Gophermail roadmap
As expected, Gophermail 2.0 went production in summer of 2008. There have been initial rounds of bugfixes and enhancements to the virtual host framework. Some of this work was done at the request of METNET, which may be adopting Gophermail as their webmail platform.
Overall, we have had very good feedback to 2.0, and I'd like to thank everyone who helped with ideas, suggestions, and testing. The mobile version, in particular, has received a lot of comments and we're happy for that!
In the coming months, I'll be finalizing "styles" documentation on the Gophermail wiki. Style handling in 2.0 is very plug-and-play, and I look forward to having that documented for the U Community.
At this time, however, it's looking likely that Gophermail itself (the codebase) will be in bugfix-only mode going forward due to the strategic direction of the University. The lead developer (that's me, Brian Hayden) has moved on to a position with the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute.
In the near future I'll likely be integrating the concepts of Gophermail 2.0 into the latest version of the Prayer webmail package which it was based on. The major advantage to the newest Prayer is HTML templating, so changing the presentation (the 'V' in MVC, for those of you that like that language) will not require code changes.
This is a large project that will not happen overnight, but I consider it worthwhile to have a clean, efficient, modern open-source alternative to the mostly-poor PHP webmail offerings out in the wild. I'm also excited to fully integrate the web-services portions of the Gophermail 2 beta, which did not make it into production as a proper API.
Thanks again to all of you.