stressfree - email

Changing the LDAP port Scalix uses

David — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 09:27:16 +0000

Scalix runs its own instance of OpenLDAP for authentication purposes and by default this operates on port 389 which is the standard port for LDAP. The only problem with this is that you cannot run a 'proper' LDAP service (OpenLDAP, FedoraDS, eDirectory) on the standard LDAP ports without there being a conflict with the Scalix service. Fortunately there is a simple workaround that lets you run the Scalix service on a non-standard port.

Edit the /var/opt/scalix/sys/slapd.conf file and change the setting portNum to a non-standard (preferably high-level) port. In this example I will use port 6389 but it can be any port that is not currently being used by another service.

portNum 6389

Now edit the /etc/opt/scalix/caa/scalix.res/config/ubermanager.properties file and set the ubermanager.query.server.port to the same value:

ubermanager.query.server.port=6389

Save the changes and restart Scalix for the new LDAP port settings to take effect.

Recent email rumblings

David — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 21:32:01 +0000

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.

In other email related news Dave Camp has just announced the first development version of Hula-Lite is available for testing. Hula is a standalone email server that provides SMTP, POP3, IMAP, CalDAV and Webmail functionality. Hula-Lite provides just the very cool CalDav and Webmail features and is intended to be integrated into existing SMTP/IMAP services. This is a very smart move as the great thing about Hula is its Webmail and CalDAV functionality. By allowing users to test and adopt these things within existing services is a lot easier than forcing an entire email infrastructure migration plus it allows sysadmins to keep using the services they know and trust.

Hopefully both these developments are beneficial to their respective projects and the open source community as a whole. I am especially hopeful that Hula-Lite will turn out to be an effective replacement for the aging SquirrelMail in the open source community. One of the most frequent requests I've received when doing my Webmin theme is an accompanying theme for SquirrelMail. Unfortunately the SquirrelMail code is not up to the job and it does not sound like its developers are interested in making any significant changes.

Ensuring mail can be sent via Scalix Webmail

David — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 04:07:24 +0000

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. For example in my network the Webmail server (Tomcat) is at 10.1.1.40 so the configuration file looks like this:

RELAY accept 127.0.0.1
RELAY accept .stress-free.co.nz
RELAY Log_Reject ALL

ANONYMOUS accept 127.0.0.1
ANONYMOUS accept 10.1.1.40
ANONYMOUS Log_Reject ALL

# extra rules added to prevent open relay usage
RECIPIENT Log_Reject *@*@*
RECIPIENT Log_Reject *%*
RECIPIENT Log_Reject *!*
RECIPIENT Log_Reject *#*@*

AUTH_SUCCESS Header .pwd.stress-free.co.nz
AUTH_SUCCESS Accept ALL

After editing this file restart Scalix smtpd for the changes to take effect:

sudo omoff -d0 smtpd && sudo omon smtpd

email
scalix

Enabling SMTP relay (smarthost) in Scalix

David — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 19:01:29 +0000

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:

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.

If you make this change just make sure your domain SPF record is modified to ensure it defines the ISP's SMTP server as a source that is allowed to send mail on behalf of your name. The best SPF wizard I have found is hosted by OpenSPF and makes creating this potentially complicated DNS entry straightforward.

email
scalix

A few useful OSX Mail bundles to correct its shortcomings

David — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 10:03:55 +0000

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.

Two of my 'must have' free Bundles are Letterbox and IMAP-IDLE which together add column views and idle support for IMAP respectively. The Growl notification framework is also worth installing if you would like visual notifications of incoming mail including sender details and a brief teaser. This is useful as it lets you can decide if it is necessary to read the complete message immediately or whether it can wait till later. Even better Growl is not limited to Mail with a host of plug-ins available for a variety of different applications.

Another very interesting but more costly (US$25-$30) Bundle worth exploring is MailTag 2.0 Beta. MailTag 2.0 adds searchable tagging functionality within email headers and a host of other features that integrate Mail with iCal. The original MailTag stored tag data in files separate to the email repository but with 2.0 this data is stored within the email header. This means if you are using an IMAP server the time and effort placed into tagging your data on one computer can be easily shared amongst multiple desktops. Many of the extra features that come with MailTags look as if they will make their way into the next release of Mail in OSX10.5 Leopard, but as it stands its tagging capabilities will be a unique feature for a long time to come.

