Columba 1.0 "Holy Moly" Released

Frederik Dietz writes to tell us that after three years of hard developement Columba 1.0, codename "Holy Moly!" is ready for general consumption. Columba is an email client written in Java that boasts a 'user-friendly graphical interface with wizards and internationalization support.' Slashdot covered an interview with the Columba team earlier this year.

Comments

the question I have

[Anonymous Coward]

The question I have though, is what makes this better than the other dozen free email clients?

--
Mod this up, and your penis size will increase by 10-20 percent in volume.

Columba or columbia

[SysKoll]

Columbia is an email client written in Java

Columba, not columbia.

When the team embarked for these three years of develomment, they luckily didn't foresee that their 1.0 release would be announced on Slashdot with a spelling mistake in the name. Otherwise, they would have played videogames instead.

Looks like Thunderbird

[MSch]

I have to say, I expected something like Lotus Hannover, but to me it looks like a copy of Thunderbird implemented in Java with icons from Evolution.

Directlink to screenshots: 1, 2, 3.

I don't get one thing

[Ilgaz]

Why people act like Java is dead on Slashdot? More Karma?

They coded a full featured IMAP4/POP3 client which becomes standard in India schools and works on everywhere.

Interface? Don't get me started about Yahoo and Gmail. For example, Yahoo must be the simplest pop3 server on the planet without any APOP or TLS options. I don't even hope for IMAP.

I already switched to Spamcop with 15 mb or so storage, at least they serve IMAP with decent spam tools.

I refuse to comment about gmail on slashdot.

Re:I don't get one thing

[El Cubano]

works on everywhere.

Please be sure and qualify your statement properly. It should read: works on everywhere where Java is.

Java is not platform independent. It is a platform as much as Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Irix, Windows, vxWorks and others are platforms. It just happens that Java has been designed to run on other platforms.

Re:3 years

[Anonymous Coward]

they invested 3 years of their life into the development of this project that alone deserves credit

3 years, hah that's nothing. Just wait until Duke Nukem Forever comes out.

Hey, Cool!

[RAMMS EIN]

So how much do I need to pay to get my software advertised on Slashdot?

- mailvisa: simple bayesian spam filter in Ruby (beats most filters in Debian w.r.t. performance, precission, recall, and memory usage)

- logalize :analyzer for Apache log files, written in Perl. Simple, so it's easy to customize.

- wake: remotely wake up machines using wake-on-lan magic packets (written in Perl).

- detach: start commands detached from the terminal (keeps them from dying when the terminal exits)

- chrootexec: run commands inside a chroot jail, as a normal user.

- Perlcookies: random quotes from fortunes files (nice for sigs), but much smaller than the fortune package. Written in Perl.

More on my website, and many more on my harddisk, but these are the more useful ones. While you're at it, take a look at my esasys.

Re:Why would I prefer this...

[NoOneInParticular]

tsk, foulmoothing on so little pretext. Yes the JVM is written in an unsafe language. This simply means that the JVM is a single point of failure. However, if the JVM is safe, all java apps are safe. Now try to argue the same thing with every C-app, and envision the amount of effort that goes into (a) ensuring that the JVM is safe and (b) ensuring that every c-application on the face of the earth is safe. Then estimate the chances of success for (a) and (b). Furthermore try to envision the amount of effort that has gone into ensuring that the Java sandbox is foolproof, compared with the effort in avoiding buffer overruns in your random c-app. Only when carefully thinking this through, start calling people dumbasses, dumbass.

Re:Written in Java

[Quattro Vezina]

Perhaps you should sit down and have a face-to-face talk with those half-dozen or so Azureus users.

I can't run Azureus for more than a few hours without it eating all of my RAM and bringing down my entire system. I have 1GB of RAM and 1GB of swap, and Azureus eats through all of it like lightning. When it does finally eat through my RAM and swap, my machine completely freezes, forcing me to hard-reset.

If I do manage to kill Azureus before it does that, X will hold on to the majority of Azureus' resources, making my system highly sluggish until I restart X.

It's a damn shame, because Azureus is the only BT client with an interface I can tolerate, but the sheer havoc it wreaks on my system is inexcusable.

First impressions under OS X

[ciurana]

Greetings,

I just downloaded and tried to configure Columba 1.0 under OS X 10.4.2. My verdict? Skip it.

The people behind Columba used some widget library that's system dependent. This is throwing a number of null pointer exceptions under OS X with the Java 5 JVM. They all relate to something called "jgoodies"; they're doing something that appears to be system dependent.

One of the main reasons for using this would be portability. They seemed to have missed the boat altogether since it doesn't run under an otherwise standad Java configuration! Why bother with writing a Java application if it's not cross-platform? Why use non-standard widget libraries? Attaining cross-portability in Java is hard enough as it is; these guys chose to make it even harder. Thank you for blowing away the only reason I might've had for using the Columba email client.

You can see a screen capture showing the exceptions here:

http://eugeneciurana.com/personal/images/Columba-1 _0.gif

Can't say if this works at all because I was unable to tell Columba about my IMAP server. I got another of those jgoodies-related exceptions when I tried to select something other than POP3.

Cheers,

E