Columba

I've been working or better playing around with Columba the better half of my student years. Especially the latest release was quite difficult to manage. RL (aka real life) kept me quite busy and is also the reason why I now finally decided to stop developing on Columba.

 I had so much fun meeting and working with all different kinds of people from throughout the world. Thank you all for your support!  

It was not quite the ride we planned. Thinking about it - we never really planned anything ;-) But, that's probably the reason why it was so much fun!

In the last days I have registered columba on ohloh .

It would be nice if any developer can register itself on ohloh to see on the nice google-map where the developers staying ;-)

It is also very interesting that the cost of columba is currently over 1,7 million of dollars.

Shortly after we released Columba Mail v1.2 “Flying Saucer”, one of the regulars on the Developers mailing list observed that it didn’t really look very good on a Macintosh. Since our developers all used Windows / Linux we all looked confused and asked why not? That was the start of a steep learning curve for some of the developers and two of us investing in some very nice Apple hardware!

This release is the first part of our plan to address making Columba as useful to Mac users as it is to everyone else! In addition to making it more visually pleasing, we have also squashed about 50 bugs and added some features to make it more useful for people on the run! Firstly, we have added to its previous command line scripting capabilities, we have added command line selectable user profiles and made it so that you can now carry your entire cross platform capable Columba mail program and its message base on a USB memory stick! Columba is more than happy to act as an online or offline mail client and to be used anywhere you have access to a Java JRE platform (put the installers on your memory stick or use Java Webstart!).

We finally have Jira up and running again. This is BTW a good opportunity to thank the guys over at Atlassian for supporting us! Our build server is up and running again, too.

Still, the wiki is not running currently. We'll keep you posted!

Columba’s server at http://columbamail.org was shutdown due to a hardware failure. The hard drive has been replaced. We have backups of nearly everything, so its just a matter of setting up the system again.

We will keep you posted about the status. Funnily we were planning to release a major new version this weekend. So, stay tuned!

Mail servers, database, website and forum seem to be working again already.

Many users stumpled over installation and or startup problems with several of our last releases. These can be seen in quite a lot Jira issues: CA-151, CA-150, CA-148, CA-149, CA-131 and CA-133. So, the good news is that we are actually tracking these issues and were finally able to solve them.

We changed our packaging scripts to use the famous install4j product, kindly donated by ej-technologies. Our build scripts still support the old packaging for anyone without an install4j license. Note, that you can get a 30-day trial license to try for yourself, though.

We finally have a build server on columbamail.org running. It is based on the beautiful Hudson.

On each check-in request to our Subversion repository this will trigger a rebuild of Columba. It shows you status of all recent builds and a nice graph showing the JUnit Test Results.

Thanks to the folks at Cenqua we have a hosted FishEye instance running.

It lets you monitor, search, share and analyze our Subversion repository content.

See for yourself.

Columba finally moved to Subversion. All CVS modules have been finally moved over to Subversion.

The old CVS access will be closed and columba-cvs@lists.sourceforge.net is therefore obsolete. A new mailinglist columba-svn@lists.sourceforge.net contains the SVN Notifications. Very handy if you want to stay up-to-date. So, register at columba-svn@lists.sourceforge.net!

All the required information to access the sourcecode can be found at our SF project page.

Hope everyone out there had a “Guten Rutsch” which is a German term describing the transition from the old into the new year - need something for my headache before I can go on!

It was quite a calm time lately for everyone watching us, but this is about to change as we are working like mad man on the next release of Columba. The focus of this release will go away a bit from the email client towards a "Collaboration Thingy" - trying hard here not to use "Groupware" here ;-)

There are a lot of new ideas floating around currently, so I will try to put all this into a roadmap. Yes right, Columba's users will finally get a roadmap!