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| Author | Beautifying my Berries? (Read 29961 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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68040
512 MB  Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done ! 
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on: February 18, 2023, 17:28
I finally managed to get my vintage e-mail client to send & receive e-mails via stunnel by switching to Mulberry. The Berry wurks for IMAP and POP and it has all the bells and whistles I was looking for. But it just looks so ugly. :O Is there any way to beautify Mulberry, via Skins or hacks, to make it more Appearance savvy? PS: Next stop -> trying to SSH via stunnel to modern day servers. |
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Last Edit: February 18, 2023, 17:51 by 68040
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MTT
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256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer
Reply #1 on: February 19, 2023, 01:27
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Yeah, that was one of my uploads to the MG. I had used that email client years ago, and thought it was no oil painting, even back then  But, function over form here, 68040. It works in 68k classic Macs and B2. I don't know of any prettyfiers for it, there may be, I just don't know of any.
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #2 on: February 19, 2023, 03:30
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Thx for that upload. Yeah, it has all the bells and whistles I was looking for but gosh, them icons are just so ... ugly. Took me half an hour to find some font that made at least the e-mail list panel look a bit more readable.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023
Reply #3 on: February 19, 2023, 08:12
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Knezzen and me had been testing e-mail clients for System 7 some time ago. At one point Mulberry was our favorite - function-wise. It works, as you noted. But the interface is ugly and so unintuitive, ignoring nearly all Macintosh best practices. I ended up using Musashi instead on 68k which is much kinder to the eye. I had some occassional crashes on my IIci, but nothing too wild. Downside is it has no IMAP support. I don't know of any mods to Mulberry. You should be able to replace the icons with some resediting. However, you won't be able to fix the strange window logic / functionality.
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #4 on: February 19, 2023, 11:32
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Well, Mulberry also has features like bouncing mails, identities and other "Swiss knife" highlights that most end user clients don't. Featurewise only Outlook can compete, but for some bizarre reason that corporate beast refuses to communicate straight with stunnel. It always comes back with decryption errors.
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #5 on: February 19, 2023, 11:54
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Update: I revisited Musashi and unfortunately I have to confirm my last memories of it. It looks sooo nice, but falls woefully short of features. Not just that it doesn't support IMAP (which by itself is a big drawback), but it also has only limited support for connection encryption, offers next to no automation for mail forwarding, handling, group distribution. Musashi's address book is a bad joke, I can't even change the location of my mail store and there are next to no options for the handling of the mail that I do have downloaded - crammed into the prefs folder of my system drive? (who the f*ck came up with that BS?!) Mulberry has a decent address book, with nicknames, shortcuts, address completion a.s.o. It offers rules for timed message deletion, grouping of messages by importance, status, labeling, leave POP mail on server but delete remote when deleted locally and and and. I can chose my mail store freely, save my prefs under different names and create separate mail identities that I can assign to accounts to specify how incoming and outgoing mails are handled. It has several options for receipt, delay or error notification, timed refresh or uploads of messages. Multiple forwarding of e-mails and auto-archiving rules. I could go on like this for hours but it all boils down to the (ugly) fact, that the developers of Mulberry spend their time working the features while the competition wasted it for the good looks. I wish they could have combined those two, but I guess you can't have 'em all. 
Last Edit: February 19, 2023, 12:02 by 68040
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #6 on: February 20, 2023, 02:32
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Announcement of gorgeous victory: Hold the presses, ring the church bells and oil up them virgins! I managed to connect to my hotmail account via Mulberry and stunnel. No proxy and no Garden roundabout needed. And since hotmail is basically nothing but Outlook on steroids, this proves that I can hook up to any corporate mail server from my vintage Mac setup (at least as long as they don't make any demands as to a specific e-mail client). Next stop: Google Mail  PS: 6000 mails that got staked up in there ever since I gave up on Thunderbird. And Mulberry slurps them all down like lemon juice.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #7 on: February 20, 2023, 10:00
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Well done and congrats! I view Musashi differently, it's small and very responsive even on slower 68k machines, it looks nice and has all the features I'd want from an e-mail program. But then I do send maybe 2-3 e-mails a week from it, so definitely not a power user. Depending on your needs, your mileage may vary, of course.
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #8 on: February 20, 2023, 10:20
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I've got a dozen or so mailboxes to manage and if I am on project I got to follow draconian rules for handling mail. So yeah, just like in a woman I need more than just a pretty face (albeit pretty doesn't hurt  ).
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #9 on: February 20, 2023, 11:53
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Replacing individual icons in the resources part by hand proved too cumbersome. Its not just the part of finding the right icon, one by one, but also sizing them just right. That would take days if not weeks to complete. Does anybody know a good looking version of Mulberry for PowerPC which I could still dissect with Resourcerer to copy over selected icon sets? Luckily enough each set of icons is named in clear speech, so they should be easy enough to replace.
