Tuesday, July 24, 2012

MailForge’s Future

With the news about Thunderbird and Sparrow, this has not been a good month for Mac e-mail clients. And now it seems there’s something going on with MailForge.

Update (2012-07-25): Matt Milano:

As lead developer, I have actually been privileged to have two parallel careers, sometimes complimentary and sometimes at odds. Recently, I was on sabbatical for a couple of months to have surgery on an old sports injury I had been putting off having fixed for a long time. During that time, I increasingly came to the realization that I simply don’t want to develop software anymore. I have been involved in this business for 13 years. While it’s been an awesome ride, and I’ve accomplished some significant things in that time, I have found that I enjoy my secondary career far more of late.

He’s found another company to take over development of MailForge.

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I had decided just the other day that in my next life, I was going to write a mail client (to go along with my genealogy app).

I’m glad to hear that IDS has found someone to take over MailForge; I didn't like any of these three mail clients personally (though I never tried MailForge—the reviews were bad enough to keep me away), but the loss of alternatives was disturbing. It’s sad that on a platform that can support 3 major browsers (even if they are all cross-platform) and a half-dozen or so second-tier ones, the mail client market has been shrinking from the relative bounty of the Mac OS days to Apple Mail, whatever Microsoft’s client-du-jour is, and…what else is still in development? Anything besides Postbox?

(I’m eventually going to have to move on from Eudora, and I’d like to end up in a mail client I like, rather than one I just make do with.)

MailMate is worth a look, at least. PowerMail still exists, though it hasn't had serious revision in years.

I've reduced my usage of email so much in the last few years (moved nearly all my mailing list usage to Gmane) that I don't really qualify as a picky email client user any more, so I don't think I qualify to judge.

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