Re: Mulberry - the future?

Sigh.

Go away for a couple of days, come back and see a lot of
mulberry messages and cheer up, read them and get depressed
again.

For background, I'm rumored to know something about email
although that claim in contentious in some quarters.  That
probably qualifies me for the "techie" ranks.  Unfortunately, I
haven't written production code in, well, just about as long as
their has been a web, so I'm pretty useless for anything but
design, QA, and whining, none of which Mulberry needs right now
(more's the pity about at least the second).  

I've been using Mulberry since Simeon disappeared (from memory,
circa 2000).  I'm dependent on several of the features others
have mentioned, especially including multiple accounts with
multiple folders per account.  In addition, I like the UI
because I'm used to it and it doesn't get in the way.  I
consider, e.g., that Mulberry's unwillingness to automatically
follow links in HTML messages as an important security feature.
But I'm also very dependent on IMAP disconnected (not just
online or offline) mode, which Mulberry doesn't implement very
well, but does support.  I use subaddresses a lot, for which
Mulberry's support is adequate but not wonderful.    Those
things and others support a comment made by a colleague some
years ago that all IMAP clients suck, but Mulberry sucks a lot
less than the others.

I'll probably stick with it as long as possible, but the writing
is on the wall.  I don't know whether the absence of support for
recent IMAP extensions, some unfriendliness to the Win7 / 8
environment, no prospect of support for messages that use
non-ASCII addresses or headers, support difficulties with things
like PGP and newer X.509 certificate extensions, or something
else will get to me first but what all of them have in common is
that Mulberry was fine when development stopped but the world is
passing it by.

Prompted by others on this list, I've looked at CLAWS MAIL and
Postbox and, at least judging from their documentation, don't
find them interesting.    For example, unless it is well hidden,
neither supports disconnected mode.  And they seem to be about
clever UI features and images that I've found mostly slow me and
the software down.  

If Mulberry dies of old age, it really isn't clear to me where
those of us who handle a lot of mail on multiple client machines
will go.  That is, for me, pretty scary as well as depressing.

   john

p.s. (spontaneous uncompensated pitch): For those of you who are
looking for a calendar and/or contacts tool that keeps the
information under your control rather than "in the cloud" with
access rules that don't match your needs, and who are running
Windows and/or Android systems, look at Pimlical
(http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/).  It is written in Java, so
those who prefer other platforms need to convince the author
that there is sufficient demand for it to justify the conversion
and support costs. And the people who miss the Palm (or, like
me, are still using one) will recognize Pimlical as an offspring
of DateBk5.