Sorting out Scalix tantrums

David — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 12:05:33 +0000

This morning after making some file changes and performing a server restart I found the Scalix 10 email server would not load. As I have never had to resolve major problems with Scalix determining the cause and solution to this error turned out to be a worthwhile experience.

Manually starting and stopping Scalix

According to the Scalix startup script (/etc/init.d/scalix) the service was successfully starting, but on closer inspection none of the actual processes were beginning. Unfortunately whilst the /etc/init.d/scalix script is a tidy way of controlling Scalix it does not provide any console logging to explain any issues that maybe encountered. For more useful output the two console commands that start/stop Scalix are:

omrc - start Scalix
omshut - stop Scalix

Thanks to omrc I was able to see that according to Scalix one of the core services, the Remote Client Interface (RCI), was in a 'shutdown process' and could not be loaded. A look on the Scalix Community Forums quickly came up with the answer here which was to run the command:

omreset -o off rci

The omreset command manually sets the status of the various Scalix services and the above comand forces the RCI service to the off state.

With this problem fixed Scalix successfully started happily enough but I then found that whilst I could log into the Administration interface, POP and SMTP services I could not however use IMAP or Webmail as my username/password was rejected. Solving this problem was a little trickier than the first but fortunately a look in the SAC administration IMAP logs showed that there were some file permissions errors occurring as a consequence of the file changes I had undertaken before the server reboot.

Checking file permissions

Fortunately Scalix has a very useful tool for checking and correcting file ownership and privilege issues called omcheck. To correct file privilege issues run the following command:

omcheck -s -d > /tmp/check_file ; sh /tmp/check_file

The above runs the omcheck command on the Scalix application and data files. Results are output to /tmp/check_file as a series of comments and chmod commands to correct any permission errors. Once omcheck has completed the output (tmp/check_file) is executed by the shell (sh), automatically correcting any issues found. I was relieved to see that after running this command IMAP and Webmail were once again working fine.

Overall solving these Scalix issues was a very good learning experience. It took quite a long time simply because of my limited experience of dealing with Scalix issues and the overly complex manner by which Scalix is configured and operates compared to other email servers. All of the answers were found on the Scalix Community Forums but finding them took a lot of searching, reading and experimenting. There is a lot of content on the forums mainly I think because Scalix is overly complex and can easily lead to problems. Hopefully with Scalix 11 and future versions these configuration and maintenance tasks become simpler, more concise and a lot more intuitive.

Migrating to and using Scalix 10

David — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 00:15:29 +0000

Last week this post on my local Linux user group got me rethinking email servers. The last time I did this was about six months ago when I made the move away from Hula onto Zimbra. At the time I looked at Scalix 9 but was deterred by its need for X-Windows during the install process and the overwhealming amount of installation documentation that came with the 100+mb download. I decided to go with Zimbra because it offered a text-based installer and some very nice looking UI features on the webmail client.

Unfortunately over time I have become tired of Zimbra for a number of reasons:

The installation essentially takes over the host operating environment and installs its own version of popular open source applications like MySQL and Apache. Consequently keeping up with security patches involves upgrading the entire mail system which is no straightforward task.
Zimbra is very resource intensive and takes what seems like forever to initally load and shutdown. This seems to mainly revolve around their management tools which store all configuration information in an LDAP database and dynamically build the traditional configuration text files on loading.
Because most configuration information is stored in the LDAP datasource making configuration tweaks by editing the traditional text cofiguration files is not possible. Instead you must read through the Zimbra administration documentation to identify LDAP attributes to tweak in order to achieve the intended output. This is frustrating and not very transparent when things go wrong.
The webmail interface is slow to operate and load (especially for dial-up/slow DSL users). After about three months I disabled the webmail interface and began using Roundcube's php IMAP frontend. There was a loss of functionality but at least performance was smooth on any connection.
Because of the way Zimbra sets up its own services it is hard to integrate it successfully into an existing environment. I only have one IP address and port 80/443 is forwarded through to my LAMP server. After a great deal of experimenting I could not get the LAMP server to natively host the Zimbra webmail client, instead I had to resort to using a nasty mod_proxy configuration (which probably attributed to the slowness for external users).
Zimbra does not offer Outlook/iSync connectors for its open source users, in order to get access to these connectors you must pay many $$$ a year in licensing costs. In small installations this is just not cost-effective.

