Re: Is anybody working on Mulberry now?

Paul Schmehl:

> I have a log file of errors generated by Mulberry when trying to connect to,
> retrieve from and move emails from my ISP. They use IncrediMail, which has
> to be the worst IMAP server on the planet. It literally crashes Mulberry
> when you get over 25 emails in your inbox.
>
> I'm in the process of moving over to gmail, because my ISP email is
> virtually unusable. I've been using Mulberry for years now, and no IMAP
> server I've ever used has been so indescribably horrible.

Wow. There's a worse IMAP server than Gmail? Something that you'd use Gmail as 
an IMAP server in preference to? Or do you mean just going the whole hog to 
web mail rather than using a dedicated email client? The reason I ask is that 
Gmail's IMAP conformance is legendarily bad. I've actually given up using 
Mulberry for my work email, because all my work accounts (at my employer and I 
have customer-hosted accounts too) are all hosted on Gmail.

That said, I guess Gmail doesn't crash Mulberry (often, it can depend on the 
attachments). But even without crashing, there are things I routinely do as 
part of my personal email workflow that are completely broken by Gmail's IMAP 
implementation (e.g. what appears to me to be Gmail's non-deterministic 
assignment of UIDs in bulk copy / move operations).

If you want to your IMAP email hosted externally, I'd recommend a paid service 
with a reputation for IMAP. I also am a happy FastMail customer for many years 
now. They do suffer increasingly from DDOS attacks (what service provider 
doesn't?), but I've never had any severe outages.

If you want free and externally hosted IMAP, there may still be some niche 
providers out there.

If you just want to migrate to web mail, sure go to Gmail.

Whatever you do, getting off your ISP's email service is probably a smart 
move. It saves hassle if you ever change ISPs.

I'd love to be one of the few still working on Mulberry, but unfortunately I 
have to little time after work and my other existing side-projects. And 
Mulberry is a non-trivial thing to tackle. And I don't particularly like any 
of the cross-platform GUI options that would be needed to modernise Mulberry.


Kenneth Porter:

> Things I need for my work flow include multiple identities and multiple
> servers.

Yes, that's the killer Mulberry feature that I have never seen any other 
client do at all well.


Kenneth Porter (later message, discussing Trojitá):

> On 12/18/2017 11:56 AM, Gleason wrote:
> > It is getting harder to find anything new.  I see this one is imap only.
>
> I only use IMAP, so that's not a problem for me. I was looking through the
> changelog and found it handles multiple accounts by running multiple
> instances. Which would be awkward if you move mail between accounts a lot.
> Not something I normally do.

Moving between multiple accounts is core to the way I use email. So Trojitá 
is out for me, even if it did run on macOS. Also, it's unclear whether it 
attempts to sync the world on initial connection to a new IMAP server, like a 
lot of clients want to do. At least it claims to be fast about it if it does.

The thing with building / maintaining an email client these days is that email 
is increasingly becoming a niche technology. Still a very big niche, but lots 
of the stuff I used to do via email has (sadly) been replaced by other 
technologies. So it's a big ask to work on an email client these days.