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #10 on: February 21, 2023, 21:46
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Got to bump this one. Also, I'm really proud of myself here. I managed to stunnel myself to every major and minor e-mail provider by now and I'm certain I could even stunnel to some websites lieks this. But what's the use w/o dreaded Java? Yet MacSSH will surely benefit from this in the future. Finally I am fully SSL capable. Now all I am missing is a modern day icon set fit for Mulberry. That shouldn't be too much to ask for. Somebody out there must have a Mulberry version that looks good with an icon set that can be harnessed for 68k!
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #11 on: February 22, 2023, 09:57
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Not sure about Mulberry icons. From what I remember, it wasn't really much popular 'back in the day'. Have you tried searching for Mulberry + iconpack or something? In any case, I'll keep an eye open! But you may be out of luck and have to use your own creative energies :-)
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #12 on: February 22, 2023, 10:48
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Too busy on too many fronts 2 hunt 4 icons. My landlord is trying to "motivate" me to move outta this place and I guess he might be succeeding.
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cballero
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1024 MB Posts: 1179 System 7, today and forever
Reply #13 on: February 23, 2023, 05:16
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68040, how does stunnel work? Do you set it up on a host, like your Linux OS and run it there or somewhere else on your LAN network? Then your web clients proxy into it somehow? I went to their site but didn't go past the screenshot page, but it looks like it works that way. I'm excited to see how well it does simple https websites, since I imagine Google's drive to make the entire Internet https is messing with a lot of older and simpler sites that can play nice with our outdated 68k web browsers but are being forced to serve secured websites by the search giant.
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #14 on: February 23, 2023, 13:02
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cballero - All that SSL does is to put an encryption layer around your data traffic. Nothing more. Its secured on both ends by public/priv key certificates, to prevent rerouting or man in the middle attacks (I hope that one doesn't get gender confusion, too). Despite the beauty of the basic concept behind it, it has many flaws that make me question the use of https'ing each and every website, no matter how benign its content. For one, the authenticity of most public certs floating around out there is a joke - to put it politely - as pretty much anyone with Internet access and as mitten of creativity can apply for one of those and it will be granted. But be it as it may, the main reason why vintage Macs can't participate in this secured chit chat anymore is that their encryption ciphers have by now been retired for security reasons. Some got cracked while others where just proven to be crackable in academic theory. So here comes STunnel, which was actually designed to allow for the encryption of random, non-secured content over the net. It runs on your local machine where it accepts data packages (secured or not) on a port you specify on your end. Beware of port conflicts, so choose a[ny] number that is still free. You start the thing as a daemon in background. It can be done in foreground as well, but that mode should only be used for debugging purposes. Now stunnel negotiates with the recipient (1 port per target and protocol) and once a connection has been established it shows in the log file. If the config file contains errros stunnel terminates. Thus make sure you get it right (-> /etc/stunnel.conf or /etc/stunnel/<...>) and the daemon is active, before cussing out your Mac program. You can try to activate some (not many) legacy ciphers in stunnel, to make it more compatible with older Mac programs. But that doesn't really make sense as long as its all running your local, private network. It might only make the outgoing connection less secure. So if your app can not negotiate an encryption cipher with stunnel, then its best to make it send the data to stunnel unsecured. stunnel then takes each package, wraps it in an SSL layer and sends it out to the recipient. Once the recipients answers, the same process happens in reverse. It is totally transparent to your local application. All you do there is exchange domain names and port numbers. The true magic lies in the stunnel config file, which takes some getting used to as it has only a rudimentary "structure: (if you want to call it that at all). So do your googling and lots of trial & error, but once you got the hang of it the doors fly open into a world of possibility. IMPORTANT: When you set up stunnel, follow the initial steps religiously. Create the local cert, assign the right permissions, start in debugging mode until you have it working OK and so on. Because if any of your initials fail than no amount of hand wringing can compensate for it later on. I for example once overlooked a failure to terminate stunnel running in the background and almost threw away a perfectly good config file, because I could not get a change to work that I had put in there. Well, you can only have 1 process occupy 1 port at a time and thus the existing stunnel would prevent any new one to succeed with the changed settings. And as I am running in a chroot jail, simply reloading the config changes via init.d command didn't work. But one "killall" later I was a happy camper again. The main obstacle for browsing the web this way (besides Java and HTML5) would be the need to specify 1 port for each website you plan to visit. Now that would be a real pain the rear.
Last Edit: February 23, 2023, 13:07 by 68040
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