Over the time I have released a lot of open source code, mostly stuff around email but also about ePub, gettext, SSL certificates, RSS/Atom and so on. Some of the major ones I have gave away to other maintainers but there’s still a lot of projects where I’m the owner and that are not actually maintained. These projects generate a lot of issues in Github that I never respond to, there are actual unfixed bugs and huge pile of PRs that never get pulled.
So, as I’m not able to actually maintain these projects I’m starting to mark these as deprecated urging users to move over to alternatives.
In short, if the project is not related to Nodemailer, WildDuck or ZoneMTA (eg. it’s not a dependency for the mentioned projects) then I’m not supporting it.
Reasons: I can’t afford it. Nodemailer has its own revenue streams (it is somewhat sponsored and has ads), I get paid to work on ZoneMTA and WildDuck is something that might have revenue streams in the future, so there’s incentives for making sure these projects get all needed attention. Other projects are just a time drain, using up my limited free time without giving anything back.
I perfectly understand your reasons, but I’m somewhat lost. I really like your good work, but there’s no fun without money.
What alternatives to mailparser exist?
Have you considered Bounty Source or opening up a Patreon account specifically for mailparser? We would be happy to contribute something.
Looks like Mailparser had 70k+ installs in the past week, in spite of its deprecation last month. I would imagine others would be willing to contribute as well.
Another idea is to leave the repo open for bug bounties. Wait until an issue gets a high enough bounty, then collect on it when it’s worth your time.
Thanks for your great work and open source contributions.