Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/POPmail

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was keep. Mailer Diablo 16:22, 28 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

POPmail[edit]

Hmmm. Alleged to be instrumental in moving higher education away from terminal based user interfaces and into a client-server metaphor. I'm having some difficulty verifying that claim. It would be more convincing if it were not one of a cluster of articles all created on the same day around a single software project and its people. I'd be much less sceptical if this reportedly significant former HyperCard stack had been documented rather earlier. Just zis Guy you know? 22:18, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

do a couple google searches of the old usenet archives for POPmail or "POPmail hypercard":[1][2] then do a google search of the usenet archives over the same time period for "Eudora":[3]17:57, 22 February 2006 Another Cat

Delete as nn. Appears to be an early hacked-together frontend for Post_Office_Protocol. Monkeyman^(talk) 22:57, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Strong keep and expand. POPmail is indeed an important piece of Internet history. I remember this program being all over the place back in the day. Here's the original announcement of the Hypercard stack (scroll down to the section that begins "We recently finished developing..."). --Aaron 00:21, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: The actual stack/program is available on this page, if anyone's interested. --Aaron 00:25, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Happy to believe you, but as any old-time Mac user knows, the world and his wife developed HyperCard stacks. Can you point me to some evidence of it being widespread back in the day? That was what I was looking for yesterday without much success. Just zis Guy you know? 09:59, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: This help page from the University of Minnesota's Academic Computing Services shows that they once supported POPmail as a standard Mac email client, and possibly still do for those stuck with very old Macs. (There's anecdotal evidence in the page info that they may have still been recommending it to their users as recently as 2001.) In any case, the screen grabs are obviously from System 7, so that puts the original version of this help page as dating from somwhere between 1991 and 1997. --Aaron 23:57, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: Here's a detailed POPmail how-to manual from UC Berkeley (warning: PDF format) dated February 1999. --Aaron 23:57, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, per Aaron. Kit O'Connell (Todfox: user / talk / contribs) 00:32, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
question: why is it spelt that way? what about pop3 (mail), what about pop (mail), etc...--CyclePat 05:20, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment: CyclePat, the software was called literally POPmail so titling the article POP (mail) would not be correct in this instance. This is distinct from POP, or Post Office Protocol which is a protocol for receiving e-mail. POPmail used POP but so do numerous other software packages. Kit O'Connell (Todfox: user / talk / contribs) 09:27, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Notable historical software. Georgewilliamherbert 20:35, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep as per reasons above. -Tim Rhymeless (Er...let's shimmy) 08:21, 28 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.