Novell has officially ended development of Hula, its open source email server stack. For those involved in the Hula community the news was not unexpected but it will be a shame to see go what once promised to bring a breath of fresh air into the rather staid life of open source email and webmail services.
History
In its prior, closed source life Hula was named NetMail and was sold as a lite alternative to GroupWise for webmail users. Back in early 2005 Novell open sourced Hula to great fanfare and pitched the project as a concise and up to date alternative to the postfix/imapd/Squirrelmail stack dominant amongst most Linux email solutions. The idea was a good one, the existing stack is a pain to configure, disjointed and the Squirrelmail component is really showing its age. Hula offered a complete, concise and functional alternative that was well tested and had an exciting development path plotted out.
Unfortunately for Hula problems began to rise very quickly. The underlying mail storage engine had significant problems requiring a complete rewrite and the 'Web 2.0' style interface which promised to blow people away took forever to emerge. The consequences of these problems set the project back significantly. The rewritten engine whilst significantly improved lacked a stable migration path for existing Hula users, trapping many in older versions and causing others to think twice before deploying or even testing the system. Delays in the interface put Hula significantly behind in terms of user experience when compared to its competitors like GMail, Yahoo Mail, Zimbra, Scalix and RoundCube.