Horde starts Crowdfunding for IMP Multi-Account feature: Funded after a week

Michael Slusarz of Horde LLC started a crowdfunding experiment: He offered a 3000 $ project at crowdtilt.com to back up development of the IMP multi-account feature. Multi-Account support allows users to manage multiple mail boxes within one horde account. The feature is meant to replace Horde 3’s fetchmail feature which has not been ported for Horde 4 and 5 because technically, it’s not desirable anymore.

Michael Slusarz: The old fetchmail functionality is not coming back. It simply doesn’t work coherently/properly in a PHP environment with limited process times (and is non-threaded).
The replacement MUST be the ability to access multiple accounts within a single session. But this is not a trivial change

After Slusarz started the fundraising campaign, long-time supporters and users of horde contributed funds.

Currently, after three days, more that 80% of funding have been raised. About 500 US $ are still missing. The change is not trivial and probably going into IMP 6.2 for Horde 5.

As mentioned previously, this is a multi-week project, at least from a project planning perspective. And that doesn’t include the bug-fixing that is likely to be significant, given the fact that this is 1) an invasive UI change and 2) is involving connections to remote servers.

That being said – this is something I personally would *really* like to see in IMP also, so I am willing to provide a discount and prioritize this over some other activities I am currently involved in.
[..]
* This won’t be available for IMP 6.1. This will go into 6.2, at the earliest.

The Horde IMP Webmailer is among the most popular webmail applications in the world. It is shipped with most widespread linux distributions like openSUSE and Debian and has been used to drive webmail and groupware applications for large-scale userbases all over the world.

Currently, Horde 5 / IMP 6 is integrated into the cpanel administration product.

Update: After roughly a week, by 2013-08-14 the crowdfunding tilted: 3090 USD had been contributed.

http://lists.horde.org/archives/imp/Week-of-Mon-20130812/055265.html

http://lists.horde.org/archives/imp/Week-of-Mon-20130812/055265.html
I proudly get to make the announcement that the IMP Multiple Accounts
feature has been fully funded, as we reached the funding goal on
Crowdtilt this afternoon: http://tilt.tc/Evs2

I wanted to take the opportunity to thank all of the contributors:

– Simon Wilson
– Luis Felipe Marzagao
– Ralf Lang
– Digicolo.net srl
– Elbia Hosting
– Thomas Jarosch
– Andrew Dorman
– Henning Retzgen
– Michael Cramer
– Harvey Braun
– SAPO/Portugal Telecom
– Matthias Bitterlich
– Allan Girvan
– Bill Abrams
– Markus Wolff
– CAIXALMASSORA (Jose Guzman Feliu Vivas)
– Wolf Maschinenbau AG (Samuel Wolf)

It feels good to put a definite milestone into the enhancement ticket:

http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/8077

Should be able to start on this soon… hopefully tomorrow. Still
undecided on which branch I’m going to do development in but I will
post information to the dev@ list once I decide. Those that
contributed may get status updates.

Once again, thanks to everyone for supporting the Horde Project. Not
only was this an interesting experience from my standpoint (hopefully
others as well), but now we will soon get a feature that is obviously
desired by a large portion of the user base.

michael

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