
C programmers with Mac experience wanted for revival of Eudora eMail client - lproven
https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/ad27vg/help_wanted_c_programmers_with_mac_experience/
======
towndrunk
In my opinion, here is how I would handle this:

Use git and not mercurial. Use github over Source Forge. This will get you
more eye balls on the project. Developers are more skilled in git than
mercurial as well.

\- Create a core in C that handles all the base functionality of the email
client

\- Create a UI for each platform using its native toolkits. Cocoa for macOS,
MFC/.Net for Windows, GTK+ etc. You want the client to be native to the
platform so it feels natural in all UI aspects and integration with the
underlying OS.

I believe Transmission takes this approach and it seems to work well:
[https://github.com/transmission/transmission](https://github.com/transmission/transmission)

~~~
j1elo
Who in this current world wants to create or promote a growing community of
free software developers, and chooses SourceForge as a platform instead of
GitHub or GitLab?

Not that other alternatives are bad, but let me insist: especially if the
intent is to attract more developers, GitHub has been THE choice already for
several years.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Isn’t SourceForge synonymous with aggressive and intrusive advertisements all
over the site and didn’t they get in trouble for inserting adware and spyware
into projects’ binary downloads?

~~~
snazz
They did wrap installers in malware but have stopped now. Regardless, the site
is very poorly designed and makes for a bad developer and user experience. To
users and potential contributors, using SourceForge is synonymous with not
caring.

~~~
honeywhite
I've registered a custom domain, which will be our primary user-facing point
of contact. Developers use SF essentially purely as a Mercurial host;
everything else is run over eMail.

------
Birch-san
I'm concerned by the team-shaming [0]:

> The only issue left is that of preventable costs arising from error,
> oversight, or incompetence

> [notably,] the indiscriminate destruction of data […] under the mistaken
> impression that it was otiose, by a programmer whose experience was
> insufficient for the task at hand.

> Although he might have been the 'cause of more harm than good' (in the
> opinion of another of our programmers), […] and while correction of the
> mistake took some time and effort, it did not result in schedule slippage.

His assertion that "the only phone suitable for the task (of talking to 3
people)" is a crowdfunded phone that doesn't exist yet, shows (at best) poor
risk-management.

I don't understand how one developer could need $170/month of mobile data to
fulfil their commitments to this project.

I don't understand why the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio would be
necessary… nor why Visual Studio would be the right choice for macOS
development.

I don't understand why he's being so open with such indefensible spending.

The project seems out-of-touch. One of his roles is to inspire collaboration,
so he would have more luck using technologies that excite people today.

[0] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1313324524/hermes-
eudor...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1313324524/hermes-eudoras-next-
generation/posts/2329358)

~~~
j1elo
You only have to see how he writes. What other projects / teams would have
reported as "fixed some bugs and replaced the unsupported spell checker
technology with hunspell, all going well!" here it takes several pages of...
fluff, if you ask me. Either that, or contrived phrases just for the sake of
writing _a lot_ of latin expressions.

You never get too much latin in your product updates!!

~~~
honeywhite
Fixed some bugs? The project _didn 't compile_ under a modern compiler. The
compiled version didn't work well with any language besides English or Latin.
There _was_ no spell-checker included with the source and we had to re-write
the library. Then there was the total inability to negotiate an SSL/TLS
connexion... don't get me started.

I wrote for a general audience. Yes, it's a bit fluffy, but I had to try to
explain certain things to people who don't know the first thing about
computers (if you don't believe me, take a look at the eudora listmoms
listserv). The responses I received were overwhelmingly "don't change a thing
but the Unicode handling and the SSL!"

------
squarefoot
It is not clear to me if the project is a new mail client based on the old
Eudora codebase, or simply making that code portable to MacOS, but anyway, we
already have a multiplatform, small but powerful and very fast mail client
that shares a lot of concepts taken from the good old Eudora, and ready to be
ported to MacOS: Claws Mail. It's stable and works on most systems and
hardware out there, Windows, Linux, BSD, including ARM SBCs (Raspberry PIs,
etc). It does work under MacOS, but has to be built locally. If I wanted to
make an easy to install Eudora-like mail client for MacOS I'd probably start
by contributing to that project for being already very mature on other
platforms; I use it on Linux since it was called Sylpheed -that's like 17
years back- and compared to Eudora I used before, from which I could import
all email flawlessly, it has been a nice step forward without problems at all.

[https://www.claws-mail.org/features.php?section=general](https://www.claws-
mail.org/features.php?section=general)

[https://www.claws-
mail.org/faq/index.php/Installation_and_Co...](https://www.claws-
mail.org/faq/index.php/Installation_and_Configuration#How_to_build_Claws_Mail_on_Mac_OS_X.3F)

~~~
bitexploder
I used Claws on Linux. What a great little mail client. Software developers
love rebuilding stuff for a variety of valid reasons, but one does ponder at
the amount of rework done in the name of those reasons.

------
stevekemp
Looks like they raised money, and having received it used it on some
questionable choices:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1313324524/hermes-
eudor...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1313324524/hermes-eudoras-next-
generation/posts/2329358)

Paying for phone bill? Buying software licenses? Perhaps that's a fair use of
cash, but it feels a little icky.

~~~
jamespo
Guy's bought himself an expensive phone to "communicate with the team" and the
phone's not even available yet.

~~~
scarejunba
Phone is also only $570 on IndieGogo wtf.

