Filed under: Software, Blast From the Past
Outspring puts the final nail in QuickMail's coffin
Back in the summer of 1989, as an eager, green college intern for a major publishing company, I arrived on my first day of work to find that my office wasn't so much an office as it was a storage room. Sure, it had ample space and ventilation, but it was a glorified closet all the same -- home to my desk, shelves and boxes, and a few critical pieces of gear. Along with the network hubs for the floor, we had a rather sexy test system (a NeXT Cube, complete with 400dpi laser printer!) and an SE/30 running an unfamiliar email server. One of my tasks for the summer was to administer this server, which (considering the speed of delivery) bore the unlikely moniker "QuickMail." With the ability to connect to other QM servers over intermittent dial-up links, offering gateways to public systems like AppleLink & CompuServe, and UUCP capability for Internet mail servers (yeah, old school), QuickMail Server and its companion client app made managing email for a small Mac LAN straightforward and easy. Future versions of the system expanded to offer webmail and POP compatibility, allowing for a heterogeneous mix of clients, but the original QM never lost its vintage UI or no-frills attitude.
Nearly 20 years later, Outspring, the inheritor of the QuickMail product line from original developer CE Software, has made it official: QuickMail is dead. Support for the product has ended, and users are encouraged to pony up the $39 to upgrade to Outspring Mail, the successor client -- as for the server, good luck (I'd recommend Kerio, Zimbra, EIMS or OS X Server, and Emailchemy to handle moving the user data). Farewell, QM; you and your sweetheart/nemesis Eudora enjoy your well-deserved retirement.
Written by Michael Rose.
[via Macintouch]
_thumbnail.jpg "Take a stroll down memory lane")
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
InSaNeBoY said 11:03AM on 7-28-2008
How funny, we used to run QM on an SE/30 here too. Kept chugging away in a closet until 2003 when we got an xserve. Now i use that SE/30 for playing beyond dark castle when it gets slow.
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Ryan Trevisol said 11:09AM on 7-28-2008
Who's "TUAW Blogger?" I'm guessing it's Robert, but this, along with the slowness of posting at other weblogs, inc blogs today is disturbing.
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d said 11:43AM on 7-28-2008
Michael Rose, says so at bottom of the post.
Ryan Trevisol said 11:46AM on 7-28-2008
Yes, I saw that after I hit the button.
It's still different. . . that's all I'm saying.
required said 11:48AM on 7-28-2008
I actually loved QuickMail and on reflection think of it more as a precursor to email. It had some neat features in its day (early to mid '90s).
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dzillion said 3:50PM on 7-28-2008
Always liked the ability to "unsend" a mail before the recipient had looked at it...
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Fritz Laurel said 4:19PM on 7-28-2008
Yeah, in the day, QM was The Shizzle. I always felt the best feature was the IM. Of course, in our office, we used QM and its IM more for, ahem, non-business activities...
I once had the write an extension/module/thingy with Lightspeed C (or was it Pascal) to connect it to a client's internal mail system.
And we also used QM to link most of the schools in the state. Ahh, those were the days...
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Richard Markuson said 2:58PM on 7-29-2008
Yeah - it was pretty cool. I converted a small office from something called "Inbox" - and then when AOL rolled out, there was an AOL/QM gateway that would look in the "generic" mail from AOL for a name it recognized and route the mail internally - all over dialup. Boy those were the days!
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