Requiem

[Simon Bowring]

>Considering the power and usefullness of PMMail,  it's amazing 
>to me that someone in the open source community doesn't clone 
>it for Linux.

At least you didn't say "it's amazing...that someone...doesn't JUST
clone it..."!

I think people underestimate the effort required to write software
(especially GUI software).

A full featured email client with all the right RFC support is not
at all easy to get right (indeed, it's not quite right yet in PMMail
after how many years of largely funded development?).

In this case much of the code can be borrowed from existing open source 
mailers which would help a lot, but even the GUI for PMMail would be 
quite a lot of work [In many, perhaps most GUI programs, the user 
interface is most of the work, the "guts" of the program is usually 
a small portion].

Several to many man-months of effort would be required, so it's 
therefore not "amazing" to *me* that someone has not done all this 
work for the rest of the community in their spare time and for 
nothing! [Rather it's amazing that any significant open source 
software apps exist at all!].

If you also had to support HTML (yes, I know, but it could be 
considered "important" to compete with Outlook), then you can 
add some addtional man months for basic support, or a couple of 
man years for full Outlook style support!)!

Simon