After the first release candidate of Mailody, some people actually installed it and it resulted in a list of broken things. Sending messages using TLS or SSL was the most prominent one.

Of course there are a lot of mailservers where Mailody was not able to talk to. Primarily because I used a lot of reversed engineering instead of reading the RFC’s thoroughly. The former is of course much more fun. But slowely I’m finding my way through the RFC’s and fixing things as people report them to me.

There are also things you don’t count on, like that I under estimated the amount of users that need authentication for SMTP. But I fixed that yesterday by supporting AUTH LOGIN. I’m trying to prevent looking at SASL, because the bugreports of KMail are still giving me headaches (when i was bughunter there), but sooner or later, it will be added.

There are also things you don’t count on, but are logical. Like a Microsoft Windows server giving inconsistent replies or some mailservers interpreting the RFC differently.

One of the big disadvantages of being the only hacker on an application is that quality control is missing. Nobody is looking over your shoulder to see if you have the priorities right, making stupid mistakes or to talk to about certain problems. Talked to Thiago for a couple of minutes yesterday and that gave a simple solution to a problem I had. Would be great to have that permanently.

Really motivating things are people finding the irc-channel (#mailody). Frode M. Døving and Achim Bohnet are always there and give a thorough beating on everything I do. That’s really great. There are also people reporting problems, telling me how to be more RFC complient and so on. That’s also nice.

Also here and there popup reviews of Mailody. For example this one, which I like because it points out the flaws (after some corrections).

There are also things that I can not control, but which I would like. I would like very much some graphics (no I refuse to borrow stuff from other MUA’s) and I would like some usability support, for example I have a patch ready which implements the sorting of threads based on the youngest child, but I’m not sure how to tell the user that that is the way it is sorted.

Later this week a next release candidate I hope.

So everyone with an energy contract has received 52 euro from our governement. Done in the name of ‘compensation for raised energiecosts’. Well, doing it one week before elections sounds a lot like they are buying my vote.

It’s a shame. I will donate the 52 euro to the SP. At least I know where not to vote on.

I just released Mailody Release Candidate 1. What has changed since beta 1:

• Use the fancy dates, similar to KMail
• Select all messages added
• Size column added to headerview
• Almost complete Apidox documentation
• Better attachment handling
• Possibility to view messages in a fixed font
• Possibility to print a message
• Threading
• Zoom in / Zoom out
• Middle click opens a message in a new tab
• Hyperlinks and mailtos are now clickable, also in plain text mode
• In-reply-to header is now send
• Warnings when SSL/TLS is not possible, instead of silently doing nothing
• Honour Reply-to header, so replies to mailinglists are now handled better
• Fix refresh mailbox list
• Possibility to mark all messages as read for a folder
• Make it possible to connect to a custom port number
• Autocompletion now works on all known email addresses
• Possibility to Add to KDE addressbook from the composer
• Left click on an email address in the mainview opens the composer
• KWallet is no longer needed, if you don’t like KWallet, you will be prompted for a password
• New mail notification
• Labeling of messages is now prettier
• Prevent auto-logout by sending a NOOP every 25 minutes
• Faster loading of the Composer due to reading the Addressbook after Composer is shown
• Switched to a different socket handler, improves stability when changing servers
• Implement left/right to browse through the headers, up/down scrolls the message
• Dozens of small bugfixes / small improvements, not all visible stuff.

There are already Ubuntu Edgy packages available (but they should work on Debian testing/unstable and Ubuntu Dapper). Also there is a git for Gentoo!

Get it at the site

ps. Dovecot users: please wait for rc2

A while back I wrote that we needed new blood to save the KIPI-plugins. It was on the edge of being absorbed back to digiKam. Since that call a lot has changed. The mailinglist is alive, there is a coordinator, there is a webmaster, there are new plugins for GPS and iPod.

Even to the level that I learned yesterday that the last plugin which I was maintaining has been taken over by a new maintainer. Considering that for a couple of months I was maintaining most of them together with Renchi. Quite a change. There is also the rumour they are going to release a beta soon.

It’s great to see such a change and it gives faith for the future of open source projects, as long as the purpose of the software is valid, and circumstances are right (did anyone mention ‘community building’ lately?) there is a chance stuff will survive. Go Kipi!

This weekend I sat down and created threads for Mailody. It’s something I missed since I switched from KMail as primary mail client. When a discussion goes forward and back a couple of times, by different people it is hard to follow when you do not have threads. I was surprised how much I missed them. I’ll probably do a release later this week of Mailody, not sure if this feature will be in that release though.

The website is made by Marijke Verkaik. It is made with a Joomla CMS. It was a while back that I last worked with Joomla, and I must say it has improved a lot – or I have of course. ;-) Marijke is gathering all links to Joomla related stuff on a page from the famous dutch Startpagina series. But as it contains mostly links, its usable for everyone: joomla.startpagina.nl.

Talkin about usable; I needed an update for ClamAV for one of my customers, and as that is not in a repository where there are security updates, I always struggled a bit to keep it up to date while wanting to stay on Debian Stable. Friday I found http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-volatile/. It exists already for a while but I have not heard of it before, but it’s a valuable repository.