Scalix 10 on the other hand addresses many of the shortcomings I found in Scalix 9 and Zimbra.

It ships with a console based installer which is a welcome sight. Rather than providing its own stack it integrates into your operating systems existing applications (Sendmail, Apache, Cyrus-SASL and even Java if you want). This makes keeping your server up to date with the latest security patches a lot easier and upgrading to the latest and greatest Scalix release less of a concern.
The webmail interface is based entirely in Java (running in Tomcat) and can be easily setup to be accessed from an external web-server (such as a dedicated LAMP box) using mod_jk.
Scalix even in the free Community Edition version offers 25 free Outlook Connector licenses which makes it practical for use within small businesses.
Rather than storing all configuration data in an LDAP datasource most configuration occurs in the standard text files for the system with a little bit of tweaking taking place in the /var/opt/scalix/ directory. This makes tweaking a lot easier as information found on the Web can be directly applied to Scalix.
There seems to be a great deal of support available for Scalix ranging from the comprehensive bundled documentation and Knowledge Base through to the Community Forums and Wiki. Between those four sources of information I haven't yet found a problem that has not been able to be resolve.

Installation

I installed Scalix on a virtual Xen instance which contained a minimum install of SUSE 10. After accepting the license agreement the installer ran through a system and dependency check. At this point it returned a nice list of changes I needed to make to the system before installation could occur. This mainly revolved around the installation of some packages and a tweak of the /etc/hosts file in order to reduce the risk of confusion later on. It also gave me a warning about memory which would be easily solved later on by giving the Xen instance access to more server memory.

Console installation (click to enlarge)

Once the dependencies were met Scalix happily installed. At the end of the process I was asked if I wished to install included versions of Java/Tomcat or use my own. I opted to use the bundled versions out of simplicity and on looking at the configuration files after the installation I can see it is a straightforward job if you wish to change your mind and use a different JVM or J2EE server once things have gone into production.

With Scalix, Java and Tomcat installed, the server reconfigured and the basic admin account setup all the services were started and the installer finished. It was the moment of truth so I fired up a web browser and made my way to the Scalix administration console.

Server administration via SAC (click to enlarge)

Disabling mod_deflate because of Firefox 1.5 on OSX

At this point I came across my first issue and it was not really with Scalix. For some reason Firefox 1.5 for OSX on my Mac cannot handle content compressed with mod_deflate very well. Consequently the Scalix administration interface took forever to load. Switching to a different browser fixed this problem but as Firefox was my default browser I decided to disable mod_deflate for the time being.

This involved tweaking Scalix's Apache configuration files. In doing so I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Scalix installer had been very neat and courteous when making its modifications. I have seen a number of applications make horrendous system configuration changes but Scalix was a good server citizen. It had added three extra .conf files into /etc/apache2/conf.d and each were well named and commented. The installer had also modified the /etc/sysconfig/apache2 file to add the jk and deflate modules to Apache and this change too had been performed in an appropriate manner. I disabled the configuration file in /etc/apache2/conf.d associated with mod_deflate, restarted Apache and everything worked as expected in Firefox.

Adding user accounts and doing basic system maintenance

Using the web-based Scalix Administration Console (SAC) it is possible to perform all the basic mail administration tasks like adding/deleting users and monitoring mail queues. The console is designed to enable the management of multiple mail servers but the functionality available through it is not as extensive as other administration interfaces I have used. For example there are no options to edit what mail services (pop/imap/smtp/webmail) start on boot or modify details about a particular service (like port numbers, security settings, etc). Changes like this are possible but it requires console-based editing of configuration files. Personally I do not see this as a bad thing but if you are pro-GUI administrator making the switch from Exchange or Zimbra you will probably be disappointed.

User administration (click to enlarge)

When creating user accounts you can select whether the account is Premium (Outlook, IMAP, POP3), Standard (IMAP/POP3) or Internet (Webmail only) which is a nice touch. The Community Edition of Scalix allows only 25 Premium accounts, any more than that and you must upgrade to a paid-for version. Upgrading to a different version of Scalix is as simple as purchasing a license and entering its details into the SAC. This means a Scalix Community Edition server can be installed, tested and demoed at zero-cost and then painlessly upgraded if and when the server goes into full-scale production.

