].
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I've used Mulberry for years - it's one of the few clients that I can use in a sensible way to handle hundreds of emails per day.
    What I'll miss is the multi-pane mode.
    Every mail client (including Mulberry in later versions) supports the 3-pane mode where the list of folders is to the left, the list of messages is on the top and the message you're previewing/reading is on the bottom.
    But with Mulberry, I can have a window with my folders on the left side of my screen, open up 4 folders at the same time, open

    • Indeed, that sort of functionality is why I use graphical clients at all. If I didn't mind seeing only one message or one folder at a time, I'd still be using pine (and trn for news, for that matter).

      However, you're mistaken if you think major clients can't handle that. You can disable the message pane in OS X Mail, Outlook, or Thunderbird so that all messages open in new windows (even without doing so, you can double click on any message to open it in a new window); in at least Thunderbird, you can doub

    • Two features that are important to me and that I've not found elsewhere are the ability to rapidly check 100 folders for new mail (I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists, delivered by procmail to individual folders), and the inheritance of properties for folders, accounts, and identities.

      Individually subscribing to hundreds of folders is the only way to monitor them in most IMAP clients, and then I have to remember to do so with each new folder I create. With Mulberry, I can use the subscribed flag to indic

      • And Mulberry's ability to differentiate "recent" and "new" messages in mailboxes can be useful for monitoring.

        Any mail app developers lurking here? If we create you a laundry list of Mulberry's unique, "must-have" features would you consider integrating them into your app? :-)

    • But with Mulberry, I can have a window with my folders on the left side of my screen, open up 4 folders at the same time, open up 7 different messages and cut/paste between them, start replying to one and go back and look through archives to find the point I wanted to make.... all in DIFFERENT windows.

      What other client can offer me that (and disconnected IMAP, too)?

      Apple Mail on OS X. Has the 3-pane interface too.

    • I think Eudora would fit your needs. Its Cocoa version is coming soon and you would like its amazing set of settings.

      http://www.eudora.com/ [eudora.com]

      It never failed here. It runs SDI way opposed to MDI while you can use it "tab like" by enabling drawers.

      ps: Advertising supported but not spyware if you don't buy it.
  • I for one am quite sad that this has happened. I have been a paying user of Mulberry for the past 4-5 years. It really was technically a great email client. The UI could have used some more work, but no other client could handle huge mailboxes anywhere close to as well as Mulberry could. I *really* hope they find a way to release the source for this product. I think with some UI reworking, it could be something truly great. Not to mention this is one of the only clients I've used that supports IMSP/AC
  • So no one else thinks that Mulberry is absolutely awful - slow, unwieldy, and obtuse? My university has been using Mulberry for years, and it's almost universally hated by students.
    • Mulberry is definitely not slow. Obtuse I would buy. Unwieldy, I suppose if you don't like reading documentation.

      Because of the way it is structured I would think that it is a poor choice for something like general use in a university environment.

    • I agree, Mulberry is a piece of shit. Campus here tried to shove it down everone's throats, nobody liked it at all. The IT dept finally decided to sack it this year.
    • i really really wanted to like mulberry, and tried several versions extensively over the years, but so hated the illogical interface, the buckshot approach to features, the crashing, the inability to cache correctly, and the companies propensity to add major new features (calendar, etc) rather than properly working out the bugs and logic burps in the old ones, made me finally switch to thunderbird for IMAP. not great but again, not bad at all...

      anyway, rest in peace folks

  • I'll speak up here in defense of Mulberry. I've been using it since '99, and for all its flaws I still love it. The organization I work for has it deployed for about 500 users.

    It's a bit of a two headed beast. On one hand it's an incredibly feature rich and customizable client, built using IMAP from the ground up. It supports POP3 and local mailboxes, but both are add ons to the IMAP core. It doesn't have the greatest GUI in the world, but it's simple, fast and powerful. The GUI is very close on Win/Ma

  • I have been an amazingly happy customer of Cyrusoft/Isamet for over 5 years (having paid for two upgrades). All of my friends know this as whenever the subject of email clients comes up, I priase Mulberry. I do not believe that there is ANY email client that can compare with it. Because of Mulberry I now have a requirements list for email clients that no other client can complete.

