Simon Cozens wrote:
>
> On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 09:43:23AM +0100, Leon Brocard wrote:
> > It didn't hit critical mass. Discuss.
>
> Yet Another Webmail Client; it wasn't exactly filling a gaping niche.
> (And I say that as someone who may soon be maintaining one of the others...)
It did at the time - IIRC there weren't any (good) GPL-ed Webmail
clients when Leon started Acmemail and when I (well, Mark and I) were
working on it to get it integrated for a free ISP I hunted around and
there wasn't anything nearly as good (IMO) except Malcom Beattie's Wing
(http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mbeattie/wing/) which I looked at but didn't
like the structure.
It's a pity Acmemail never really took off (apart from being ripped off
and turned into a succesful company by At-mail) because it had loads of
great fetaures, was easy to extend and customise (especially the latest
development branch) and could easily (a month of good hacking) have had
feature sets to rival or beat anything I've seen including Hotmail and
Yahoomail.
On the other hand I learnt a lot about writing good, abstracted, large
scale CGI applications and maintainable, reusable code. I learnt about
doing mail and MIME properly under Perl, about working as a team on
code, Open Source software development models, that Mail::Cclient is
powerful but complicated and can be a bitch to install, supporting users
(God some of them are stupid) and writing documentation and installation
guides.
Which was nice.