Scalix server statistics (click to enlarge)

Migrating existing mail

Scalix provide a suite of tools for seamlessly migrating users from Exchange which is their core target audience. Unfortunately as I was not running Exchange I could not test these out. It seems like the standard way of migrating non-Exchange mail onto Scalix was through the manual creation of user accounts and then transfer of mail using the Perl-based imapsync tool. There maybe a smarter way of doing this but the Scalix documentation I found did not provide any hints.

Imapsync is a very functional piece of software but it is a little troublesome to setup if you are not used to Perl. It requires a number of libraries that by default are not installed with Perl but fortunately are all available in CPAN. Once the tool is running migration was straight-forward but it is important to set the --setinternaldates flag so that migrated mail retains the original arrival time (otherwise everything will get listed as turning up on the same day). The process does take a while and is fairly resource intensive, running the imapsync process from a third computer during a time when mail activity is low is recommended.

Using Scalix

With the user accounts and mail transferred it was now a case of using it. The Webmail interface works very well and is a lot snappier than Zimbra's. It is also relatively straightforward to configure Webmail to be routed through an intermediate server providing other Web services. Doing so requires some understanding of mod_jk which is a bit of a dark art though not as bad as regular expressions or mod_rewrite. Fortunately the installed Scalix configuration files are well commented and provide even mod_jk novices with enough insight that setting configurations like this up should not be too much of a problem.

Webmail interface (click to enlarge)

There was a weird bug with Scalix and OSX Mail's Kerberos implementation. On setting up an IMAP account in Mail the application automatically sets itself to exchange passwords using Kerberos but this does not work (my guess is an incompatibility between the two implementations). This issue can be solved by changing the authentication encryption to MD5 in Mail. The weird thing is when setting up Scalix as an SMTP service Mail automatically sets encryption to MD5 and works quite happily without further user input.

Scalix with Outlook

I do not use Outlook but I was interested in trying out the Scalix Connector for Outlook. Setting up the connector was more than a simple case of pointing Outlook to Scalix and telling it that it was actually Exchange. The process required the installation of a Scalix Connector package on the Windows client and then migration of the standard Outlook account to a special Scalix-enabled version. Fortunately all of these tasks can be automated to enable network roll-out but I found the documentation just a little bit too light in places to feel really comfortable about what I was doing. Once setup the results were pretty impressive, 99% of all the Exchange functionality is available using the connector and it appeared to be very fast and stable.

The Outlook connector and webmail (click to enlarge)

Shortcomings for the non-technical administrator

By default Scalix does not ship with any anti-virus or anti-spam software. There are numerous pieces of documentation on how to set these things up but it revolves around making configuration file changes using the console. Here again Exchange administrators will not feel too comfortable and would probably prefer the Web-based check box functionality of Zimbra when it comes to setting up anti-spam and virus services. But if you are prepared to get your hands a little dirty the end-results will be a lot better, more flexible and most importantly when things go awry you will have a better understanding of what exactly is going on.

Conclusion

For those administrators out there that do not want to mess with complex console work Scalix is not for them. Installing and configuring Scalix will take more time than Exchange which will offset some of the licensing savings. However once it is up and running it is very stable and flexible system with all the power of Exchange without the licensing, security and reliability concerns that come with Microsoft software.

Three very useful tools

David — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 12:15:37 +0000

Over the last couple of days I have come across three very useful tools:

Google Browser Sync
Just released it keeps all your Firefoxes in sync with each other. Great if you have more than one computer (or virtual computer). I have used other bookmark management tools in the past but as this is integrated right into Firefox, automatic and free it is hard to beat.

Letterbox
Widescreen view for Mail.app provides a three panel view very similar to that of Outlook or Thunderbird. When you have a widescreen display it makes a lot of sense.

BlueHarvest
If you have ever browsed network shares (i.e. Windows/Netware/Linux shares) with OSX you will know that it leaves a lot of debris scattered around the remote filesystem (in the form of hidden files). Whilst invisible to the casual OSX user they usually stand out to Windows and Linux users and are even sometimes used to explain why Windows is better than OSX (figure that one out). BlueHarvest runs around behind you cleaning up the mess so to speak. You can also get it to search places you have been to in the past to clean up.

Also today my Google Spreadsheet invitation came through. It looks very promising but it really needs to leave the Labs and get integrated into GMail/GTalk/Search in the same manner that the 'View as HTML' function has become for Word, Powerpoint and PDF documents.

