|
WARNING: DON'T DEPEND ON IT! |
| Product | IMAP ok? |
MIME ok? |
Why |
| Siren Mail 3.1.1 | No | No | Proprietary detachment May be better in June |
| Groupwise | No | ? | Not tested |
| Pronto97 | Yes | No | Detaches some folders Does not send correct charset labels. |
| Solstice Client 2.0 EA | No | ? | Not a finished product |
| Embla | No | Yes | Not detached operation |
| AtisMail 3.0 | ? | ? | Can't get it to work, seems complex to use |
| Z-Mail Pro 6.0 | No | No | No detached operation, big |
| Netscape 4.0 beta 2 | No | Strange | Functionality isn't there yet. Should look at it again in some months. |
| Simeon for Win32 4.1 | No | No | Not detached operation |
| Pine 3.95 | No | Yes | Not detached operation |
| Mulberry 1.1.1a4 | No | Yes | Not detached operation |
IMAP4 is "the next big thing" in Email reading.
In particular, "disconnected mode IMAP" seems like the heaven-sent
opportiunity for doing "E-mail on the road".
This document describes how we got where we got to (Or WILL, when we've actually gotten there).
UNINETT is investing in a new support structure, which includes equipping a lot of us with portables, which naturally have to have E-mail reading capability.
The existing infrastructure was MH with EXMH running on X terminals.
The requirement was that:
Now, what can we use for E-mail?
Disconnected mode IMAP seemed ideal; we would have a server-side mailbox that had all the sorted, saved and stored messages, and a "cache" on the notebook that contained reasonably recent messages. When we deleted them from the notebook, they would eventually disappear from the server too.
(This is a very different beast from "offline" mail reading, where you copy messages to your notebook, work with them there, and then copy them back once you're back home.)
As it turned out, this wasn't too simple, but seemed possible. However, the experiences learned were valuable.
The other requirement was simple: That we should be able to send and receive messages where the subject line and the text of the message were in Norwegian, and correctly encoded according to Internet standards. This requires support for 3 characters: Æ, Ø and Å.
IMAP is supposed to be standard. Therefore any recent IMAP server should do, right?
So we picked up the latest IMAP4 server from U Washington, compiled
it and installed it.
No configuration documentation? That must mean that the default makes
sense - right?
If only......
The UW server is a product with attitude.
This led to some requirements on the client:
The basic selection was done by looking at the www.imap.org Website and looking for clients that supported disconnected mode, by searching for "disconnected use: Yes" as phrase.
The resulting list was:
In addition, a rumour to the effect that Z-Mail Pro supported IMAP4 was traced, and Simeon 4.1 was installed on a whim.
As far as possible, these were then tested. In addition, Pine and Netscape Messenger were installed, in order to check them out and verify the IMAP4 installation.
Contact: Jeffrey Morrison <morrison@siren.com>
The funniest part here was actually getting to the download site; Netscape 4.0 beta 1 seemed to have a raft of bugs designed to keep you away from completing this Web registration path....
But the next message was not so funny: "You are not connected to a Siren server. Therefore, features like.....working offline....are not available."
End of test. A pity; it looked rather nice. (It also listed all my files as folders. In a wrinkle of its own, it also listed the directories as folders, reporting that it was not in mailbox format when clicked on. Apparently, it was unable to detect that there were folders inside the directories.)
I sent an E-mail to that effect to the company, and got back a very nice letter from Jeffrey Morrison (morrison@siren.com) reminding me that Siren Mail 3.1.1 was in fact older than the IMAP4 standard, having been released in April 1995, and that version 4.0, which will be released for beta test in April, would have full IMAP4 functionality, including both the functions I had problems with, and offering the Siren proprietary-extended IMAP2bis server for use in the testing.
I'd like to review where they are in April.
Siren Mail did not support RFC 1522 encoding of subject either, and happily sent messages with "us-ascii" in the charset label and ISO 8859-1 characters inside of it. Ungood.
With this product, I looked at the packaging, and decided that it was probably not terribly useful to attempt to use this without buying into the Groupwise "millieu", something I was not willing to do at this time.
Its product announcement says:
"GroupWise 5.1 natively supports open Internet standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, SMTP/MIME and LDAP (client), with support for IMAP4, POP3, NNTP, S-MIME and LDAP (server) due shortly."
"Due shortly" is not "now", so I didn't bother checking this one more.
Contact: Bob Rosa <brosa@commtouch.com>
The Pronto client description made me drool - it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, even after being filtered through my mental filter that removes all content-free phrases like "market leader", "the best" and so on.
Bob Rosa (brosa@commtouch.com) offered me the use of their Beta 2 client; some of the experience below is based on it.
The ProntoJava client seems to be vaporware at the moment; only a demo exists,and it took too long to load into Netscape (130K) for my patience.
Pronto97 appears to have quite a few features.
Its disconnection model seems reasonable: in the set of folders stored on the PC, there is a menu entry called "link to", which offers the opportunity to create a link to a folder on the IMAP server.
When linked, there are menu entries called "Update" and "Retrieve" which apparently access the IMAP store in the ways you'd expect.
This was the implementation I tested seriously; the testing uncovered a number of problems, documented separately.
The biggest problem was its failure to support MIME charsets; it sent out messages with 8859-1 text in them, but no charset label, did not support RFC-1522 encoding of Subject: fields, and did illegal MIME encoding of text attachments - again without supplying charset labels.
Since the ability of UNINETT to be taken seriously when discussing E-mail and character sets depends on its sending correct E-mail messages, this means that the product is not usable for UNINETT.
The version I found was claled "Solstice Internet Mail Client V2.0 Early Access", using the tag "ROAM".
