Grendel

» see mozilla.org/projects/grendel as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

"Nobody is actively maintaining Grendel, and it needs a lot of work before it will be usable. But there it is." That is Jamie Zawinski on 8 September 1998, releasing the source of a mail client nobody at Netscape was going to finish. In the same note he counted it up and observed that this made the third incomplete mail reader mozilla.org had open-sourced that year, then stopped to check whether it was really the third or only the second.

Grendel came out of Xena, a 1997 Netscape project to rewrite the whole of Navigator and Communicator in Java. The press called it Javagator. It was cancelled before it was finished, and the mail component was the piece furthest along, close to beta quality as a reader. It had a three-pane window and could compose a message, it spoke POP3 and could display IMAP folders, and its own documentation described the MIME parser as full-featured and extensible.

The code that went public was worse than the code that had existed. The GUI components would not compile. Sun's JavaMail API had moved on since the work was done, so the parts built against it no longer matched. Without the interface, as Zawinski noted, most of the features were not reachable in any practical sense.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the volunteers built ~

Then something unusual happened for an abandoned code drop: people showed up. By 2001 the project was being maintained by Jeff Galyan and Giao Nguyen, and the project page could report that Grendel compiled and that the basics of reading and sending mail worked. It also handled what the page called personalities, multiple identities on multiple accounts from a single client. There was working Mac OS X support through Apple's Project Builder, checked in with instructions about which files would show up red in the Files pane.

Ian Clarke, who had built Freenet, donated a package called GFilt, a learning filter that used genetic algorithms to generate mail filters from the shape of your existing folders. It was checked into the tree and never integrated. The page says as much and explains the reasoning in one line: it seemed good to make it available.

My own mail in 2001 came through Outlook Express on a TTNet line, and before that through whatever the university gave me. A cross-platform Java mail client aimed at power users was a thing I would have had no way to hear about, and no reason to install if I had.

~ the hiatus ~

The project page carries a date stamp, 08-Apr-2001, and under it a note about the maintainer. "Jeff (talisman) is taking a brief hiatus while he gets his company started. Please continue to feel free to contribute code and such to the Grendel project. Just don't expect to see much work coming from Jeff in the short term." Nothing about the page ever changed again.

What sat below that note was a table of outstanding issues, and it reads like a list of everything a mail client is. News needed .newsrc state keeping and the ability to post. POP3 needed to actually download mail to a local store. Incoming attachments were marked "needs to be implemented." HTML message viewing had its requirements summarized as "too many improvements needed to list here."

~ the page that outlived it ~

Mozilla's footer said "Last modified December 5, 2001" and kept saying it. The page went on serving that same 2001 content, hiatus note and unfinished issue table alike, until 19 July 2008. By 1 September 2008 the URL returned a 404.

Seven years is a long time for a webpage to keep promising that somebody will be back shortly.

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