PocoMail Future?

[FFF]

Great to hear at least anything <g>.
FTR, i would buy any update in an instance if it would tackle and solve the problems around UTF-8 formatted mails, (especially the flavour macs produce), as it this is an utter nuisance in dealing with clients (something like: "öffnet Export aufgelöster Füßchen angehängt, auslöst" ) ...
If a new version would provide a means to establish discrete "attachments" folders for each account, it would be a bonus

Keep them coming!
Karl

[GHaavy]

Slaven,

I'm not going to be as understanding with my response.

First, I love Barca Pro and still use it daily (for personal email and scheduling) despite its formatting shortcomings. I, along with many who still (occasionally) frequent this forum, would happily pay to support your continued efforts to improve this still valuable software.

Secondly, thank you for finally gathering the courage to admit some of the issues you've faced over the past few years in bringing an upgraded product to market. As a member of the community, I appreciate your candor and want you to know that I understand some of the issues.

Having said that, however, what the hell took you so long.

I think its shameful how you abandoned your community leaders, leaving them to fend for themselves. Eric and, to a lesser degree, Thomas and Robin have continued to be a presence in the forum, trying to answer questions as best they could while you were nowhere to be seen. These guys, especially Eric, deserve not only your recognition but your gratitude. They've kept this website alive for 2 years without your input.

I would like to see you communicate more frequently, if not with us, then at least with your moderators. I would also like you to consider some form of recognition on your part for their efforts over the past few years in your absence. I maintain that the primary reason you still have people reading this forum is because of their efforts.

Grant Haavaldsrud.

[Slaven]

Grant, please don't mistake my absence on the forum from being ungrateful or even out of touch with our mods or the users. I do have email and have communicated with many of you directly. I just had very little of publicly usable information to announce and felt development was becoming seriously disconnected from everyone's expectations and ever evolving market conditions. My mantra was to never over-promise, which left me with little to share publicly. I can get into more details but I really don't think you all want to hear it, it will just make me sound like a bitter old developer railing against the changing market landscape; suffice it to say it is not my commercial interest that keeps me coming back for more. Eric, Tomas and Robin know how much I appreciate their help: a lot!

[flashfox]

Thanks Slaven for dropping by. Now that the ice is broken, please remember to drop by even if you don't have lots of news. You have a loyal following here along with very patient and capable admins.

[luxor]

Thanks Slaven for dropping by. Now that the ice is broken, please remember to drop by even if you don't have lots of news. You have a loyal following here along with very patient and capable admins.

Here. here.

[Slaven]

Thanks guys!

[Bo98]

Hi Slaven,

Parts of the PocoSystems website are not working (Helpdesk & PocoScripts in particular). I'm wondering if they will be fixed anytime soon?

Thanks in advance.

[davidg80]

It is good to hear from you Slaven. I am a long time Poco/Barca user but of late I have needed to use more complex templates which Poco could not cope with, or at least find a way to produce them (they are based on a table format).

I have been playing around with The Bat for a while which can do what I want but don't really like it as a program but at least it is being developed together with the compulsory bugs. Don't think that a new version of Poco will be ready anytime soon assuming that it can even cope with table formation so sadly I will have to convert to The Bat but will keep a watch here in the hope that I will be able to come back when it does what I want.

One point that does concern me is that you mention using IE. Up to now with Poco using its own hmtl engine I have been reasonably safe from any malware buried in emails. Could you explain how security will be maintained in the future please.

[Slaven]

Bo98, the site is still getting settled, we had to move everything to a new server and change a lot of the plumbing.

David: The only reason we finally decided to look at IE as an option is because of the pains Microsoft has taken in the last several years to improve the safety and flexibility of that component. It was good timing too, since the HTML component we were using has been abandoned and is no longer being improved.

It's hard to say if our templating will become a lot more powerful, this area is still a bit of an unknown as we try to find a way forward.

[davidg80]

Thanks for the info Slaven.

[Goody]

i have both Poco and Barca and have had them from early on. As it became obvious that support had gone away and no new news or updates, I moved on. I went to Outlook 2010, The Bat, and many others but could not find a good client that gave me the comfort I needed for my email. I tried IMAP and web mail but still no joy. Then came along Postbox. It just works, and it works nicely. It is in constant development with good support. I got it at 1.0 version and now it is to 2.5.2. Updates are a breeze, and the client works great. I have come to depend on it completely. it is not free but they do have a free version that does not have all the options that the paid version has.

If Pocomail comes out with a new upgrade to Barca Pro, I think i would take a look but to be honest, it would be hard to back out of Postbox. Slaven is correct about the email client market being a dead end. Very soon, everything will be Cloud and there is not much we can do about that direction. I recently had my ISP email account hijacked by some dude in Germany and all Comcast would do about it was to say they were sorry and suggest i use there Webmail instead of Pc based client. They hinted that client support was on a short fuse...Probably the same for most ISP's.

So, not sure if development of Barca would be a profitable venture at this point in time. I realize there are hard core users who would rather quit than switch but if there is not a large enough client base to support development, i would not do it either..

Goody

[tonnelier]

Obviously an email programme cannot be all things for all men. A feature deemed indispensable by one will not be used by another. And so it is for me. Pocomail is the only programme I've found with automatic language recognition (as you type). Thunderbird, The Bat, Postbox etc offer language recognition, but it has to be pre-set manually. Not user-friendly in a multi-lingual country. So I can't see me changing from Poco despite some of its limitations

[FFF]

Very soon, everything will be Cloud and there is not much we can do about that direction

Oh yes, you can. Noone can force you to put your data anywhere out there. And i don't care if Google or whoever cries how great they are. I can't afford to close my office when something happens to the I-net connection. Saw this last month while in holiday - some building activity hampered the cables and they couldn't repair it during THREE weeks. Very nice, if i could only stare on an empty browser window i would be out of business today....

Gimme proper UTF-8 handling in Poco and i buy in an instant.

Karl

[FFF]

BTW, just to illustrate my point re cloud:
From the last c't 19/2011 mag:
July 2011:
* Amazon needs more than 12h after a lightning strike in Dublin to get at least 60% of the affected apps running again
* MS Online Office at the same accident needed 4h to get back to work
* US and Canadian users of MS Online hat to wait more than 5h to get on again after some networking problem

Plus:
similiar to MS, Google has admitted to grant access to it's european servers to US-govenment agencies, including the statement that these accesses already have taken place on behalf of US-secret service requests...

Cloud? No, thanks.

Karl

[Ricardo]

As of this week I have Windows Live Mail running parallel with Barca. I'm going to see if I can adapt.

There are a few issues that really bug me with Barca now:

-I live in Brasil, that means we use accented chars and my email subjects are aways messed up;
-The clpboard i quite random, my wife emails me lot's of formatted mail labels and more often than not the formatting is lost in the copy from Barca paste to Word process;
-Last but not least, everytime my internet link gets acting I'll have at least one email account lose control of what was downloaded and have the 30 days worth of messages still in the server duplicated.

And the lack of news got me trying soemthing else.

While we are here, any chance we get mail folders instead of mail boxes? It's much easier on the backup...