Re: Mulberry - the future?

Hi (if anyone's there...)

I've just seen Ferdinand von Prondzynski's email (Aug 13 2013) to this list, enquiring about the future of Mulberry.  Just thought I'd add my penny's worth.

Mulberry had been in use at my institution (University of Sussex, UK) for many years (using an IMSP server for preferences and address books), and rather like Marmite (other yeast-extract products are available :-) some people loved it, some hated it, and many more merely tolerated it.   We built up a strong local support resource for it, and wrote many useful FAQs for it (see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/faqbrowse?cat_id=17 while you still can).   We used it while it was commercial, licensed software, and continued to use it for years after it became free and open source.

Although it was a very complete and robust email client, Mulberry is "of its day" and no longer meets my institution's needs.  In Spring 2011 we moved to MS Exchange, and Outlook.   Some people love it, some hate it, some merely tolerate it... but Outlook and Exchange are undoubtedly providing us with a more complete email and calendaring facility, even though its support and management can be a nightmare.   Mulberry will work with Exchange IMAP, but Exchange doesn't support the IMAP extensions used by Mulberry, so the loss of some very useful features, combined with a shift of support resources, meant its days were numbered here.

We finally switched off our ageing, slow IMSP server at the end of 2013, and apart from one or two local installations of Mulberry (i.e. using locally-stored preferences etc), the client is now, sadly, more or less dead at my institution.

Congratulations and thanks to Cyrus Daboo for what was a fine piece of software, that in its day was arguably the best email application around.


-- 
Andy Clews
Client Services Group,         University of Sussex IT Services