It also opened a debug window where I could follow the IMAP4 transaction; fun, but not terribly useful in production mode. This also had a constant chat of "Version du Soleil" rejected - is it looking for Sun-specific features?
The Sun Web page labelled this as a "Reference Client" with no support available.
The "Mailboxes" window was interesting; there was a string you could edit, in "host:Directory" format, with "roam:/" as default (no way to set it that I found).
Setting this to "server:/" gave a listing of the ROOT directory
of the server!
server:~ gave the home directory once, and the root directory thereafter;
I was unable to provoke it into accessing MH folders. It refused relative
paths like server:~mail.
After leaving the client, it seemed to forget all about what mailboxes were interesting.
It seemed to have a most promising way of looking at things, where the
default was that messages were on the server, and that what was on the
PC was a local cache.
But it seemed too much of an "early access/proof of concept "
thing.
Conclusion: Not what we're looking for.
This installed and came up fine. It puts a little "squiggle" into the status box of Win95 that is apparently a mailbox watcher; I could not find out how to turn this off or remove it, short of uninstalling the program.
The display has "Inbox", "Outbox", "Draft", "My Local Folders" and "My Server Folders".
Clicking "properties" on "My server folders" brought up a very nice display where I could add any number of trees on the server into the folder system. Adding "#mhbr" there brought up my MH folders, as they should, while adding "mail" brought up the mailbox set I had set up for testing.
Default is empty string - all files in my homedir.
The "Inbox" was mapped (by the server's INBOX entry, probably) to /var/mail/my-login, as it should.
When disconnecting and attempting to look into "My Server Folders", Embla asked "Would you like to connect now?".
This product does not seem to support my idea of disconnected operation.
But Embla gave me one of my few moments of joy when testing MIME functionality: When sending my standard message, it correctly encoded the subject line, and correctly labelled the body as ISO-8859-1. I'll forgive it for thinking that a body with 3 out of 15 characters having the high bit set should be done in Base64 rather than Quoted-Printable.
This was perhaps the second most frustrating client of the bunch (next to Netscape).
The version tested was ATISMAIL version 3.0 (Lite?), which seems publicly and cheaply available. It also has lots of functionality like folder synchronization, LDAP interface, and more.
Unfortunately, I was not even able to get it to work to the point of reading my inbox; no matter what I did, it seemed to have a 50% chance of crashing with Windows GPF.
This is beta release 2of Messenger.
The display of folders showed "Mail on <server>" and "mail" as 2 different top-level folders, in addition to "news".
The IMAP mail directory prefix is under Edit/Preferences/Mail Server.
From beta 1 to beta 2, I think there must have been 30 more grayed-out entries in various menus and config files related to offline operation; however, most of them don't do anything. (Some do, in spite of the gray color!)
The MIME charset support is strange; it correctly encodes the subject field, including identifying the charset as iso-8859-1, but when faced with 8-bit characters in the body of the message, it encodes the whole thing with Base64 and labels it as US-ASCII!
But Netscape has made this work correctly earlier, so I hope this will be corrected.
Pine is "the canonical IMAP client"; Mark Crispin
says that it will add disconnected support at some date, but not Real Soon.
Start working on it in April, perhaps?
Apparently the lower layer stuff is well underway, but the user interface
will take a while longer.
Pine is also almost infinitely configurable - if you can figure out where to put it, you can get it configured. Unfortunately, that may be a job...
The necessary configuration to get it to send messages in Norwegian is "character-set"; type "(S)etup (C)onfig" and PageDown five times (I'm NOT kidding!) and you will find it; set it to "iso-8859-1".
After that, it will send Norwegian correctly in both subject and body.
Contact: Jeremy Jones <nmbtest32@netmanage.com> and Joseph Fried <joseph@netmanage.co.il>
Since we have some experience with Z-Mail inhouse, the news that this might be supporting IMAP came as a welcome shock.
It is easily the biggest application tested, having a dozen or so subsidiary programs.
Unfortunately, perusing its documentation revealed that it had not even a hint of supporting disconnected operation. Mail with Z-Mail (Joseph Fried (Joseph@netmanage.co.il) revealed the statement
"we currently support downloading a folder for off-line operation and drag and drop operations, but not in a one-sync action. We will support this feature in the next release."
The version I was testing was 6.0, the newer version, 6.1, seemed to offer no new functionality wrt IMAP.
Worse was the fact that I was unable to get the system configured correctly; it read my inbox fine, but was unable to find the mailboxes on the IMAP server. No matter what I did to the "computer" listed under "Remote folders", it stubbornly refused to show any folders.
Not even "create new folder" did it. Obviously a simple bug, but.....
I also tried to configure both #mh and mail into "other mailboxes viewable under this privillege". This turned out to be fatal - Z-Mail now goes into an "illegal operation" fault immediately upon startup.
But 6.1 might be better.....I guess another LONG download is in my future....
Sending my standard test messge gave pure 8-bit characters unquoted in the headers, and a quoted-printable body labelled as "US-ASCII".
Contact: Genai McLeod <genai@esys.ca>
Simeon version 4.1 seems like a great client, and supports a lot more IMAP features than the others, including subscribed/unsubscribed folders.
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any hint that it supports disconnected
operation.
Like Embla and others, it supports local folders and remote folders, but
offers no help in keeping the two consistent.
Sending my standard test messge gave pure 8-bit characters unquoted in the headers, and a quoted-printable body labelled as "US-ASCII".
This client was recommended to me by Patrik Faltstrom.
I tested the Alpha Win95 version 1.1.1a4. It does not support disconnected operation, but supports Norwegian in MIME out of the box.