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jwz wrote an article on their original attempt to do so, basically saying what was said above: no competent programmer wants to spend free time building something they desperately don't want to touch once it's done. Novell has since given up on the project, but that (IMHO) may have more to do with their new Microsoft contract than with the actual merits of the software.

The last time that I was around Microsoft evangelists, the topic of mono was raised. Instantly, the smell of fear was so thick in the air that you could cut it with a knife. I suspect that it was mono that was the motivator behind the recent deal between MSFT and NOVL. I hope that I am wrong but I won't be surprised if http://www.mono-project.com/ quietly goes the way of http://www.hula-project.org/

Hula was designed to be highly scalable, to compartmentalize multiple organizations on a single machine, and to allow multi-layer role-based administration for a carrier, and organization, and a user.

You might want to check out the list of hosting companies and ISPs who are using NetMail today in exactly that way.

If you don't know what any of this means, don't worry about it. Just know that once Hula has taken over the world ;), your cell phone provider will be using Hula to integrate your email and voicemail and to keep your addressbook for you even when you switch cell phones.

Hula was designed to be highly scalable, to compartmentalize multiple organizations on a single machine, and to allow multi-layer role-based administration for a carrier, and organization, and a user.

You might want to check out the list of hosting companies and ISPs who are using NetMail today in exactly that way.

If you don't know what any of this means, don't worry about it. Just know that once Hula has taken over the world ;), your cell phone provider will be using Hula to integrate your email and voicemail and to keep your addressbook for you even when you switch cell phones.

From the Hula Project web site:

Hula is a [Linux-based] mail and calendar server with a friendly web-interface designed for a great user experience.

So if Novell has taken all their FT developers off Hula, are we to assume that Microsoft is now going to offer a Linux-native version of the Exchange server? I mean, come on. If Microsoft-Novell is really serious with their "we are working on Linux-Windows interoperability" then they're dropping out of Hula in order to work on their Linux-native of the Exchange server, right??

I mean, the only other possibility is that Microsoft "asked" Novell to stop supporting a direct competitor for a Microsoft product. And that would just be silly of them, wouldn't it...

[/sarcasm]

Novell still has a lot of great software. I think they have the best webmail interface, although it's free Hula is a free version of Novell's NetMail. If I was implementing a webmail solution right now I would definately lean towards Novell's NetMail w/ eDirectory.

Zimbra? Come on people, you want me to trust my user's email to a web2.0 company? what the hell?

Horde? For a user-base of this size? That's crazy! Where are you going to find enterprise-class support for a mediocre php web app framework?

The decent alternatives are Open Xchange, or Hula Server

But none of these compare to Sun's Messenging Server. Calendaring, IM, mail, all standards-compliant (even to the backend ldap server), all open-source. It integrates with outlook. It's backed up by a global corporation and is certified to run on Solaris, Red Hat, HP-UX and Windows. *

I don't understand why people even look at some of these other mail/calendar systems, let alone ignore this offering from Sun. Seriously, will someone answer that? (Sure it's not GPL'd, but Zimbra?)

*I do not work for sun.

Novell NetMail has been open-sourced (and largely superceded) by the Hula Project.

The web interface is one of the key improvements over NetMail.

You really should check out The Horde Project. Horde (and it's webmail client IMP) has been around for a very long time. Development is very active and open.

Horde went through a major rewrite/restructuring for the 3.0 effort. Horde 3.0 is definitely a web-based Exchange-killer (and Sharepoint-killer).

If you use Cyrus IMAPd as your IMAP backend, you even get shared mailboxes. Horde's other modules also have excellent sharing support. Shared calendars, mailboxes, todo lists, addressbooks, etc. Turba, the addressbook module, supports LDAP directories. Horde's other modules also have support to grab bits of info from LDAP.

I highly recommend Horde. I used to use it a lot more than I do know. When that was the case, I was also a regularly submitter of patches to the project (I helped mostly the last year 3.0 was still unreleased).

While Hula may look prettier, I find Horde to be much more functional.

Of course, there are plenty of things to be done... So, start using it and start submitting patches!

This reminds me a interesting article JMZ wrote on the subject of groupware. It's worth reading just for the quote "How will this software get my users laid", but it's got some good points that are relevant here. I daresay Google's been reading it too.

