Email as a technology is pretty boring but it is hard to tell that this morning with two really interesting announcements coming from Eudora and the Hula-Project.

Eudora are the creators of of the first usable pieces of email software for normal people. Since that time in the early 90's they have fostered a relatively small but loyal user base. Recently however they have announced that the latest version of Eudora email client will be their last based on the traditional code-base. As a replacement Eudora are going to build their unique interface and feature-set on top of the Mozilla Thunderbird code-base which is a win/win for both parties. The move allows Eudora to focus on specialised functionality rather than maintenance of general features whilst for Mozilla it increases their overall user-base and in theory should result in a more stable product overall.

There has been rumblings about software as a service and Web 2.0 revolutionising the way people work with their computers and data but very little to really illustrate this point. Whilst the average person is comfortable with having their email and chat hosted by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo the idea of businesses trusting third parties with hosting their software and data is a foreign one.

Companies like Google, SalesForce.com and now Zoho are out to change this attitude with a direct push at the business marketplace. You know an I.T. concept has momentum when it has its own conference, and now with the Office 2.0 Conference there is a showcase for business orientated, software as a service applications. TechCrunch has been doing a very good job covering the new applications released during this conference. Zoho seems very interesting from a software capability perspective although successfully marketing this service within the industry as it stands today will no doubt be difficult. However it is probably more likely that Zoho is concentrating on their application feature-set with an end-game of being purchased by a larger company (Yahoo, AOL). This larger company will then rebrand Zoho and use it to compete with Google's emerging online office suite and Microsoft Office Live.

Whilst Wiki markup language can be a little intimidating for the novice user it is hard to argue with the overall success of the Wiki concept especially when you take a look at sites like Wikipedia. I have tried a number of Wiki tools but DocuWiki is my favourite for a number of reasons.

Firstly it just seems to work with very little hassle, mainly because it is written in PHP and does not rely on any back-end database, preferring instead to save all data to files on the disk. I also like it because it gets up and running without any major configuration process, if you have the correct PHP extensions loaded and file permissions set it will just work with almost no questions asked. To top it all off if the extensive built in functionality does not meet your needs it can be easily extended through the use of plug-ins as this Linux.com article illustrates.

YouTube provides online video quickly when you want it and those related video links are just addictive. My favourites are World of Warcraft clips and comedian videos like Bill Hicks. If you have not had your head stuck in the sand over the last few days you would have heard Google has purchased YouTube, or more precisely they have given the owners a tonne of Google stock ($1.65 billion worth) and not a single real dollar changed hands. Hopefully this purchase by Google provides a search speed increase, at the moment searching for videos is often very slow when compared to just browsing which is always very snappy.

Probably the most interesting reaction to this came from Jason Calacanis who was all for the deal which is quite unlike his tone on the Gillmor Gang of late. The most unsurprising reaction was from Mark Cuban who stuck to his guns by saying YouTube is a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen and bad news for any future owner.

For ages Tim Woodill and I have been engaged in various email debates about 9/11 conspiracy theories. Anyone that knows Tim will know he loves a good conspiracy theory even if they are sometimes quite ridiculous. Last week thanks to a link to a story I emailed him he got entangled in a rather intense email battle with the author of this post on 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Tim spent a lot of time getting his arguments in a semi logical format and writing well thought out responses and questions to the author. They were so well thought out and written that I suggested he start a blog and he has done so, the ominously titled 'The Unpleasant Possibilities'. It only has one post up there but hopefully Tim uploads some of his previous writings and email exchanges so they can be appreciated (and ridiculed) by a wider audience than myself.

OSX Mail is a typical Apple product, it has some great features that make it fantastic but it is let down by the tiny details. For example I've been battling with it's 'Synchronize IMAP Account' feature and its ability to almost crash my Scalix mail server. The feature is useful because it creates a local copy of an on-line IMAP account for SpotLight searching and general offline use. Unfortunately if this process is run after a long period of time offline it can cause the Scalix IMAP server to trip up and not allow further IMAP connections.

I've been on the Scalix forums trying to resolve this issue and it seems like the root cause is a hard-coded limit of 17 simultaneous IMAP connections within Scalix. Unfortunately OSX Mail creates multiple simultaneous connections when performing the synchronization process and just to make matters worse it takes its own sweet time in closing them. Consequently it does not take long for the 16 process limit to be reached, the Scalix IMAP server to trip over and the Mail client to be left out in the cold.

The most annoying thing about the problem is that unlike Thunderbird, OSX Mail offers no way to limit the number of simultaneous connections, thus getting around the issue. Fortunately it sounds like the server team will resolve this hard coded process limit bug, perhaps in time for Scalix 11, so the annoying issue maybe resolved once and for all.

Recently I put a second, faster network card in a server. On booting OpenSuse 10 assigned the new card the name eth2 and the existing, built-in Ethernet device eth0. A number of applications, for example Samba and dnsmasq, typically bind to an Ethernet name rather than a specific IP or MAC address. It is possible to change the individual configuration files for each of these services but this is a little ugly considering my goal was to install the new hardware and disable the existing device, leaving everything else untouched.

A tidier solution is to assign eth0 to the new card and eth1 to the older (unused) device. Figuring out how to do this is a little confusing, there is no Yast option to configure network names and manually editing /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth(mac address) provides no help either. Instead you must edit the file /etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules and change the device name associated to the relevant network MAC address. In a two card setup the file will look a little like this (each network device entry is on a single line):

The Scalix Webmail client requires an authenticated smtp connection in order to be able to successfully send messages. If the Scalix smtpd service is not configured to allow annoymous smtp connections from the Webmail host then the client will receive the following Javascript error:

methodname = send

To correct this edit the Scalix smtpd configuration file at /var/opt/scalix/sys/smtpd.cfg and ensure the Webmail server is added as a source that can send annoymous email.

By default Scalix configures itself to operate as a standalone mail server which is normally what client's want. Unfortunately the IP range my ISP owns is frequently flagged by anti-spam services  making mail delivery to certain recipients challenging. Fortunately my ISP provides an SMTP relay server for customers on the network which is not effected by the broad blocks applied to the IP range I am on.

To configure Scalix to use the SMTP relay for outgoing mail edit /etc/mail/sendmail.cf and find the line that reads:

DS

And change it to:

DSrelay.smtpserver.com

Restart sendmail and you will find all your external mail sent via Scalix is relayed via the ISP's SMTP server. To check it is all working send an email and then view the /var/logs/mail file, the last entry should show a log of the outgoing mail with the relay recorded next to it.

Apple's Mail application by itself is not the most fully featured of email tools, it lacks proper calendar integration, column views and more technical things like always connected IMAP IDLE mode. Fortunately it makes up for these shortcomings in its interface, great search functionality and integration with the rest of OSX. But still its nice to have the functionality that is available within contemporary applications like Thunderbird and Outlook and that is where Bundles come in.

Bundles are Apple Mail-speak for functionality extensions similar to Firefox's. Unlike Thunderbird which has the ability to be extended but has so many inbuilt features its almost pointless, Mail has a wide array of Bundles that provide nearly all of the functionality missing within the base application.