I'm retiring

[John Goerzen]

Well folks, back in June of 2002, I made the first commit to the 
OfflineIMAP repo.  I never imagined I'd still be using it 8 years later. 
  After all, mail readers would get decent IMAP support soon, right?  right?

Well, despite all my attempts to stop using OfflineIMAP over the years, 
I failed repeatedly.  KMail added offline IMAP support, but it kept 
crashing and losing mail.  Thunderbird's didn't have a broad enough 
feature set.  Gnus was too slow, mutt didn't cache things and was slow, etc.

I have long considered OfflineIMAP "done", and haven't had time to work 
on it in a significant way in some time.

http://changelog.complete.org/archives/1463-moral-obligations-of-free-software-authors

In any case, I'm no longer using OfflineIMAP.  So it's time for me to 
retire from my maintainer hat -- something, incidentally, I've also 
tried and failed to do before (couldn't find someone to adopt it, or the 
person that did disappeared).  This time I'm not coming back even if 
that happens.

Thanks to all of you that sent patches, documentation, PayPal tips, 
words of thanks, even bug reports.  No thanks to all of you trying to 
make this thing talk to Exchange and bugging me when it didn't :-)

I know a lot of you like and use OfflineIMAP.  I'm glad of that; it's 
satisfying to have something I wrote out of an annoyance with mail 
readers find more broad use.

I would therefore like to do what I can to encourage the community to 
thrive better after my involvement than it did with it.  Suggestions on 
this are welcome, but here are some initial thoughts:

1. OfflineIMAP is already on github.  There are already three forks. 
Perhaps some of these people would start acting as patch integrators.

2. Github supports wikis (I have one on my OfflineIMAP github page) and 
issue trackers.  Someone could set those up.

3. The community could agree on the "canonical" new home of OfflineIMAP. 
  The person maintaining it could then produce periodic tarballs, etc.

4. When there is obvious consensus in the community and evidence of 
long-term stability, I will update all my links to point to the new home 
to give the project the greatest possible visibility.

5. Some person or group could volunteer to admin this list.

Thoughts?

-- John