Last Tango Round the Mulberry Bush

On Aug 21, 2006, at 12:46 PM, Kevin van Haaren wrote:

> --On August 20, 2006 3:50:12 PM -0700 Matt Neuburg <ExtraBITStidbits.com> wrote:
>
>> Mulberry is available for Mac OS X (10.3 or later), Windows, and Linux.
>> It is a 12 MB download. Development has officially ceased, so I would not
>> expect Mulberry ever to become a universal binary. But you never know...
>
> Yay! I'm a big mulberry fan because it does IMAP so well. One thing doesn't
> make sense though. Matt says development has officially ceased, but the web
> page has a section for filing bugs and feature requests.
>
> <http://w3.mulberrymail.com/codetrack/codetrack.php?page=login>
>
> why would you have that if development has ceased?

The About page <http://www.mulberrymail.com/about.shtml> provides a
definite maybe regarding future development:

"...though its future is still cloudy in terms of whether development
will advance or not...".

On Aug 21, 2006, at 3:46 PM, Kevin van Haaren wrote:
> Yay! I'm a big mulberry fan because it does IMAP so well. One thing doesn't
> make sense though. Matt says development has officially ceased, but the web
> page has a section for filing bugs and feature requests.
>
> <http://w3.mulberrymail.com/codetrack/codetrack.php?page=login>
>
> why would you have that if development has ceased?

On their website under News they have the following message:

> Welcome Back Mulberry!
> (20-Aug-2006)
> Mulberry is back under new ownership and is now available for FREE!
> Please note that there is no official support for Mulberry now -
> community support via mailing lists and other such resources will
> be used instead.
<http://www.mulberrymail.com/index.shtml>

Apparently they allow you to file bugs so they can be addressed by
the user community.

Geoff

On Tuesday, August 22, 2006, Geoffrey Odhner wrote:

> On their website under News they have the following message:
>
> > Welcome Back Mulberry!
> > (20-Aug-2006)
> > Mulberry is back under new ownership and is now available for FREE!
> > Please note that there is no official support for Mulberry now -
> > community support via mailing lists and other such resources will
> > be used instead.
> <http://www.mulberrymail.com/index.shtml>
>
> Apparently they allow you to file bugs so they can be addressed by
> the user community.

This is WONDERFUL news. I use a POP client for reading and composing my
mail, but I'm so obsessive about my email that I keep everything on the
server as well and archive/manage the mail on the server via an IMAP
client. Apple's Mail program simply could not handle the volume of mail
I deal with, but Mulberry never broke a sweat transferring thousands of
messages at a time from one mailbox to another.

Glad to hear it is still around and hope it will move forward.

--
Christian Smith

--On August 22, 2006 8:14:31 AM -0700 Geoffrey Odhner <GeoffreyOdhner.net>
wrote:

>> Mulberry is back under new ownership and is now available for FREE!
>> Please note that there is no official support for Mulberry now -
>> community support via mailing lists and other such resources will
>> be used instead.
> <http://www.mulberrymail.com/index.shtml>
>
> Apparently they allow you to file bugs so they can be addressed by
> the user community.

There is a difference between support and development. Support is helping
users with the current product, development is producing the next versions.
Bug reports are useful in support so you know when not to beat your head
against the wall.

I fully expect free products to have community support but (except in open
source projects) the user community can't help fix bugs so there really
isn't a reason to have a bug filing system if you don't expect they'll
eventually get fixed.

I think John Baxter pointed out that future development is still in
question so the bug tracker is probably "just-in-case", and of some use to
the user community.

--On August 21, 2006 2:27:45 PM -0600 Google Kreme <gkremegmail.com> wrote:

> On 21 Aug 2006, at 13:46 , Kevin van Haaren wrote:
> Maybe no one took the reporting pages off the website.

It's a brand new website. The old url was a cyrusoft one or a isamet one.

On Aug 26, 2006, at 3:44 PM, Kevin van Haaren wrote:
> --On August 22, 2006 8:14:31 AM -0700 Geoffrey Odhner
> <GeoffreyOdhner.net>
> wrote:
>
>>> Mulberry is back under new ownership and is now available for FREE!
>>> Please note that there is no official support for Mulberry now -
>>> community support via mailing lists and other such resources will
>>> be used instead.
>> <http://www.mulberrymail.com/index.shtml>
>>
>> Apparently they allow you to file bugs so they can be addressed by
>> the user community.
>
> There is a difference between support and development. Support is
> helping
> users with the current product, development is producing the next
> versions.
> Bug reports are useful in support so you know when not to beat your
> head
> against the wall.
>
> I fully expect free products to have community support but (except
> in open
> source projects) the user community can't help fix bugs so there
> really
> isn't a reason to have a bug filing system if you don't expect they'll
> eventually get fixed.
>
> I think John Baxter pointed out that future development is still in
> question so the bug tracker is probably "just-in-case", and of some
> use to
> the user community.

Yes, it could very well be that the notice on the website is a false
promise of allowing for "community support". When they say such
resources "will be used instead" of official support, that seems to
me to imply that they will somehow make this possible, perhaps by
making the project open source, but who knows? I'm certainly not
vouching for their intentions, I'm just quoting their notice and
saying what inference I draw. But maybe they just want people to
report bugs to waste their time -- I really don't know.

Geoff