Hula was an open-source effort sponsored by Novell and developed by Dave Camp, Dalton Valliere and Joe Gasiorek, amongst others.

Hula aimed to expand in three main directions: It came with a web-based client to access information, but desktop applications were intended to be readily supported.

[1][2] On January 30, 2007, The Messaging Architects announced an agreement to acquire NetMail and take over leadership of the open source Hula Project from Novell.

Before it disappeared, it announced the transfer, due to the move of Hula from Novell to The Messaging Architects.

With the future of Hula unclear to many, a software fork of the source code was used to create the independent Bongo Project.