With their talents and GMail's strengths, it looks like they're ready to come out with just what JMZ is proposing. Which may make Hula dead in the water, but we'll just have to wait and see...

Hula's actually an Open Source Netmail, but they're going to be porting major new features from Groupwise to Hula.

Web apps non-modifiable?

The source code that generated that HTML might not be modifiable. The php scripts of a GPL'd website can be modified by someone else and not have to redistribute the source because they aren't distributing the modified source. they have it sitting on some server somewhere not copying itself. Most web-apps don't even release their source code.. see digg.com, del.icio.us, gmail, etc. That's why there are open source equivalents of these.. respectively: pligg, scuttle, and the Hula Project

Brett Smith of the FSF just email me today to notify me of the Affero General Public License, which requires the source code of the site to be available to anyone who receives content generated by the site.

Let me highjack this for a moment and expand to the Windows platform -

Are there any decent calendaring applications that let me /subscribe/ to online calendars?

Plenty of programs will import iCal calendars (which seems to be the most popular format), but it's a one-time thing. I'm looking for something more like RSS - import what's there now, and check back on a regular basis for updates.

Importing isn't very helpful if I have to do it manually every couple days.

I think the time is ripe for a new kind of calendar application. Most calendars programs are pretty simple and assume there's just one person involved - you. The assumption is any event on the calendar is one that you are involved in. There's not much notation for differentiations like "This is something I'm doing" and
"This is something I'm interested in"

Here's a use case. I open my calendar program. I go to my custom views for "entertainment". I check out what movies are showing next week, what plays, what concerts, sports events, etc. I see my favorite band is coming to town, so I mark that entry. Now, if I go back to "my" calendar, I see that concert. Two days later, the bassist gets sick and the concert is postponed two weeks. When I open my calendar program, it alerts me that the event that I was interested in has changed.

Nothing I have found comes close to this. To be honest, most were just plain painful to use, and none had anything close to my dynamic calendars ideal.

There's some hope. Nat Friedman started the Hula Project last year (though JMZ had some reservations -- a good read, as Jamie's obversations usually are) which is open source and has the backing of Novell. I'm not sure if they've actually gotten anywhere, though; the open source landscape is littered with failed projects that started off as a code-dump from some major corporation. But at least someone seems to have the same idea and is trying to make a go of it...

Is Hula maybe what you seek? If not, is it hackable to what you want it to be?

Novell have already started the Hula Project to try and meet this need.

• iFolder - http://www.ifolder.com/
• openSUSE - http://www.opensuse.org/
• Mono - http://www.mono-project.com/
• Hula - http://www.hula-project.org/
• Diva - http://www.diva-project.org/
• Tango - http://www.tango-project.org/
• Beagle - http://www.beaglewiki.org/
• Better Desktop - http://www.betterdesktop.org/

Check out Knowledge Tree. They have a fairly polished webdav-based DMS, and are going to write a MS plugin for it as well (Plugin not open source). It has LDAP integration, and versioning. I plan to install it and goof around once I get my website back up and running, and get a couple of spare computers to hook everything up on.

Hopefully, I'm looking to get a Hula, Knowledge Tree, Fedora Directory, (I hate OpenLDAP, and I don't want to pay for Novell's) server, with pGina for Windows client authentication. I haven't tried OpenOffice with a WebDav server backend, but if that worked with revisioning, you have all the parts for a completely open-source server/infrastructure that meets the requirements that I mentioned. I just don't know if I'm going to have time to ever put it together, and some projects aren't mature enough to completely replace their MS counterparts. Hula especially, as right now it has only limited client support for all the applications, but it supports LDAP, and it's not a bunch of recycled parts with no management parts like Kolab. They should rename that project Kobble. But hopefully soon, all the parts will be production ready.

Man do I go off topic.

Check out Novell's Hula Project

We tried Mozilla Calendar/Sunbird with a WebDAV server (even though it deleted two calendars upon upload and barfed on a third, my office loves Sunbird's interface)

It seems that AJAX, while being a rather old idea, has taken over all new webapps these days. From Gmail to the Hula Project to the fantastic looking Zimbra Collaboration Suite, this reduced reliance on the old client => server model is a great step. I found more info on Kahuna beta from someone who wrote about it back in August.

Now that I'm playing with Ruby on Rails I'll be very interested in the next 'killer app'; a Ruby on Rails/AJAX based webapp client. ...drool...

