Yesterday evening I moved my mail server from a clunky old Windows 2003 server to a shiny new SLES 10 box.

I still use NetMail – but I had a couple of fun hours with the move.

First I looked at the state of Hula; some pretty broken RPMs that didn’t do much useful for me. Then I saw this post from Alex Hudson

So, Hula as a Novell project is basically over – Novell are no longer interested in any potential “Maui” product (which was going to be an upgrade path to Netmail users), the product group has been broken up, and at least one developer who was part of that group has now left Novell.

Bummer. Kinda confirms what I had found out internally a few weeks ago in planning the mail migration.

Then I saw this from Peter Teichman (who I really respect from his work on Red Carpet Enterprise at Ximian):

Novell no longer has anyone working full-time on
Hula.  As a team we have spent some time looking at where the Hula
project is and the opportunities in the market and in the end we had to
conclude that we couldn’t justify investing at the same level in Hula
going forward.  So those of us who have been developing Hula full-time
will be moving on to other roles and to other parts of the company.

So Netmail as it stands is somewhat orphaned. It’s pretty much end of life.

I’ve got Netmail running on SLES 10 without major pain; it does what I need. I’ll need to look around for the ‘what’s next’ some time next year – but for now I’m sorry to see Hula and Maui not move forward.