MailForge and the Future - Continued

[simpsomatt]

Need to integrate with the OS X Address Book.

[mbierly]

Can you add this into the ticket system as a new feature request?
Thanks.

[Lonnie]

Hi Mike:

I would have added this to the support section, and still will, but that option has been unavailable for about 24 hrs now.

An issue that needs to be addressed is an apparent conflict between a program called Deskovery (see http://www.neomobili.com/products/deskovery/) and MailForge.

Deskovery has a nifty feature similar to the Windowshade from Unsanity Software; when one double clicked on the menu bar of a window that window would collapse to just the menu bar. To do this that program obviously had to be running continuously in the background.

With Deskovery running, when I would start MailForge, MailForge would almost immediately freeze requiring a Force Quit to recover.

I've never heard from IDS when I posted this information on their forums and, curiously, I have never heard from anyone at Neomobili about it either.

Thanks,
Lonnie King

[mephits]

To chime in with everyone else, I'm so glad there's a real push to see MailForge become what we'd all like it to become; the world-class, power-user email program Eudora once indisputably was. To that end, I'd like to add my own comments to the list. I purchased two licenses to MailForge (back when it was Odysseus) to support the project and to be able to use it on my home machine and my work one, but I've never felt like it was robust enough to try and use as a daily communication program. A couple of years ago, I finally migrated to Apple Mail since it was obvious that Eudora would stop working sooner or later and that the longer I waited the harder it would be to change.

As another has stated, the support page appears to be down right now, or I'd add this to the tickets. Once it's back up, I'll be glad to put it all in. One of the greatest features of Eudora was it's amazingly fast search capability. This was made possible by the fact that the messages themselves were stored in a plain text file, one for each mailbox, with pointers to the attachments saved in some other (user configurable) location. This made backing up much easier (incremental backups only backed up the edited text files and any new attachments, rather than a monolithic database), made searching incredible (100,000s of messages can be searched in just a few seconds, even on ancient systems like Classic Mac OS 8 and 9) and allowed for easy reading of messages outside of Eudora should something go wrong. It did have the one problem of sometimes losing where the attachments were, but I'm pretty certain a modern database system could be much more robust there. To me, this is one of Eudora's killer features and one I'd love to see again.

This method of mail and attachment storage, combined with a well-thought-out multi-window system, allowed for an extremely efficient, almost entirely keyboard-driven workflow for me. New mail would be filtered into it's respective mailboxes and only those boxes with new mail in them would open. Read through the new mail in one box (Cmd-down arrow to each, handy) and then close that window when done. You're immediately presented with the next open mailbox through which you can quickly page and then close, and so on. Much faster to use and easier to see what exactly is going on.

Those said, I'd like to see MailForge's IMAP and HTML support be better than Eudora's. At least on the Mac version, neither of those was ever reliable. I get the impression from the IDS forums that neither of those was ever particularly reliable in MailForge, either. Personally, I'd be fine with my plain-text emails over POP3 forever, but it's obvious the rest of the world doesn't agree with me on that, so robust support of them will of course be a must. This is one point where utilization of OS X's frameworks will be useful. Webkit use shouldn't be too terrible to implement and will keep ya'll from having to build in your own HTML parser. I don't know about Windows, but I'm guessing there's some kind of built-in HTML engine like Webkit there, as well.

Integration with the system address book is also a must. It was another real weakness in Eudora on Mac. Since the classic Mac OS never had a system-wide address book Eudora never got around to tying into it once it was introduced with OS X. With MailForge, there's no excuse not to allow for the integration.

Those are my thoughts. I hope they help. Thanks for taking over the project, and good luck!

Michael

[grebmar]

... This method of mail and attachment storage, combined with a well-thought-out multi-window system, allowed for an extremely efficient, almost entirely keyboard-driven workflow for me. New mail would be filtered into it's respective mailboxes and only those boxes with new mail in them would open. Read through the new mail in one box (Cmd-down arrow to each, handy) and then close that window when done. You're immediately presented with the next open mailbox through which you can quickly page and then close, and so on. Much faster to use and easier to see what exactly is going on.

Integration with the system address book is also a must. It was another real weakness in Eudora on Mac. Since the classic Mac OS never had a system-wide address book Eudora never got around to tying into it once it was introduced with OS X. With MailForge, there's no excuse not to allow for the integration.

Those are my thoughts. I hope they help. Thanks for taking over the project, and good luck!

