Peter's Blog

Whee google have enabled imap in my gmail account. Maybe I will do something about the 2016 messages in my inbox. Or maybe not.

I've got 5260 messages in all, taking up 347Mb of my 4536M of space.

I only delete spam.

I am back with Google Desktop Search. I was using MSN desktop search but I got tired of it not shutting down with the computer. I have moaned about GDS in the past, particularly that I don't like the idea of results appearing in a web browser because the only thing you can do is open them, you don't have Windows Explorer's right-click context menu. After months of using MSN search I have decided that this is not a big deal: on the whole I can remember where things are and I use salamander to access them, I only use search when I have lost something.

GDS integrates better with thunderbird than MSN search did: I installed an MSN thunderbird plugin but it never worked. GDS supports it out-of-the-box, although as I use IMAP it will only index the messages I actually open, not the 2400 messages in my archives (unless I view them all one at a time).

I have come to appreciate the various plugins available for the GDS sidebar, especially the email preview thing: in fact I find myself reading email on that rather than switching to thunderbird. There are many plugins available but their installation programs often seem excessively large (megabytes) for something that is hosted by another application and appears in a window two inches square.

I have stopped using Opera for now: it's mail reader was not showing me the contents of some messages so I abandoned it. Some emails can crash it and it is still not as compatible with web sites as firefox. It has got me hooked on gestures and I find myself gesturing in FireFox to no avail (except at microsoft.com). I have installed a gesture extension and am hoping the next point release of firefox doesn't break it.

I'm trying the Opera 9 preview as an alternative (or complement) to Firefox. Opera has been attractive to me in the past but always gave odd rendering problems or crashes that put me off. This version has been ok thus far and has features built in that are quite seductive. Ok firefox has extensions but these all seem to break every time they upgrade it and I have got fed up with reinstalling them (too high maintenance).

Opera goodies, some maybe all available as Firefox extensions but are bundled with opera:

• Fast Forward: this button seems to find the 'next' link on your page and clicks it for you. You can go through google results very quickly.
• gestures: right click and move the cursor around to control the browser: e.g. right click and move right does the fast forward action so takes you to the next page with no fuss and minimal physical effort.
• email client: this supports IMAP and works with Microsoft Exchange. It chucks all email in one folder and gives lots of options for searching through it. For example, you click on a contact name and see all the mail from that contact. Looks ok so far and is appealing as the memory footprint of Opera should be less than Firefox + Thunderbird. Only downside so far: cannot compose html email. Not a showstopper as I rarely bother to format email (like I rarely bother to format blog postings) and it does display html email (as a web browser should be able to).
• It supports widgets if you have a need for a huge clock that cannot be resized. There are only 9 of them so far (clock, calculator, calendar etc).

Possibly more cool: Opera Mini. This is a version of Opera written in Java so it works on my Sony-Ericsson K750i phone. This is a proper web browser, it supports http/html, it is not a crippled WAP thing so you can look at real web sites. It displays them in a tiny font that gets a lot of info on the screen. It communicates with a server at Opera which compresses the pages you are viewing and minimises the download: the front page of this site was a 8k! I installed it thusly:

• Download the .jar and .jad files for the k750i.
• Connect phone to USB
• Copy files to \MSSEMC\Media files\other
• Unplug phone (stopping USB devices on Windows 2000, not necessary on XP).
• On phone, go to 'My Items', Other.
• Select the .jar file, right click and Install. It will ask you if you want it installed as an Application or Game: you decide.
• For uk vodafone, go to Settings/Connectivity/Internet Settings/Internet Profiles and create a new profile. Give it any name and set the 'Connect Using' field to 'Contract Internet'.
• Go to Settings/Connectivity/Internet Settings/Settings for Java(tm) and select here the new profile you created above.
• Go to My Items/Applications (or Games) and select Opera Mini. It will do a connectivity test. If it fails the internet profile for java above might be wrong.
• Enjoy

Using another PC at work and getting tired of Microsoft Exchange Web Access, a pretty poor web email application. What to do?

Put Portable Thunderbird on a Freecom USB hard disk and carry that around the building. I would use a flash drive but I would have to use my own and I don't want it performing excessive writes and using up the flashes erase cycles. I am using IMAP and keeping all the messages on the server but I don't want to take any chances. Portable Firefox does try to limit writes to flash.

The USB hard drive does appear to make the other PC I am using take about two minutes longer to boot which is more time to make coffee.

I copied the profile directory from my static thunderbird install to the portable one and it all seems to work fine.

I seem to get a lot of people visiting this site looking at how to use thunderbird with Exchange. I don't think I ever described it in detail as I found it quite easy. I just enabled an IMAP service on the exchange server and I connect to that from Thunderbird using the standard procedure (username/password). IMAP has the advantage of keeping all the messages on the server so it is someone elses problem to back them up. Also searching through messages seems to work much faster as the server is good at that kind of thing and Microsofts local message archive format, the .pst file, is pretty poor. It is probably just as easy to set up POP3. Email is sent using authenticated smtp so I am prompted for username/password to send messages.

With this setup I don't get shared calendars or any other executive gimmicks but I don't use them anyway.

Sorry if this suggestion seems inane but as far as I know this is the only way this can be done.