(I forgot, again, to check "use txt"...why isn't it default dammit...)

Funny...we're thinking about the same thing: recently I've realised that adress http://calendar.google.com/ (as opposed to http://boo.google.com/ for example) is actually configured on their server and working, although right now it points only to their search site. Could they be preparing for something? :) I mean...why configure the adress at all?
And half a year ago I mailed Google with proposition that they can perhaps do something like Hula
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html (worth reading IMHO...)
http://hula-project.org/
http://www.nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005
http://nat.org/2005/august/hula.html - how it looks now
Hmmm...easy webcalendar, with parts made "public" so other people can see what you're planning partly, and integration with Gmail to announce something automatically to others/retrieve their calendars/etc.
Another feature that isn't mentioned anywhere and would be great IMHO - some kind of collage of few webcalendars (of others) on one, yours, so you can adjust...
I actually submitted this recently to /. but it got rejected...oh well, fvck this.

But back on topic.
I should say "ignore me", I remember suddenly that on my own computers I haven't had acces to the net through most of last year :P
However...I DID noticed extremelly high, compared to previous times, email usage on my part...I guess thanks to something that Gmail done right and you probably mention.
(BTW, too bad I never played with IMAP really...but I haven't stumbled upon any free provider that I know wouldn't suck and any client for that matter...but when you think about it, Gmail is conceptually very similar to IMAP...)

Funny...we're thinking about the same thing: recently I've realised that adress http://calendar.google.com/ (as opposed to http://boo.google.com/ for example) is actually configured on their server and working, although right now it points only to their search site. Could they be preparing for something? :) I mean...why configure the adress at all? And half a year ago I mailed Google with proposition that they can perhaps do something like Hula http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html (worth reading IMHO...) http://hula-project.org/ http://www.nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005 http://nat.org/2005/august/hula.html - how it looks now Hmmm...easy webcalendar, with parts made "public" so other people can see what you're planning partly, and integration with Gmail to announce something automatically to others/retrieve their calendars/etc. Another feature that isn't mentioned anywhere and would be great IMHO - some kind of collage of few webcalendars (of others) on one, yours, so you can adjust... I actually submitted this recently to /. but it got rejected...oh well, fvck this. But back on topic. I should say "ignore me", I remember suddenly that on my own computers I haven't had acces to the net through most of last year :P However...I DID noticed extremelly high, compared to previous times, email usage on my part...I guess thanks to something that Gmail done right and you probably mention. (BTW, too bad I never played with IMAP really...but I haven't stumbled upon any free provider that I know wouldn't suck and any client for that matter...but when you think about it, Gmail is conceptually very similar to IMAP...)

Replace http://hula-project.org/ with http://zimbra.com/ in your post and the statement becomes false how?

Brian

Personally, I'm looking forward to hula http://hula-project.org/ because it's the sane combination of an enterprise class email platform (netmail) with sensible, link based calendaring and works with pretty much any client. No forced web interface or one program only support. Personally I hope the idea catches on with more people. I can't wait for a point release!

http://www.hula-project.org/Hula_Server

Check out the new cal for Hula http://hula-project.org/Hula_Server - amazing work.

And the front end to the webmail for Zimbra http://www.zimbra.com/

Really, really nice stuff.

Look at using Novell NetMail with Novell eDirectory.

It's fast, cost effective, standards based, scalable - and it runs on Linux, Windows, Solaris - or even NetWare.

For 100 users it will be just great.

If you want open source - and depending on your acceptance of 'newness and risk' - look at Hula - again based on the NetMail codebase.

It's unfortunate you got so many junk answers to your query (e.g. "resign", gmail, .mac, etc). I had a server running ~15,000 accounts on a Pentium 133 with IMail 7 a while back. It wasn't pretty, but mail got sent and received as it should.

Hula claims to scale pretty well, integrate with ClamAV and SpamAssassin, and have lots of other cool gimicks for calendars and such. For 1 million accounts, I'd get some sort of dedicated spam/virus filter, though.

Novell's created an open-source mail server project called Hula that's based in part in part from their original NetMail codebase. It's aim is to provide a mail server that's easy to use and also scalable. Disclaimer: I haven't tried it, but have only heard about this.

Now, if you want a system that scales to tens of thousands of users, you are going to need to get something a little bigger than this, you are going to need to get a mail system that can distribute the messages over a number of servers. That is something I have not researched.

