Cyrusoft International, Inc. announced this week a February 2 ship date for the UNIX-based version of their Mulberry E-mail Client package.

Mulberry v2.0.6 for UNIX has been in beta testing mode since May of last year, and the Beta 2 release that was put out on December 8 certainly shows the polish of a good, long beta cycle when I tested it this week.

The Mulberry beta comes neatly packaged in a tarball file, ready to pop into your Home directory for decompressing and running. Mulberry is geared to run on several flavors of UNIX, including Linux, LinuxPPC 2000, Solaris8/Sparc, and Solaris8/x86. While I was able to run Mulberry in demo mode on a SuSE 7 box, it was obviously a lot smoother on a RedHat 6.2 box. This is consistent with Cyrusoft's listed compatibility with Red Hat 5.2+.

When you crack open the tarball and run the binary, you are asked to either provide a registration or run the program in a 30-day demo mode. The version I downloaded was set to expire on January 31, two days before the official release of this app.

Running the beta in demo mode does cripple some functionality, such as the ability to create additional "cabinets" for grouping e-mail messages. Nor could I create more than one mailbox.

Despite these issues, I found Mulberry for UNIX to be a fairly robust and tidy e-mail app. Controls were intuitive, with just enough graphics on them to be informative without being goofy. Mailbox setup could handle IMAP, POP, and local mail servers, depending on what you need.

Security-minded users will like the SSL transport-layer security encryption capability Mulberry has with any SSL/TLS-compatible IMAP or POP server, as well as the PGP encryption plug-in you can purchase separately.

Mulberry has its own address book, which was nicely integrated with the rest of the client. And not only were signature files accessible (a common requirement these days), but you can also customize your Reply-to header.

While the pricing structure for the UNIX version has been announced at $35.95 for the base version and $39.95 with the additional PGP plug-in. Cyrusoft's multi-license structure allows users to install their copy of Mulberry on as many of the user's machines that are required.

In all, I found this tool to be on a par with any of the graphic e-mail clients out there for Linux, and it's certainly worth a look by anyone who is seeking a GUI mail client.