The last time I funded a software development effort was neovim and those guys
had stuff out super fast. A Github repo, plans, the binary. It’s a successful
project. That is some gold standard development, imho.

~~~
honeywhite
Canadian and American dollars, remember. $570 US = $800ish Can. The
Kickstarter is also in Canadian dollars.

------
droithomme
I've been through this process with several projects. At this point a Carbon
codebase like that needs to be rewritten from scratch.

The best path forward if you want a program that works like the old one but
runs on the current version of macOS is to use the old version to create a
requirements document and then develop that using modern techniques.

Same as with restoring a 19th century farm house with a bad foundation. The
cost of restoring it and bringing it up to modern standards will typically be
5-20 times more than knocking it down and building a lookalike from scratch
using modern building techniques.

~~~
EmielMols
I have no specific experience with carbon but in almost (arguably) similar
cases I've come across as a developer, I've found a better approach to look
for a mechanism to allow for granular upgrades over time.

In this specific case I could imagine supporting both carbon and cocoa screens
/ logic at the same time, and begin conversion screen-by-screen or feature-by-
feature.

In the end this might mean maintaining extra complexity to support both
technologies, but protects you from the danger of having to implement a
complet syst m to feature parity at once.

~~~
cnasc
I believe at this point no incremental upgrade is possible, because Carbon is
entirely deprecated and will not run on current Macs.

~~~
ksherlock
You could reimplement Carbon in Cocoa.

~~~
lostgame
You’re so right, I’ll go grab the source code for both and work on that right
away.

It’s so obvious - why has nobody done it before?

------
psychometry
As someone who had to deal with Eudora in a support environment for many
years, I hope this revival is a colossal failure.

------
nivenhuh
Looking at this source code... it's a window into the past that nobody should
have to revisit.

I would recommend:

\- Start a new program from scratch

\- Refer to old code to port over "novel" concepts/logic

\- Publish a skeleton / MVP project so people can add to it (instead of trying
to start from an unusable codebase).

Some fun snippets from main.c:

    
    
      // Update the emo turd cache
      EmoTurdCache = EmoLitterInternetWithTurds();
    
      /*
       * run the text analyzer
       */
      if (!TypingRecently && BeingAnal()) AnalScan();
    	
      // and the emoticon scanner
      if (!TypingRecently && HasFeature(featureEmo) && EmoDo()) EmoScan();
    	

Looks like the person who wrote this had fun with naming conventions... :)

------
c-smile
Interesting. As a part of
Sciter.Node([https://terrainformatica.com/2018/12/23/sciternode-versus-
el...](https://terrainformatica.com/2018/12/23/sciternode-versus-electron/))
project I was thinking about "flagship demonstrator" project for it.

One of ideas is to create e-mail client. In principle its UI will be quite
close to another Sciter application:
[https://notes.sciter.com/](https://notes.sciter.com/) that is multiplatform
and simple - the application was created in 4 months as a side project. Its UI
can be morphed to e-mail one in comparable time frame.

Will it be better to focus on this rather on totall rewrite of MFC based
project? Especially because Sciter is multiplatform already by nature...

------
honeywhite
I decided to deal with all issues raised here, in one big Reddit post:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/aeo39h/hermes_m...](https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/aeo39h/hermes_mail_your_questions_here_and_on_hacker/)

------
kokey
I think it's good that we see more efforts at making good e-mail clients.
Outlook was never great, but it has really ruined e-mail with the current font
and design layout that makes it even harder for people to notice important
e-mails and this is killing it off as a communications medium.

We have the advantage nowadays that the server protocols are more open than
they have been for a long time, also the rendering of rich e-mails is more
standard so it's a good time for alternatives to gain some of the market.

------
appstorelottery
Copied from reddit comment:

Also, from this update it can be seen that the OP already burnt through all
the funds without even putting out a single line of code. The expenses
include:

"Finally, because our team is scattered all over the world, I need a device to
communicate with them; I found only one suitable for the task (the Cosmo
Communicator), which I purchased for the princely sum of $840"

------
jcoffland
Most C programmers with Mac experience know better.

------
ngcc_hk
Just want to read Eudora database. Still have some old one in 1998 archive.

~~~
bartread
Would this do what you want?

[https://turgs.com/eudora/viewer/](https://turgs.com/eudora/viewer/)

(Downside: appears to be Windows only, but you could always run it on an Azure
VM and remote desktop in if you don't have access to a Windows box of your
own.)

~~~
zozbot123
It might work under Wine.

~~~
bartread
Good point: I always forget about Wine, due to always having Windows available
_somehow_ , but it's often a viable alternative. Thanks!

------
gjmacd
WHY!?

~~~
rasz
tldr: needed new phone

------
techslave
cool. but i’d rather see revival of mulberry. which was the spiritual
successor to eudora IMHO. eudora was good for its day but modern email means
it is obsolete.

it doesn’t need “revival” so much as “rewrite”

------
mistrial9
interesting to see the "blind man and the elephant" responses here, each
hacker/blind man insisting that the beast needs to be tamed this way.. For the
critics - do you value the human happiness that a software user has, with a
well-made and visually pleasing app environment ?

porting software has been accomplished for decades, to varying degrees of
success - of course this can be done.. go for it !!

------
JustSomeNobody
Scrap it then build a modern client in Electron. Allow modern features by
hosting servers to filter, search, and glean info from email paid for by
slipping ads back into the email.

~~~
saagarjha
Surely this is sarcasm.

~~~
drb91
It seems far more likely to succeed IMO.

Also isn’t this essentially the business models of Airmail and Spark and (I’m
sure) many others? They do this all up to the point of actually injecting ads.
Which is absurd; these days access to your email is probably more dangerous
than access to your SSN.

