grapes development has not yet started in earnest. This page therefore exists in the hope of recruiting developers not to provide resources to a potential or actual user base. If you are interested in donating some development time then please subscribe to the mailing list grapes-general@lists.sourceforge.net and announce your presence.
Traditionally, the "last-mile" Internet connection provider to private households has also offered mail relaying, mailbox hosting and web hosting to their customers. As with most things, though, this is no longer a stable situation. Providers like AOL are in a position to differentiate themselves from their competition by offering better such facilities along with their "last-mile" connections. This includes instant messaging with video conferencing and higher storage capacities on their web hosting. They are also in a position to deliver custom software that makes these facilities easier to use, both on their servers and on their clients' machines. Desiring some of this market, other companies like MSN and Google are offering alternative services that aren't bound to your "last-mile" provider and have also demonstrated their desire and ability to deliver proprietary software solutions to their servers and clients.
This project has the goal of levelling the playing field. The primary goal is to provide Free Software alternatives to enable smaller companies and non-profit organisations to provide similar levels of service to these giants (albeit for a smaller number of people). It should also be straightforward to provide these services for yourself, your family and your employees. A secondary goal is to make it easier to migrate between service providers so that people don't feel tied down by having, for example, given their @proprietary-webmail-provider.example email address to all of their contacts. A tertiary goal is to develop a brand so that people will be more inclined to use a provider who advertises themselves as "powered by grapes" i.e. to promote the use of this project.