SORBS: An anti-spam service worse than spam?

David — Thu, 25 May 2006 05:53:10 +0000

SORBS is a Realtime spam BlackList (RBL) that is far from helping the spam problem. I am not alone in thinking that rather than being professionally run and attempting to target real spammers SORBS solution to the spam problem is just to add half the Internet (figurately speaking) to a blacklist. Case in point yesterday I got a call from a friend who mysteriously could not send email to certain people on the Linux server I had setup a few years ago. I checked on the server and found nothing wrong yet still some mail just was not going through. He rang up his ISP (TelstraClear in this case) only to be told that his entire subnet (about 500-odd TelstraClear users) had been added to the SORBS blacklist two days ago. On the blacklist there is no reason given as to why this subnet is banned nor is there any attempt made by SORBS to contact effected parties. The only clue for the ban is that SORBS considers the ip range dynamically distributed even though TelstraClear issues static addresses to their business customers on this ip range.

Trying to get off the list is hard, bordering on the impossible. We have both submitted support requests to have the ip removed but at the moment my request is number 2050 in line and it is not moving. RBL's are a good idea in practice but they have to be targeted and professional enough to get incorrect ip addresses removed quickly. Whilst some could blame mail server administrators for subscribing to SORBS poor blocking service I don't think you can blame a doctor for giving medicine to his patients. My guess is these guys at SORBS are raking in a lot of money from Google AdSense adverts on their website as thousands of people hit it every day trying to get their innocent IP addresses off their crudely constructed list.

Windows Live to host college email

David — Wed, 03 May 2006 08:32:31 +0000

I talked about Windows Live a while back and so news that 72 U.S. colleges will be using Windows Live for student email services seemed quite relevant. It makes sense financially for the colleges and from Microsoft's perspective it gets customers early before they have made a definite decision on who their email provider will be. No doubt Google and Yahoo will soon be following this same path with their mail services in an effort to build (Google) and maintain (Yahoo) their user-base.

The move is another vindication of the software as a service concept and will help bring some sanity to educational IT departments. Victoria University should adopt the same policy for student email and file storage. If not sponsored by Microsoft/Google/Yahoo they should at least scrap student email and file storage services in favour of Google/Microsoft/Yahoo email and personal USB keys. The savings whilst not huge would add up over time, plus I am in no doubt that the big players could provide a better level of service and featureset than what any over-stretched educational IT department could ever provide.

Zimbra migration thanks to Xen

David — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 19:22:20 +0000

After the comments from Kevin H about Zimbra to one of my last postings I thought I had better take another look at Zimbra. The last time I downloaded and played with Zimbra was when it was in Beta. It has changed significantly since then and now provides packages for OpenSUSE 10 which is really good to see.

The last time I tried Zimbra I was not too happy to see it installed its own versions of services like MySQL and Postfix. I started a thread on the Zimbra forum back then and it sparked a bit of debate. Unfortunately Zimbra 3.0 still assumes the install system is only going to be running Zimbra which makes it difficult to install on a system already running most of these services. Although I specified different ports to avoid conflicts my test install did not work at all very well and to top it off it managed to break the existing OpenLDAP installation (something to do with missing shared libraries).

Even though things did not work straight off the bat the Zimbra feature overview movie and the little that I had been able to experience had me hooked. Rather than fight the Zimbra install process I decided to setup Xen on the server and provide Zimbra with a clean virtual server to install on. After an evening of toil I finally had my virtual server running fine so I ran the Zimbra installer. Everything installed and ran without issue using the default options and the speed was acceptable given the hardware was now running two instances of Linux, two mail servers and a host of other services. Migrating mail from Hula to Zimbra was problematic as automatic tools such as imapsync do not play nicely with Hula's implementation of IMAP. I eventually resorted to using Thunderbird to copy mail from one server to the other which resulted in the loss of 'Date Received' data. Once the mail was migrated I replicated Hula's mail proxy functionality with fetchmail and switched from a testing to development system without any downtime.

Setting up webmail proxying with Apache was fairly straightforward but it did require a change of the default url for the spellchecker. I posted a question about how to do this on the forum and it was solved within the day. For future reference to change the default spellchecker url use the following command:

/opt/zimbra/bin/zmprov ms SERVERNAME zimbraSpellCheckURL SPELLCHECKER_URL

and then restart Tomcat (or just restart Zimbra).

