Category ‘Personal’
I took it! And so should you
A List Apart has published the 2008 survey for people who make websites. If you work in the web business, you should go ahead and take the survey as well.
Thunderbird IMAP push email
Using Thunderbird as the e-mail client of your choice and the IMAP protocol to fetch and manage your mail?
RFC 2177 defines IDLE, an extension to the IMAP protocol allowing mail clients to change into an idle mode while keeping the TCP-connection open. This allows the servers to notify the clients of new mails on arrival (the so-called push e-mail).
Not all e-mail providers support IMAP IDLE, though – you should check whether your mail provider supports it by opening a telnet connection to the IMAP server (standard port for IMAP is 143) and sending 001 capability. If the answer contains „IDLE” your server supports IMAP IDLE.
GMail for example answers
* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UNSELECT IDLE NAMESPACE QUOTA XLIST CHILDREN XYZZY
001 OK Thats all she wrote!
There's one thing to look out for, though – Thunderbird only sends the IDLE command (effectively enabling push e-mail) if you disable the „check for new mail every nth minute”-option. I could not find any documentation on that feature – however using Help » Mozilla Thunderbird Help causes a 404 File Not Found error for me anyway (using the German version of Thunderbird).
Steve Jobs would say: „Exchange for the rest of us” – using GMail, IMAP and Thunderbird.
Webmail done right
I recently bought a (gs) shared hosting package at mediatemple.net. I’m not going to talk about their system now, but about their webmail client, which is provided by @Mail, their mail server. The @Mail web interface comes in 4 variations: Simple (which is plain HTML), Simple with AJAX (which is how most other webmail interfaces work today), Advanced for IE6+ (please, don’t ask me to comment on this one) and Advanced for Mozilla.
When I logged in using the Advanced for Mozilla interface I noticed something in the address bar: .webmail/parse.php?file=html/english/xul/xullogin.html&XUL=1. XUL? Wait… I’ve heard this before… A quick lookup at Wikipedia confirmed my thoughts: XUL is the XML User Interface Language, the Language the Firefox layout (i.e. XUL defines where the Home button is) is written in. But what does that mean for a webmail client? The answer is easy: It’s a hell lot faster than HTML + JavaScript, actually it’s running at the native speed of your browser, which is pretty amazing. The XUL interface also takes advantages of features your OS can do for you: The menus and lists are rendered by your OS and even sorting is done at native speed - awesome.
However, it’s still getting better: PGP built-in right into your webmail client! Unfortunately it seems you can’t upload your own key or download your private key after you generated a key using the webmail interface, but I’m sure we’ll see some improvements in the next version(s) of this software.
If you have a Firefox Browser at your hands, make sure to try the @Mail-Demo at http://demo.atmail.com/index.php