Contact:
Gretchen Underwood, Carnegie Mellon
412-268-2900
John A. Degory, Cyrusoft International, Inc.
412-605-0499

For immediate release:
February 4, 2003

Cyrusoft International and Carnegie Mellon To Collaborate on Next Major Release of Mulberry

PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University and Cyrusoft International, Inc, today announced a collaboration that will influence the next major release of Mulberry, Cyrusoft's cross platform IMAP/POP desktop email client. Carnegie Mellon has a site license for the Mulberry client.

The collaboration - in the form of a project course - is part of the university's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) master's program. The HCII will have a team of students work with Cyrusoft's technical team and clients to define and develop elements of the user interface for next version. This project will provide Carnegie Mellon students an opportunity to have input into the next product release, as well as offer a real-world experience for the graduate students working on the project.

"We are very excited with this opportunity to work with Carnegie Mellon's HCII graduate class," said John Degory, CEO of Cyrusoft International. "This will provide us with an opportunity to work firsthand with a major site customer, as well as end users within this customer. The project will help our next release to be focused on the user experience."

Degory said the collaboration will allow Cyrusoft to make major strides in making Mulberry a "very user-friendly product." He anticipates that the project course will be an "excellent example of how the university community and the business community can work together."

According to Joel Smith, Carnegie Mellon's vice provost for computing services and chief information officer, "Mulberry is, in many ways, a valuable email client for Carnegie Mellon because of its rigorous implementation of IMAP standards. Products that closely implement IETF standards are always preferred at the university. This project will help add "user-friendly" interfaces to Mulberry's technical power."

Robert Kraut, Carnegie Mellon's Herbert Simon Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, and one of the instructors who will be supervising the students working with Cyrusoft, agrees with Smith. "By working with Mulberry, our master's in HCI students will gain real-world experience, help a local business, reduce support costs for Computing Services, and improve the lives of many students on campus. This is a case where everyone wins."

The project starts immediately and the team will work through the end of August 2003. Mulberry plans a product release incorporating results of the project scheduled for late fall.

About Cyrusoft International, Inc. Mulberry, first released commercially in 1996, has been well known for its excellent support of the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), its cross-platform OS support, as well as its features oriented toward site management and administration, such as remote preferences and personal address books. Cyrusoft has close to a million paid licensees in 31 countries and virtually every U.S. state and Canadian province.

About Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon is a national research university of about 7,500 students and 3,000 faculty, research and administrative staff. The institution was founded in 1900 in Pittsburgh by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who wrote the time-honored words, "My heart is in the work," when he donated the funds to create Carnegie Technical Schools. Carnegie Mellon's position of leadership in the arts and in technology is unusual in higher education today. The institution's prominence in the arts dates back to 1917 when it awarded the first undergraduate degree in drama. And it has become a national leader in technological fields such as computer science, robotics and engineering. The university is a diverse blend of academic disciplines, including nationally recognized programs in cognitive psychology, management and public policy, writing and rhetoric, applied history, philosophy and biological sciences. Carnegie Mellon is recognized as a pioneer in the uses of computing in education. Its "Andrew" computing network, named for benefactors Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, is among the most advanced on any campus today. For more information, visit www.cmu.edu.