HP Ending OpenMail

Ron Harwood writes "Hewlett-Packard has announced that version 7.0 of OpenMail will be the last major release of the application. OpenMail is a pretty good competitor to MS Exchange and it can be used under Unix. Perhaps when HP decides to discontinue it as a product, they should open the source code." The ComputerWorld article says that this is the last *major* release - bug fixes and such will still come out. As well, they will provide support for the next five years, but it sounds like OpenMail may have reached the end of it's lifespan.

Comments

Um, Openmail is HIGHLY successful.

[belloc]

So, once again HP makes something innovative, OpenMail, and promptly bails out of the marketplace.

Whoa there, Chester. Check your facts before spouting. They didn't "promptly" bail out of anything. Openmail is the most popular UNIX-based corporate mail software on the market, and has been for something like 12 years. They have in the tens of millions of seats worldwide.

The reason that it's not more widely known, despite its widespread use is that it falls into a curious niche among mail solutions. Shops with mostly MS-based servers don't run Openmail, because it would require administrators to learn to use their keyboards (Openmail is CLI-administered). But smallish shops with UNIX-familiar admins can easily drop in a Linux box with a Free (speech/beer) mail solution.

Openmail finds its use somewhere in between: in UNIX environments that need highly-scalable solutions where some degree of collaboration is necessary. Openmail includes support for corporate directories, bulletin boards, Outlook MAPI, and some other features where OSS just doesn't cut it. I know, because I worked for three years trying to stay fully open source before I finally had to break down and install Openmail. LDAP just doesn't have functionality we needed (not LDAP's fault, Outlook just doesn't play nicely with it), and we needed some Public Folders functionality within Outlook, which we couldn't get on a large scale with any open source stuff. And there was no way in hell I was going to install Exchange.

The last thing is that, as reported in the ./ blurb, Openmail's support will continue for five years. Five years is an eternity in this market. If you're a sysadmin right now, think about what your organization's mail solution was five years ago. If you even had your current job five years ago, which is statistically unlikely (as if there's any other kind of unlikeliness), it is even more unlikely that your current mail setup is the same as it was five years ago.

Lots can happen in five years. They could decide to spin it off, they could decide to open-source it, they could change their minds and keep it, the government could discover some insidious MS plot to get rid of Openmail, etc. Their long-time corporate customers are pissed at this announcement, and might be able to sway them into taking one of the above courses of action. In fact, I'm pretty hopeful about it.

Openmail kicks ass, I love it, if you couldn't tell. I can support any mail user in my organization so easily, it's not even thinkable to move to Exchange, or back to sendmail/exim/qmail/whatever. Outlook clients, IMAP, POP, LDAP, it's fantastic. I know what I'll be using for (at least) the next three-four years, even if they aren't working on version 8.

Belloc (I don't work for HP, just a satisfied customer)

Re:Discontinuing Notice?

[dwm]

It is strange. It's bizzare. It's almost unheard-of in the computer biz.

It's... it's...

Ethical Behavior(TM).