Michael

I would agree with all of these points, especially the multiple windows, which MF currently does, I believe. But as I noted above, Apple's Address book is really inadequate, and I have found it generally one of Apple's duds of a program. I would prefer a separate address book in MF, and it currently his its own address book and integration with Apple's. But if MF it could be integrated with the Address book, but able to create groups with ease (ie from all the addresses in a single message), then it would be good.

[mbierly]

Sorry for the confusion I've caused. I had posted in the announcements section that the support ticket system was being changed. The "new" ticket system (which is Mantis) is at http://feedback.macsimizesoftware.com.

The primary reason for switching was that I disliked that osTicket would let a person only see their tickets. I wanted everyone to have visibility to all of the issues reported and what their statuses were.

Once again, sorry for the confusion.

[crzyhrse]

Mike,

To chime in, I've been using Eudora on a Mac since '96, and am still using a 6 year old MBP and OSX 10.4 mostly because of Eudora. I just recently purchased a new cMBP and am currently in the process of setting up and moving over. I've been feeling into the seemingly inevitable, Apple's Mail, or so it seemed until just this morning when I went one last time to the IDS site and found myself over here, reading all the posts so far. And so once again a positive feeling about Eudora is surfacing for me. I'm starting to again believe that there will be a true Eudora for the present day Intel Mac with Eudora's look, feel and functionality, one that is solid and reliable. From what I have seen on the IDS forum over the years Mailforge has never actually gotten out out of beta, no matter what version number was stuck on it.

Over four years ago I paid for Odysseus/Mailforge to support the effort, and also made a few posts. Since then I've just been watching, appreciating all the folks posting over there and now here, people who have been working hard with Matt to make Mailforge into what so many of us want it to be. I don't have the space in my life to be testing beta software, and have been really, really appreciative of all the effort and input there, and now seemingly here. Just as a way of maybe groking how robust Etdora continues to be, in reading some of the posts here this morning regarding features, I learned two things I didn't know I could do with Eudora, features that I would have been using often the last 16 years if I'd known...

One thing that is very important to me is the ability to have group recipients with many addresses. I've sent to as many as 2000 addresses in one group using Eudora, and no I don't want to use a email list service, the flexibility possible with Eudora is essential. Including being able as needed to put into the group both addresses as well as Eudora nicknames linking to other individual addresses, and all of it set so that the To: field people see results merely in the name of the group, and all this without using using Bcc...

And then all the other things people are letting you know here, so much, I believe if you can eventually get it to where we all envision it, in general of course, and in the meantime make it work well enough that it can be relied on now, then you will have what Eudora always was, the best email client software ever...

Regarding communication, openness and honesty are some of its first prerequisites. That was in my view sorely lacking from IDS. Change that (seemingly changing already ) and this will all be a very different and much more positive process, maybe even with not just a good but a great outcome...

Sure would like to begin using it now on my new machine but no way at the moment, but I'm slowing down the move a little bit now, wondering how quickly you can get it working relatively reliably, with a good way to get all my stuff, settings etc from here to there... I also wonder if there is some way of getting a code for Mailforge, considering that I paid early on when the idea was if we paid then, there would be some perks...

Thanks, and truly, good luck!

John.

[GeraldT]

Hello,
Long time Eudora user and early supporter of Odysseus/MailForge, I am very happy to hear that the project is still alive and hope that the new managers will lead us to haven if not to heaven.
Here are some of the features that seem to me the most interesting in Eudora:

1. A customizable tool bar.
2. Extremely quick search engine and sort engine.
3. Fully scriptable app.
4. Strong filters,including in particular the possibility to move attachments from any definite sender to any definite folder.
5. Easy handling of attachments, for instance the possibility to move an attachment from the message window to any other folder.
6.Use of format=flowed (see http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html)
7. Separate windows for separate folders, which stay open when you reopen Eudora.
8. The possibility to program the sending of an email-message.
9. Identification of sent messages by typography (italics).
10. Possibility to edit a received message.

Regards,

Gérald

[tdiaz]

... that the web site, after several days, is -still- the -generic- Joomla page isn't saying much. If you can't figure out how to get Joomla to work .. (you're not alone), put a re-direct on it to point directly to the forum. Put up a graphic place holder, a teaser, with a desktop shot of MailForge and Eudora .. or .. something, and a link to the forum from there. Install WordPress and use that, its' practically become a CMS, but can also serve as an excellent blogging platform for you to keep people updated on your progress.

But leaving a default page? You're URL is out there, like it or not. People showing up and finding a Joomla page for several days makes it all the more credible..

This mail client has a long way to go in my opinion. Nearly 5 years now, and quite honestly, I don't care what Matt and company said. There is simply no way in hell they were using that thing daily, they might have run it daily, and been using something else for the heavy hitting. But RealBASIC was just not the way to go, and it showed. For nearly 5 years.

