Hello Jan,

1) From my understanding, SOGo packages meant for production use are - among 
others - distributed by sogo.nu, Debian (as part of their distribution) and 
mailcow.
Do the packages on sogo.nu actually differ from those provided in Debian - Is 
there a different feature set?

> Official SOGo packages are distributed on https://packages.sogo.nu - Nightly 
> packages are available for everyone, but release packages for commercial 
> subscribers (https://www.sogo.nu/commercial.html). We dot not maintain the 
> other repository so we can't tell if there are up to date and from which 
> commit/source they are built.

2) Reading through the documentation, it says that SOGo provides ActiveSync 
connectivity. However, there appears to be a certain ambiguity. Active Sync is 
listed as a feature, but CalDav Synchronizer is listed for Outlook 
connectivity. C.f. https://www.sogo.nu/about.html:
"SOGo particularly focuses on: (…) Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync“ vs. "Using 
the Outlook CalDav Synchronizer plugin, Microsoft Outlook users can fully share 
emails, calendars and contacts with other SOGo users.“ What’s point in 
focussing on ActiveSync but actually utilizing CalDav Synchronizer?

> SOGo supports ActiveSync and CalDAV. Meaning you can either using Outlook and 
> activesync with your sogo account, OR you can use outlook/thunderbird/others 
> with imap account for emails and caldav for events/contacts. For outlook, 
> there is CalDAV synchronizer (not maintained by SOGo team) - to integrate 
> caldav services.
Note that for activesync, there is a current bug with some outlook versions -> 
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/activesync-dont-sync-events-created-with-outlook/1ff33063-3f84-47d7-8781-ea55402f30b4?page=1
Besides, sogo


3) Studying the material on Thunderbird:
a) The guide 
(https://www.sogo.nu/files/docs/SOGoMozillaThunderbirdConfigurationGuide.html#_mozilla_thunderbird)
 lists the Integrator and the Connector plugin for download, but only the 
connector plugin is offered for download at 
https://www.sogo.nu/download.html#/frontends.  Where is the integrator plugin?
b) The same guide explains that one needs to install Lightning. But from my 
understanding, Lightning is integrated into Thunderbird and the Plugin is 
removed. 
Is it still necessary to install lightning?

> Lightning project has been merged into Thunderbird. The frontend page is up 
> to date, but the documentation needs to be cleaned. There is a planned task 
> for this : https://bugs.sogo.nu/view.php?id=6026

4) Project situation.
Looking at the bug tracker at 
https://bugs.sogo.nu/view_all_bug_page.php?filter=6724fedeb0c67, 1455 bugs are 
open as of now. Some of the bugs appear to be few years old without receiving 
much attention. (e.g https://bugs.sogo.nu/view.php?id=6019) - others appear 
trivial such as having a different column type 
(https://bugs.sogo.nu/view.php?id=5656)
The Github-page has some PRs open (e.g. 
https://github.com/Alinto/sogo/pull/349). About 4 PRs were merged this year.
Hence, I’m wondering if the bug tracker and the GitHub-Page actually reflect 
the state of the project. Is Sogo driven by a community utilizing the bug 
tracker for coordination, or is the bug tracker solely a tool to communicate 
with Alinto that is not shepherded? Is there a thriving active 
contributor-community besides Alinto?

> Sogo is an opensource project from 2004 and Alinto only took the wheel 2 
> years ago. We were already using it, then the previous owner, Inverse, was 
> abandoning it so they offer us to have it. Since, we're doing our best to 
> make new releases (https://www.sogo.nu/news.html) and as much bug fixes as 
> possible. However, our human and time resources are limited, and we must 
> prioritize our tasks. Also, paid customers have a private bug tracker you 
> can't see where the bugs reported are obviously prioritized. 
The public bug is mainly used to communicate with Alinto. We do read all the 
new bugs but only answer when we are sure to have the time to investigate and 
fix it. Sometimes, other experienced user can give their inputs and help too.
The number of bugs can be alarming but there is so much different 
configurations, environments, or way to use sogo that most of them are peculiar 
cases and we and other users don't reproduce them. Also, we didn't clean it 
after inverse so I'm sure a lot of the bugs are now obsolete or already fixed. 
The largest users are impacted by a bug, the highest are the chances we're 
going to fix it. We also are very careful when a new release is made and when a 
bug is reported after one of our nightly commits.
There is not much PR from the community because sogo is old and complex, with 
rare language (objective-c, angularjs material). So, it's kind of hard to get 
into it.
That being said, SOGo is fully operational and not at all abandoned. We're 
making new releases every 3/4 months with new features and bug fixes and our 
community is actually growing. You should definitely give it a try if you're 
interested in it.

Quentin
Lead dev at ALinto

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