I've discovered Thunderbird saved searches. They allow me to create items in the tree thing on the left that act like folders full of messages that meet certain search characteristics. For example, I can have an item called 'fred' containing all messages from 'fred'. Previously to do this I would create a folder and get my filtering rules to try to shuffle incoming messages into the right folder. In outlook this was always flaky, in thunderbird I've never bothered. Saved searches are much easier to set up and have the advantage that if you change the search terms then the changes are applied immediately, you don't have to run all your messages through filtering rules again. Also messages can meet more than one search pattern: I could have a search for everyone in project X and I could also have searches for specific people in project X: the same messages could appear in both.

It's working nicely with Microsoft Exchange via IMAP: the searches occur instantly, no real overhead. This may be because the IMAP is offloading the search to the server. If the search was done locally I doubt that it would be so transparent.

Hum, as a concept these stored searches could be considered an alternative to tagging. Instead of manually having to mark an article as being about, say, ubuntu, the stored search would automatically search for the word ubuntu in the article and list the matches. It is more fiddly to create a search than a tag but they would require less maintenance. Tagging does give the possibility of structuring articles. Something else to think about.

Servant Salamander: coming to rely on this. Pretty much destined to register it. Today I discovered that I can get it to calculate space used in subdirectorys and then send a report of directory names and sizes, sorted by size, to the clipboard. Try doing that with Windows Explorer. I've stopped using filezilla, Salamander is a useful sftp client. Things I do wish it could do:

• copy directly from one sftp site to another. Similarly, since you can browse straight into a zip or tgz file, it would be nice to be able to copy a file from within an archive on one window to other window showing an sftp site. The user interface spoils you, you start thinking these things are possible, you try them and are thwarted.
• create tar.gz files. I have actually learned the incantation for this, I am becoming such a command line junkie:

  tar cvfz blah *
  

  It can do zips and rars and stuff.
• It sometimes goes a bit crazy with the confirmation dialogs, sometimes giving two or three in a row. I don't have faith enough to disable them, combining them into one dialog would be nice (e.g. yes I want to copy, I want to copy it there, I want to overwrite everything).

Thunderbird: since I fixed the exchange server I have been using this instead of outlook and have not looked back. I use an IMAP connection to the Exchange server and it is working just fine. I used to have problems with it when my network connection was flakier (it kept asking me for my password) but since I installed XP on my pc the network has been ok (one of those software decay things on my old Win2k install). I think outlook was tainted by spambayes which was pretty lethargic in moving spam around (to get around outlook's flaky message filtering it does lots of sleeps to keep out of the way). So you go to look at a message and find that spambayes is still in the process of moving it to the junk folder. Thunderbirds integrated bayesian spam filter is working for me. Another thing I like about thunderbird, the flag thing that pops up and goes away again when new mail arrives. The outlook taskbar thing always used to get stuck on, even after deleting new messages, to the extent that I disabled it.

I wanted to get the POP and IMAP services on our Exchange 2003 server running so:

• I could use Thunderbird (or at least had the choice)
• Folks could potentially look at their email from their mobile phones.

Clicking on the 'POP3' service in the Exchange manager gave the useless error 'The server is not operational'. Googling for this implied a DNS problem so I looked in the event log and found a number of instances of error event 5789. The details of this were:

Attempt to update DNS Host Name of the computer object in Active Directory failed.
The updated value was 'server.work.co.uk'. The following error occurred:

The parameter is incorrect.

Searching for event 5789 gave this MS knowledge base article. Aparently this error is due to the DNS domain name being different to the Active Directory Domain Name. In the case here, the DNS domain name of the exchange box should have been domain_name.work.co.uk, not work.co.uk. I fixed this in Control Panel/System/Network Identification and did the mandatory reboot.

When it came up, life was sweet, existing POP3 and IMAP services were reborn and Thunderbird is working nicely.

Moral: Never ever assume that working with Microsoft Exchange is easy.

Yesterday:

FireFox

decided to show me profile manager and refuses to let me open my old profile. Have to start new profile from scratch, installing extensions etc

ThunderBird

not connecting to IMAP server: waits forever and doesn't time out

The gmail way of working is a good model. Mail is received in the inbox, you read it and when you have digested it you press an 'Archive' button to move it from the inbox to the archive directory. I like this, it keeps the inbox clean of everything except email that needs dealing with. The old messages are out of the way, in a place where they can be ignored until 2 years later when you need to prove someone wrong.

I have started working like this on my dovecat IMAP/squirrelmail setup: I deal with stuff in the inbox and move it to one of the following:

• a project related folder
• an archive folder for general stuff.
• a 'spam.categorically' folder

This has another advantage because the archive folder will be full of 'ham' messages (not spam) and makes a good input to the spamassassin bayes filter. Messages in the inbox can go from 'unread' to 'deleted' very quickly, in which case the bayes filter does not get a chance to look at them as it learns on a cron job every night (hoping it will learn the new keyword 'rolex' real soon).

I still need to realise my dream of publishing the contents of the project related folders on a web server where they can be searched, linked to and ideally threaded. This needs some kind of mega mail tool. The closest I can find is mail list server stuff which I am not sure can deal with CC's etc. Mailman may be hackable, being python, but where I've seen it used the presentation is pretty poor, one of the things that puts me off subscribing to mailing lists.