Roadmap for Archiveopteryx

At Oryx, we try to strike a balance somewhere between making promises we can't keep, and keeping our users entirely in the dark about our plans.

Easy installation, good documentation, stability and predictable behaviour are important to us.

Releases

Oryx generally releases a new server version every five or six weeks, and recommends that everyone upgrade twice per year.

Occasionally a release may be delayed by serious problems, or we may change our planning. More than 80% of the versions were released exactly as planned, two releases were advanced due to serious problems, and the remainder were delayed by one week.

There is no stable/unstable fork. Instead, new features are often disabled by default until we think they're stable enough. (If you're wondering about any specific feature, ask info@oryx.com.)

Customer satisfaction

We add features in the order asked for, more or less. We will do everything on this page eventually. What we'll do first is whatever our users are asking for — even if it isn't on this page.

To ask for features, send mail to info@oryx.com.

Mail server

Archiveopteryx will provide normal IMAP/POP service, with the features our users expect from regular mail servers. See «customer satisfaction» above.

We'll gradually implement many IMAP extensions, including the Lemonade extensions. We will support basic POP, but not many extensions. Sieve support is under active development.

We're keeping an eye on calendar and smarthost/mailhub functionality. We don't know whether it's something our users want.

Webmail gateway

In addition to IMAP/POP access, Archiveopteryx provide access via a webmail gateway, with powerful search functionality.

In some ways our webmail gateway resembles Google's Gmail, particularly regarding the user interface. Unlike gmail, we do not use any browser detection, and we mostly avoid javascript.

We require CSS support. Some features (e.g. showing all message header fields) require javascript. We test our webmail gateway against five common browsers, and do our best to avoid obscure features that might be incompatible with other browsers.

Archive usage

Oryx will provide an archive interface that can be used to present some mailboxes as a read-only archive on the web, along with search and view features to make large archives usable.

Much of the currently written code is shared with the webmail gateway.

Mail retention policy

In addition to the current scheme whereby deleted messages are retained for a configurable period, we plan to implement a system to specify which messages cannot be deleted, which messages must be deleted, and which may be.

Retaining mail is sometimes required by law. Automatically deleting mail can be desirable, too, for example to restrain resource usage without strict quotas.

Mail-handling logic

Archiveopteryx processes incoming mail using the Sieve language. Some current features include support for vacation messages and other autoresponses, time-sensitive handling (e.g. special handling of messages that arrive outside working hours) and more.

We're slowly extending this.

Relevant links

In case you have any questions, please write to info@oryx.com.