Thanks to J Bradley, P Berkowitz, Neil, and B Freeman for their replies to my message of Feb. 7.

These comments made me think about some growing concern, for some of you, that I might never get to the final release version of eMA 4.10, and later. Although I have no such intention, I agree that the increasing delays might be getting rather annoying to many users.

The suggestions made included making it open-source or letting others take over, or something like that, so that some more experienced developers could help with it. Sounds good, but I have no idea how to do that, so I am not the best one to do it.

The delays between my messages and updates, even without the extra delays due to my recent computer problems, have been getting much longer than when I started eMA development 10 years ago (then called eMK), or the start of eMA-Talk 7 years ago. Even my response to your recent letters has taken 1.5 months! 

My "excuse" for this, and I have given many excuses for my shorter delays in the past, has usually been that my eMessage Archiver development work has always been a kind of hobby for me and a way to escape from the sometimes overwhelming and boring times pursuing my main kinds of research work that I generally love to do. 

The only really difficult work on eMA recently, for me, has come from trying to support Apple's Mail application, which involved a lot of tricky workarounds for features still missing in Mail's support for AppleScript. I am not really qualified to do such programming, nor did I know at first anything about the email standards, or Apple's odd way of implementing some of them. This stuff is quite uninteresting to me, and only the fact that I have used Mail for several years has kept me going with it. 

Not much of a refreshing change from other difficult work!

But the rest of the eMA work is still fun for me, if I am not feeling rushed. The problem is that I have simply had much less time for it, and less real need for the distraction, as my other work has become more and more interesting and time-consuming—even exciting.

As long as this slower and slower schedule of my eMA activities is OK with the users, than we are all satisfied with the situation. However, if some users, especially some that are also developers, are less than satisfied….

I am more than willing to let others take over most or all of the development of eMA, and perhaps make it an even better application than I am able to. If I stop being the main developer, I will also stop charging any shareware fees and make it more like free domain software. 

I have discussed this with a couple people in the past, though perhaps not on this list, but never got any follow-up from them about it. So I dropped it.

So, here's my offer, to anyone interested. I will continue for now on my much slower development pace, until someone or some group of developers comes up with a plan for how they can take it over, and are prepared to implement it. 

However, from a professional developer's point of view, much of the eMessage Archiver code is a kluge with minimal documentation. While I can discuss problems and explain most of what I have done, I am not prepared to bring it up to professional standards myself.

So, you might want to look at the current FMP database code, buttons, and menus, and the AppleScripts in eMArchiver, before offering to help. Nothing is locked in this version, so it is all there for your inspection. (Hint, much of the AppleScript code is in library files that are loaded as needed. These files are currently located inside the eMArchiver application bundle, though easy to locate in AppleScript with the "Bundle Contents" button.)

Maybe it is a snap for you guys, or maybe it is too much of a bother to try to fix. Perhaps you might even want to start over with it the "right" way. Let me know what you think.

I await your responses. Whatever they are, I won't be offended. Perhaps even relieved. ;-)