Who is PocoMail in November of 2009?

[Fritz Wagner]

Hello,

I have been a PocoMail user for a long time. It may say in the user ID that I have been in this forum for four years, but that is because they lost the old DB when they moved to a new server and everyone started over again.

In terms of refinements I have never found anything that comes close to PocoMail and that has always been important to me because I have often spent several hours per day handling email.

I am now in the process of moving from a PC to a Mac (fewer keystrokes, viruses or surprises in general; less under the hood maintenance). But I can't just drop the PC because I have a lot of expensive software and some swell games that are not now and are unlikely to ever be available for Mac.

One possibility would be to partition the Mac and install an emulator and run PocoMail that way. (I could also pull a horse trailer behind my car and if the car ever got stuck, hitch up the horse to pull it free.)

So I am trying to figure out which way to go knowing that one cannot maintain two email clients. I have some basic questions about the present status of PocoMail:

1. Who owns it today? Has it been sold to Rose City Software which offers an email client called Courier?

2. Slaven invented it and headed the company. Is he out of the loop now? Not even a paid consultant?

3. Tomas and Erik. You have both been helping us out at the forum forever. Is this a personal avocation or are you doing it for someone else? Why are you still doing it? A fair question, yes?

4. Is PocoMail financially viable regardless of who runs it? I have often wondered if its financial problems don't result from it's being too complex for typical email consumers? Also, it is unknown to most computer users. I have never seen the light of recognition in the eye of anyone to whom I have mentioned it!

(And the brand name! The best that can be said about it is that it relates to the fact that it was once a lean program when others were bloated and hard drives offered only 400MB of storage! It could stand rebranding today!)

Some answers would be appreciated. For old time's sake.

Best,

Fritz Wagner

[Eric]

Hi Fritz,

I can't help you with Mac, but I'm sure others can.

So I am trying to figure out which way to go knowing that one cannot maintain two email clients. I have some basic questions about the present status of PocoMail:

1. Who owns it today? Has it been sold to Rose City Software which offers an email client called Courier?

See Rose City? for more information. Or also have a look at Is PocoSystems Support and Development Dying?

2. Slaven invented it and headed the company. Is he out of the loop now? Not even a paid consultant?

Don't have a clue about it , although I think Slaven is working on the next major upgrade. Maybe he's getting some ideas to incorporate into the next version, as well as the new engine he talked about.

3. Tomas and Erik. You have both been helping us out at the forum forever. Is this a personal avocation or are you doing it for someone else? Why are you still doing it? A fair question, yes?

It's personal, so I'm not working for anybody else.
Still doing it, because I like helping out others with the software.
And I don't like using another email client, since Barca Pro gives me everything I want.
I'm not that demanding.
As for Tomas, he's helping out with official support and lending a hand here at the forum.

4. Is PocoMail financially viable regardless of who runs it? I have often wondered if its financial problems don't result from it's being too complex for typical email consumers? Also, it is unknown to most computer users. I have never seen the light of recognition in the eye of anyone to whom I have mentioned it!

No idea on the financial matter.
I agree not a lot of people do know about Poco/Barca.

(And the brand name! The best that can be said about it is that it relates to the fact that it was once a lean program when others were bloated and hard drives offered only 400MB of storage! It could stand rebranding today!)

Maybe it will, so I'll wait until it's official.

[chrisretusn]

In terms of refinements I have never found anything that comes close to PocoMail and that has always been important to me because I have often spent several hours per day handling email.

'
I couldn't agree more!

I am now in the process of moving from a PC to a Mac (fewer keystrokes, viruses or surprises in general; less under the hood maintenance). But I can't just drop the PC because I have a lot of expensive software and some swell games that are not now and are unlikely to ever be available for Mac.

I made a similar move a few months ago, with a couple of differences. One reason I kept a Windows machine around was PocoMail. The other is I went both the Linux route and the Mac route. I currently do not have any machines that boot to Windows, only Linux, OS X and one other OS.

One possibility would be to partition the Mac and install an emulator and run PocoMail that way. (I could also pull a horse trailer behind my car and if the car ever got stuck, hitch up the horse to pull it free.)

So I am trying to figure out which way to go knowing that one cannot maintain two email clients.

I looked at a lot of options. I decided on two routes. One was VirtualBox. VirtualBox Runs on OS X and Linux. I ran PocoMail inside a Windows XP virtual machine for quite a while. A potential problem with VirtualBox is it's snapshot feature. You need to be aware that when restoring a VM to a previous state any changes to PocoMail since will be lost unless backed up externally from the virtual machine. That translates to lost messages. There are ways around this. The simplest is to use VirtualBox's Shared Folders. You can set up a folder on your host machine to share with the VM guest. In the case with a Windows guest you would map the share to a drive. This was data is not affected by changes in the VM. This mirrors how I used PocoMail in Windows, as I always ran PocoMail off C:, but put my data files on another drive. One disadvantage to using Shared Folders, at least for me, was running Compress All Folders. I can take a very long time to complete, especially if you have some large folders in PocoMail.

THe other option and the one I am currently using now is Wine. It will compile and run on OS X. I have not done this yet, but it's in my plans. Right now I am running PocoMail in Linux using Wine. PocoMail loads up seamlessly within Linux. I check all of my accounts several times a day and have never had a problem. It just works, there are a couple of what I consider minor cosmetic issues that do not effect usability.

I like both options better than BootCamp, simply because dual booting is not the way to go since I use PocoMail to frequently to be dual booting just to check mail.

There are other options as well such as CodeWeavers CrossOver Mac and Parallels. Here is a pretty good run down on what you can use on a Mac. Three Ways to Run Windows on Your Mac - AppleMatters

[Fritz Wagner]

Much appreciated, Chris.

I will check out your suggestions.

Best wishes