Mulberry achieved something which is pretty hard. It made telnetting to the IMAP port of your mail server seem like an enjoyable user experience.

I hated it. Half the inferface was just odd, the other half just looked ugly and though you couldn’t put your finger on it, you knew it was some how slowing your trawl through email down.

Eg. The search box. How hard can search a few mail folders be? you search them… Mulberry would show cryptic icons next to each briefly, which you had no idea what they meant, and then take you to the search results of the first mail folder… ok so the first folder either had none, or at least not the email i wanted… how to get to the next folder i just searched, the original dialogue had gone and clicking on the folder showed the folder as per normal. After years of using it I never figured it out, and I must have tried every possible method.

That’s just one example, but the whole interface was odd.

For some people, they would create a new folder but it wouldn’t show up. Create it again, and it would produce an error saying it already existed. I would find the missing mail folder (a file on the UNIX server) sitting in the person’s home directory, instead of within the ‘Mail/’ directory. And yet, others, with identical settings – especially regarding server locations and directories – would be fine.

Or there’s the fact that to create a folder you have to right click on an exact bit of right space to do so. Or that unlike every other program in the world, going in to preferences and changing a setting and then clicking OK to close would not save the change. That would be too easy. No, you have to click on ‘save defaults’ – obviously – and then OK for the setting to be remembered.

Oh and the same company had a webmail client, called silkymail. This was a joke. It seems to be based on a early version of IMP/HORDE, only with the interface changed to look shit.

I only used this a few times. I never seemed to have much luck. If it worked at all, it would be go slow, or an essential row of icons would just not show up making it impossible to use. It had a fantastic feature that if you had more than a certain number of mail boxes, you had go to go to some non-obvious preferences page and set yourself to advance before being able to see all your mail folders. So imagine your average manager, with hundreds of folders, sitting at a conference and knowing to do that.

Anyway, the good news is it looks like they will be no more. The company is filing for bankruptcy. Which would be a sad thing, but if after 10 years you can’t get such basics as the GUI right then maybe it is for the best.