    • Handle connecting to multiple imap and pop accounts.
    • Be able to send messages from multiple ident
    • I have also paid for 2 upgrade of Mulberry. I tend to use Thunderbird more often now though. There are things I don't like about it, such as the lack of IMSP/ACAP support, lack of support for creating SIEVE rules, and how it downloads every header in the mailbox. However, it isn't bad. And, like you, my main requirement is support for multiple identities. Thunderbird seems to handle this perfectly fine. It didn't used to, though. Give it a shot if you haven't looked in a while.
  • This is the downside they don't talk about very often when comparing the risks of using closed source to open source. And they don't even consider all the patent violations that may be occuring in closed source (which I think will come to light within the next 2-3 years when some lawyer finds the right language to make closed source reveal source code).

  • IMAP is... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @01:48PM (#13694217) Homepage Journal
    It's good that we have a standard protocol that all mail clients can use to access all mail servers. It's good that the protocol is open and unencumbered. It's a shame, though, that the protocol we standardized on was IMAP.

    IMAP is an ugly, convoluted mess. And as I tend to rant about often [citadel.org], overly complex protocols encourage buggy implementations. "Keep it simple, stupid." If something like POP4 [pop4.org] had become the standard, there would be a better selection of quality, non-troublesome email clients out there.

    Although, with an increasing number of richly [gmail.com] functional [citadel.org] webmail [roundcube.net] systems out there now, perhaps the email fat client will become less relevant anyway. Of course, email clients will never go away entirely: you still need text-based access (pine and elm), and non-interactive clients such as Fetchmail...

    Oh hell, I'll just come out and say it... anything is better than Outlook. :)
    • Webmail will go away too, if anything ever happens that causes the public to start valuing encryption and signing. Webmail is a technological step backward from mail clients, because the software that the user is running, doesn't really understand what it's doing.
    • Your criticim of IMAP would be more compelling with specific examples, as opposed to broad strokes like "it's too complex."

      Not that I disagree with you, I would just like to see specific examples of where IMAP went wrong. Then readers could judge for themselves whether they agree with your conclusion that IMAP is a bad protocol.
  • I know a bit about this. In former times I went on an annual IMAP pilgrimage, looking for a client that didn't suck the proverbial donkey balls, for Mac (and Linux, though that was hopeless in those days).

    Mulberry was hella not it, although I tried out every new version as part of my quest.

    Somebody said it was fast--that's true, if you happened to be connected directly to your mail server on a local gigabit ethernet link. Otherwise, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Mail.app, and Eudora were all faster (in thei
  • I tried out the demo for this program in 2002, when I was evaluating email clients for Linux, to replace SeriousVoodoo (the program I had been using on my Amiga).

    Mulberry looked reasonably capable (it supported my requirements: PGP/MIME, IMAP over SSL), but the UI had a strange look and feel to it. It didn't really suck, but it just felt .. oddly foreign, sorta like a Java or WINE program. I don't have any intellectual reason for saying that's a bad thing, but nevertheless, it rubbed me the wrong way.

  • First off, count me as one that hasn't heard much about this client (I knew it existed, but never actually tested it or reccomended it)...and I'm an e-mail server admin...

    Now, as to what will actually happen to the source code...

    It's pretty obvious that the source code to this app is probably their biggest asset...there are obviously still folks that use the app and I would say that the real reason they won't open source the app is that they really think that someone will eventually purchase it...who, I don
  • what sad news.

    Mulberry was and perhaps still is the best IMAP client out there. The only one left where you can have a seperate window for all your folders with email list/content and a seprate window for your folder tree.

    Downside always was and is the horrible interface.

    I would love to see this one in Thunderbird. Very sad that the source can't be released. Really really very sad.

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