It might be called Hula: http://www.hula-project.org/

the Lucene (http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene) indexer will be inplememtned within Hula the web and cal application (http://hula-project.org/Hula_Server) made from open sourced Novell NetMail code. Samples of the search engine have been comitted and should start functioning within weeks, just in time for the new cal UI, which you can now view a demo of here: http://nat.org/2005/august/hula.html That's looking to be an amazing app...

Not finished yet, but it might be something you're looking for...

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
http://www.nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005
http://hula-project.org/

Free account:
http://nat.org/2005/june/#Planet-Hula

>So if you have less than 150,000 accounts you can do it with just one server. I'd like to see
>an open source mail package that can live up to that particular boast.

Try Hula.

-Mark

Personally I think these solutions only mimic the problems that Exchange had, why not go a different direction? My money is on Hula, the great open source project launched by Novell with 20,000 lines of code from their proven NetMail. New versions of NetMail will be built from Hula's codebase, so it will be used in large companies/implementations. It's come a LONG way since February, and I have it running on FreeBSD currently. If interested, hit the mailing list, and we'll help you out.

Try this:

http://hula-project.org/

While the idea of OpenSUSE certainly sounds good, I have to wonder out loud if it will also go down the ugly, almost-dead, stagnant route that the Hula project went. As you might remember, in February Novell also open sourced the Novell NetMail product and called it Hula. They promised Hula would be "the apache of collaboration software". In reality the Hula web site has not been updated since then, and the FAQ still has phrases like "We will be providing instructions for doing this sometime soon, watch this space!" and it also says it is not production ready - the same as in February. Really Novell, as much good as you've done, you've got to put some muscle behid the OSS projects you toss out in the wild, like Sun has done with OpenOffice.org

You're going to want to check out the recently open-sourced Hula. It's based on NetMail's code, and from here on out, where Hula goes, NetMail will follow.

It's hard to implement a system like this properly...although now that you've given me the idea I might give it a try sometime.

Remember, your kids won't be happy if you're able to go through their email without them having any way to keep at least some of their messages private. But I'm 15 so I am slightly biased in this area ;)

It could be an interesting project for me to try out though...have you got any ideas on how I'd go about it? Modifying something like Hula perhaps? I don't know too much about working with mailservers, I've used Postfix and Hula, but that's it.

Hula seems to have a lot of killer-calendar potential but probably has a little ways to go. I installed it yesterday and I'm starting to play around with it. Any positive/negative experiences?

Hula: Hula is a calendar and mail server. We want to build a real web-based calendar: to make it trivially easy to publish a calendar, to invite anyone with an email address to an an appointment and process their RSVPs, to get to your calendar via HTML or RSS or with an instant messenger or with SMS.

It's an actively developed open-source derivative of Novell's NetMail

-metric

Having a calendar client is all fine and good, but until open source calendar servers are as ubiquitious as Apache, a calender client isn't going to be a lot of use.

An especially promising initiave in this are is the Hula project.

Hula project is funded by Novell.http://hula-project.org/General_FAQ#Relatio nship_with_Novell Don't think that Novell will ever support Netscape Directory when they have a better (eDirectory) alternative. Integration with Openldap might be a possibility. Netscape...doubtful

Can RH possibly integrate the http://hula-project.org/ into this roll out? I would really like to have THE non-M$ directory/email/calendaring system running for my school district: single sign-on and email accounts for teachers, staff, students, parents... with Mac OS X Server directory delegation, Kerberos, etc.

A killer kombination for Open Source.

You really should scope out hula.
Very smooth and getting better fast. Lots of cool things happening around it. LDAP backend coming soon. Based on Novell's NetMail.
Enjoy.

Hula

Will it get a 22 year old college student laid like Hula?

To see what Hula is about go to Hula Server site. You can also view a few screen shots

To see what Hula is about go to Hula Server site. You can also view a few screen shots

Not at all! Only HULA *H*elps *U* get *LA*id
http://www.hula-project.org/
But then I think you knew that!

Replying to myself:

http://www.hula-project.org/index.php/Mailbox_File _Structure

It uses mbox. VERY disappointing. Hopefully there is/will be some sort of plugin structure to get it to support Maildir (without having to use an alternate IMAP store) or a more robust storage format.