5 years that more and more of it's potential users have given up, found something else, moved on. It's come to the point where I'm so used to some of the other features that Gmail gives, I can't see ever switching back to Eudora. But at the same time, I'd love to do it just for the speed and massive flexibility. But since that is simply not an option.

Aside from the several times the database/storage/backend of MailForge was changed, and problems that brought each time, I kid you not, but you nearly can not convince me that the rest of the code is anything new. Why? It's got Many of The Same Problems that "1.0" had. Stupid stuff. Fundamental things like it can't sort dates properly. Or by subject. Stuff that even ThunderClucker and other things do well. Many open source solutions provided these basic functions. Open source. As in you can open up the source and look. Imagine that. If you can't get it right, have a look at something else.

Something else I found to hold true for every version of Odysseus, MaiiForge, whatever. Simply quitting the Mac Finder improved speed 10 fold. Why? Nothing else had that problem.

The common excuse IDS would cite was "Well, no one has tried to start from scratch in all these years". Really? You mean every other email solution out there came from one piece of source code?

The impression given off by IDS was "This is a Eudora Replacement!" and yet it seemed that instead of getting basic functionality down, they spent a lot of time off on feature tangents adding stuff that never existed in the first place. leaving issue after issue untouched. I know they tried focused testing with certain people, I was one of them, and a couple times more I got asked if I would test a certain version, only never saw it, and one Thanksgiving eve we must have had 20-25 different builds go between us for several hours, that was 2009. Problems that existed then, still exist now.

Another thing, POP3 with GMail. Eudora, 20+ year old Eudora, and darn near anything else I've tried handles it just fine. IDS OTOH swore several times that "GMail is different, we can't get it right .. we may just give up on it". I spent many hours resetting crap, re-downloading all the mail, trying to get a local copy. Finally I ended up doing the reverse. I've uploaded years of Eudora data into GMail instead. At least now if I ever find something, MailForge even, that works half as well... I know I can suck it all down again and have a local copy as well.

But many potential users have switched, moved on, etc. There's some users who can start from scratch and leave the old data behind, and there's some that won't. The ones that won't soon discover that MailForge collapses under the load of massive amounts of data, and the ones that do can't understand why the others say "this is slow", "has problems", "can't sort", etc. But unless that's fixed, they're headed to the same thing when their data file gets bigger.

I say it like I see it, sorry if I come across crass or pompus, you could have saved a lot of money and hatched your idea by simply cloning Eudora on paper and starting from scratch, because I'm convinced that's what has to be done. After all, that's what IDS did. Despite IDS claims that 3.x is a near total re-write, yet it acts in many ways, just like the prior versions. It's broke. Majorly. You will spend more time fixing it than starting over, because when you go to fix something you wrote, at least you will understand the code base 100%.

Fix mail downloading first. If you can't download mail, there's no sense in going any further. MailForge doesn't even do this right 100% of the time. Then worry about the feature set.

When you add something, test -everything- again. Not just the thing you added. Only then send it out. Publish a detailed changelog right beside it. Make it easy to find on the forums, too. IDS's MO seemed to be the opposite, because for one thing added, a couple would break and they'd quip "but we fixed that 27 versions ago" .. Well, it's broke again.

Adding a feature isn't done until the UI is done 100% for it. That means the preference box, the controls for it, etc. Many things added were half hacked into preferences and it showed. Basic functionality like dragging attachments into the message, out of the message, handling of them, things the way Eudora has done it for 80% of it's existence, things that your typical targeted user would do without a doubt, did not work. In many ways MailForge was not the Eudora replacement it was trying to be, for the many simple things it left out, it made me wonder if IDS and company ever used Eudora at all.

You've got a -huge- project ahead of you.

[mac-christian]

Ability to edit From: header

Yes, very desirable.

Multiple Personalities per account, with incoming filters to assign personality to inbound email

I do not completely understand this. In Eudora, a "personality" for me was just one email account. So, if I had 3 accounts - say "myname@domain.com", "nickname@otherdomain.net", "thirdname@somethingelse.org" - then I just made 3 personalities, one with every address.

If you like to send/receive 3 "realnames" from/to the same address, this can be done by setting up more than one account (or personality). Say, "myname@domain.com" should have "My Name", "Wife Name" and "Son Name" as realnames, then just set it up accordingly. 2 of the 3 do not need to retrieve incoming messages because then they would never get something after the first personality fetched the messages. You can then filter incoming messages using the realname - but you'll end up with som "unfilterable" messages if the realname in an incoming message is not specified.

Christian