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by Alan Knowles.
Original Post: More Blog Hype and Imap servers
Feed Title: Smoking toooo much PHP
Feed URL: http://www.akbkhome.com/blog.php/RSS.xml
Feed Description: More than just a blog :)
There were some interesting comments from my last post on Hyping by blog. Jackson Miller pointed out very bluntly, isnt that what blogs are for, and while he is partly correct, if a blogs are purely a advertising / news feed for a project, then they are not really blogs, but more project sites. What makes blogs interesting normally, is not that they publish release announcements, but that you get some insight into other things a developer may be doing, often unrelated to a project they are well known for. So I guess the conclusion was, if some one starts hinting you are Hyping and not blogging, perhaps you are..
I saw a few posts on Artima more recently, that included detailed analysis on RoR indicating alot of what I considered RoR to be. Ruby, while having interesting features, doesnt appear to have what could be called an elegant language construct, or a particularly huge following, which for me are part of the consideration on whether to invest time into experimenting with it, (which C#/ASP.net did justify, but produced similar returns). RoR, turns out to be little more that a clever combination of tools to write skeletons and some reasonable libraries, which while useful, really doesnt justify the excitement, but I gues it's an improvement on the ASP.NET, where the solution is not forced in your face so much, and alternatives are frowned apon (try googling for the equivilant of mysql_escape_string in .NET, and you will see what I mean)
Imap Continued.
Bincimap unfortunatly was unable to deliver the promise that it looked like it could. This week I got a call saying that Outlook express (or more like 'lookout express') users where having problems. It's pretty common knowledge that although outlook says it supports IMAP, it's implementation is buggy to the point of unusable. I know this from googling mailing lists and seeing the amount of kludges and workarounds that appear to have gone into IMAP servers, just to support this pile of crap.
Normally when you get problems with outlook and imap, you brush it off as intermittenant problems with a crap piece of software, and suggest they upgrade to a real email client (thunderbird, or evolution come to mind). But sometimes, company owners or important sales staff are not really that open to changing the ill gotten ways, so Outlook support has to be suffered.. (at least at an hourly rate!!!). So this time (after a few goes at modifying the settings on outlook) I decided to examine what was going on a little closer, including doing protocol dumps.
The key problems where that deleted messages (and ones that had been moved to another folder) would reappear as unread, new when you pressed the send/recieve.
To my amazement, outlook spawns new connections and does alot of imap operations concurrently, without a care in the world on how complex this may be to the server (eg. 3 connections all doing operations on the inbox folder). And menu operations often open new connections, and drag and drop operations dont. - It's all a bit like a beginners VB program, completely undesigned, and thrown together a few minutes after hello world worked.
I've given the protocol dumps to the bincimap developers, but over the weekend, I also discovered that my wife's palmphone, was unable to read email. I can pospone problems with companies a few days, but I better fix my wife's issues faster!. So after another marathon protocol dumping sessions, it became clear that bincimap was sending a little too much information for snappermail to understand. So I quickly switched over to dovecot imap.
I feel a bit disapointed here, us fickle users, jump from one ship to another so easily. I did get the chance to look at bincimap's souce, and it was very clean C++, and pretty well designed. And having given the author (Andreas Aardal Hanssen ,who was very responsive) a reasonably high quality set of bug reports, I didnt feel to bad deserting to another application.
Dovecot on debian proved amazingly simple to migrate to, the only change required after apt-getting was modifying /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf and changing the line protocol = imaps
Other than that, restarting evolution, which should provide another good blog review, and I have now finally tested, used and configured all 5 major open source imap servers..
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