It’s with very mixed feelings that this post is being written. Over the last 4+ years, we’ve poured our heart and soul into MailForge. In that time, we’ve made many friends, learned a lot and enjoyed every minute of it.

Recently, however, there have been some developments affecting the future of MailForge. As lead developer, I have actually been privileged to have two parallel careers, sometimes complimentary and sometimes at odds. Recently, I was on sabbatical for a couple of months to have surgery on an old sports injury I had been putting off having fixed for a long time. During that time, I increasingly came to the realization that I simply don’t want to develop software anymore. I have been involved in this business for 13 years. While it’s been an awesome ride, and I’ve accomplished some significant things in that time, I have found that I enjoy my secondary career far more of late.

So where does that leave MailForge? As I said, we’ve poured our heart and soul into MailForge. We want MailForge to succeed as much as everyone else. With my retirement from software development, however, we believe MailForge and our customers will be best served by another company taking over development. We have carefully screened several companies, all of whom were interested in taking over the project. The company we chose is very committed to continuing the work we began, and we firmly believe MailForge will continue to grow, evolve and serve its users. Especially with the demise of Thunderbird, and Sparrow being bought by Google, we believe this is an excellent time and opportunity for MailForge.

We at Infinity, and I personally, would like to thank everyone for your support over these last several years. It’s been an awesome ride, and we look forward to the great things MailForge, and its new developers, will accomplish.

We’ll keep you posted as the transition takes place over the next week or so.

Sincerely,
Matt Milano
Lead Developer

Please report any bugs to our bug tracking system: IDS Bug Tracker

Be advised that MailForge 3 is a paid upgrade for anyone who purchased prior to 2012. Lifetime license holders, of course, are exempt from the upgrade fee. Due to a change in the serial scheme in MailForge 3, we will be sending out new Lifetime License Serials to the relevant individuals. We will be sending these out during the coming week. In the meantime, MailForge 3 is available as a 30-day trial.

As always, if there are any questions, please feel free to ask.

MailForge Regular License:
$19.95

MailForge Upgrade License:
$9.95

Download Links

Mac OS X Intel

Mac OS X PPC

Windows XP or later

The only problem is, MailForge was never designed to be an exact duplicate. Our press release announcing the release of MailForge 1.0 said the following: “providing users with a familiar look and feel, while at the same time adding features and abilities to further enhance the user experience.”

Nowhere does that imply it would be an EXACT duplicate. Our goal, rather than creating an exact duplicate, is to create an email program for power email users. In many cases, this will mean mimicking Eudora, since it was the quintessential power user email program. In some cases, however, Eudora’s way of doing things is decidedly less than ideal, a throwback to a time when operating systems and email were far simpler. In these cases, we choose not to follow Eudora’s model, instead implementing features the way we think they should be.

Hopefully, that leads to a better email client. It does not, and never will, mean that MailForge is an EXACT Eudora duplicate.

Once we are confident it has fully been addressed, we will release MailForge on Tuesday, April 17.

Once again, thank you for your patience.

Please accept our apologies for the delay.

We believe we’ve finally ironed out the bug that has prevented us from committing to a solid date for MailForge 3′s release date. As we previously stated, this bug was due to a poorly documented Apple API that relates to how we display HTML emails.

Now that we have this worked out, we will be release MailForge 3 on Monday, April 2.

Thank you for your patience.

Where We’ve Been
When the MailForge project (then Odysseus) first started, we felt an unnecessary need to get MailForge out ASAP. As a result, some poor decisions were made early on that have caused us a great deal of grief throughout the project. As one example, we licensed closed-source code from third-parties (yes, we realize this is the same mistake Qualcomm made) that ended up being a hinderance to us for a long time.

In addition, we have struggled with performance elements that have had profound impacts on widespread features. For example, performance limitations with SQLite have created a slew of problems with sorting. These performance issues were only recently overcome.

Where We Are
Over the last year or two we have been working on rewriting all of the affected portions of MailForge. Unfortunately, integrating these rewritten and improved features into the original codebase has presented all new challenges. This has led to the “two steps forward, one step backward” syndrome that has plagued MailForge for some time.

Where We’re Headed
As announced in other sections of the forums, we have already embarked on a complete rewrite. This will represent a 93 – 95% rewrite of the original codebase. As stated, we have some modules and portions of the programs rewritten already, waiting to be plugged into an improved framework.

In the course of this rewrite, our main focus will be to make sure that each and every feature works perfectly … before we move onto the next. To ensure this level of performance we will be releasing incremental Alpha and Beta releases to get user feedback.

Timeframe
While we absolutely will not commit to an exact date, we can say that the rewrite will be in the “months” range. We are working as fast as possible, and will shortly provide a detailed Roadmap. We will also start releasing the early builds in the very near future.

In conclusion, we want to thank everyone for their patience. As we stated at the beginning of this project, we are in this for the long haul. We rely on MailForge for our internal email and look forward to many years of development.