[pmmail-list] Interest in New Edition of PMMail

[L.Willms]

On Mon, 19 Dec 2005 14:51:16 -0500 (EST), Walter F. Metcalf wrote:

> VOICE is considering sponsoring an updated and supported version of 
PMMail for OS/2.
> 

   Good news! 

> There is the general feeling that a large number of people still use 
this long-dead email client because is is fast, and feature-rich, 
> among other reasons. 

   I am still using it, but I am about to switch to TheBat! which also 
means to take away one more application from OS/2 to Windows. 

> Possibly others would start using it again if it were 
> updated and supported.

   It is quite late now, and it is a big question, if an overhaul of 
PMMail could incite people to move back to OS/2... 

> Before VOICE commits to this project, which could be costly and 
developer-intensive, at least in the short term, we want to get a 
> slightly better idea of the usage and interest in PMMail for OS/2, so 
we have created a poll to determine this.

   Why should it be costly? There is this Sourceforge project for making 
PMMail/2 an open source project -- or it was: I just did a search on 
Sourceforge.org for PMMail, but that only turned out a "PMMail 
archiver". 

   So that means that the current owners of the PMMail source were 
resolved to give the PMMail source to the public for free, and I think 
this is the way to be pursued. I remember that several people writing on 
this list have voiced interest in contributing work towards improving 
PMMail after it is made into open source. 

   And PMMail really does need a big overhaul, not only for adding some 
more charsets (which should be made in a way that those could be added 
by users in form of a plugin), but most importantly, the MIME 
implementation needs a complete rewrite, if I am not mistaken. 

   OTOH, I think that it would be wrong to just revamp the OS/2 version 
and let the Windows version rot and go bust. One should try to unify the 
sources and try to do that in such a way that this product can also be 
implemented on Linux and Mac. 


Yours, 
Lüko Willms
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Frankfurt/Main