Like many others I would like to see the Outlook Connector sold as a separate product (with single and pack licenses) so that users of the open source version can get the functionality of Outlook without having to pay for the Enterprise edition. Support for me is not an issue and most of the target install sites I know of are too small to really justify the price of the Enterprise edition (but nearly all use Outlook). I am also holding out for the Zimbra iSync adapter and hoping that this to does not just get bundled into the Enterprise version. It is something I would pay for especially if it lets me add/edit contacts and calendars in OSX and have them synchronised to Zimbra. This would be especially useful to keep all my contacts/calendars in sync across the three Macs I now have (something that .Mac can do but I don't want to pay $200 a year for).

Whilst the web interface is great I prefer native applications because they are (and will always be) much faster and enable offline work to take place. Plus the main reason I use iCal is to easily set alarms in my cellphone so if Zimbra and iCal could work together I can keep my phone reminding me.

GMail invites to give away

David — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 01:57:03 +0000

I checked my GMail account today and I have 100 invites available to anyone who would like one. If you are interested please get in contact. Don't forget to provide your email address as this is needed to send you a GMail invite.

email
google

My first week with Tiger

David — Thu, 05 May 2005 05:29:11 +0000

It has been a week since I upgraded to Tiger and its been a slightly bumpy ride (although things are smoothing out now). Initially the upgrade went well but unfortunately Mail 2.0 just would not accept any new messages. After hours of debugging I just could not get it to work so I reluctantly switched over to Thunderbird in order to email. Unfortunately in the process I managed to loose a bunch of messages which resulted in a few embarrassing emails to people asking for them to please resend. Eventually (like today) I finally realised what my problem was with Mail (iAlert was incompatible with Tiger) and with that fixed I am now back to Mail 2.0 again.

I now have Mail 2.0 working (Click to enlarge)

Mail 2.0 is a big improvement over the original Mail once you get rid of the hideously ugly buttons with Cage Fighter. There are some really neat options for attachments like viewing a slideshow and importing images directly into iPhoto. The Spotlight search within Mail is really quick and very versatile. The Smart Folders in Mail are nice but that essential when the Spotlight search is so good.

Spotlight itself is a feature thats going to take a while to grow on me. I think it would be great on a G5 system but on my G4 laptop the two or three seconds it takes to search and display results is just a little too long. The search system is a little limiting as well. Apple have harnessed the unlimited attributes capability of their HFS+ filesystem to index the hard-drive. This allows any file to be quickly searched but it does not extend to databases (such as web browser caches or Thunderbirds .mbox mail boxes). Consequently the search system is a little limited but at least it is available now and is very fast. What I am finding is that rather than crawl through my Applications directory to use odd utilities I am pressing Option+Space to activate Spotlight, typing the first few characters of the program and then pressing enter (as it prioritizes applications over documents).

Spotlight Searching (Click to enlarge)

The improved Safari browser has made me switch back from Firefox. Its a lot faster and now works with every website (even Google Maps). I use NetNewsWire for RSS news-reading so the RSS features of Safari go unused (but they do look pretty). In the upgrade I have also made the move from NetBeans 4 to Eclipse 3 as my Java IDE. The SWT toolkit makes it is a lot faster than NetBeans and in the near future I want to get into some multi-platform SWT programming for rich client interfaces.

My Dashboard Widgets (Click to enlarge)

The Dashboard feature of Tiger was something that I did not think would be that useful after using Konfabulator for a long time but I have found it very good. It does not drain resources like Konfabulator and there is some really good Widgets available. Theres a great screenshot widget whilst Emma loves giggling at the little hula dancer one.

Overall the upgrade has been well worth it and I have a feeling many of the new features like the graphics subsystem, Quicktime 7 and Spotlight have yet to be fully leveraged by Apple or third party developers.

Novell to Port Evolution & Beagle to Windows

David — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 04:34:58 +0000

Nat Friedman has reported in his blog that Novell will be porting Beagle and eventually Evolution to Windows. This is good news for supporters of Open Source transition.

It is difficult to migrate a company bootlaces and all to Linux due to the sheer number of changes required in the daily workflow. The minialisation of this change through gradual introduction and migration of applications such as OpenOffice and Evolution should eventually see increased uptake of Linux in the desktop environment.