Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
--On 9 July 2009 11:27:55 -0400 Jorey Bump l...@joreybump.com wrote: Ian Eiloart wrote, at 07/09/2009 10:46 AM: --On 9 July 2009 09:54:31 -0400 Adam Tauno Williams a...@morrison-ind.com wrote: Ian Eiloart wrote, at 07/09/2009 05:39 AM: Except that the sieve server ought to be on the border MTA, so that the user can tell the server to reject the message at SMTP time. That's not feasible for mail with multiple recipients. It is if your rule is to reject all email from a specific sender. No, because the MTA either accepts or rejects a message [in connection]. Not true. The MTA can decide *per recipient* whether to accept mail from a specific sender. How? Well, you have to have the right software to begin with. Some MTA software simply accepts all email, then decides what to do with it. You don't want that type. To understand how this works, you need to understand the SMTP protocol. Perhaps info-cyrus isn't the right place to be explaining that, but read through the example at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol#SMTP_transport_example. Imagine that theboss has blacklisted Bob, but Alice hasn't. -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex 01273-873148 x3148 For new support requests, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/ Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
--On 9 July 2009 11:51:32 -0400 Greg A. Woods woods-cy...@weird.com wrote: At Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:46:42 +0100, Ian Eiloart i...@sussex.ac.uk wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? There probably aren't any SIEVE implementations that do what I suggest, and the implementations wouldn't be simple, but there's no principled reason that it shouldn't. Yes, I suppose something like Sieve could be used by an MTA, and it could be used in a per-recipient manner. Personally I've found it best though to leave management of MTA level controls to system managers. We let people create Exim filters at the MTA level, but they operate on delivery not as messages are accepted. They don't have access to all the functionality that a system filter does, but Exim filters have more functionality than Sieve filters. However Sieve in the context of this mailing list is the one inside Cyrus IMAP, i.e. the local delivery agent, and it confusing it with anything that could happen beforehand in the MTA would be very wrong. I my very strong opinion the reject and redirect actions should not be a part of any valid Sieve implementation. We don't like that much, either. However, I'd be happy to allow users to reject specific senders (a) at SMTP time, or (b) in the event that a positive SPF or DKIM match were found. I don't know of any Sieve implementations that meet those conditions, though. Luckily the RFC 5228 removed reject as a directly mentioned feature (leaving it only as an optional extension). They probably should have done the same to redirect, and it certainly should not be required to be implemented, but luckily implementations are required to provide a means of limiting the number of redirects a script can perform (as well as other required controls). -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex 01273-873148 x3148 For new support requests, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/ Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: sieve configuration (was Automatically moving marked mails?)
--On 9 July 2009 12:56:24 -0400 Greg A. Woods woods-cy...@weird.com wrote: At Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:39:28 -0500, Mike Eggleston mikee...@mac.com wrote: Subject: sieve configuration (was Automatically moving marked mails?) On Thu, 09 Jul 2009, Greg A. Woods might have said: (even use of the vacation feature is questionable, especially since it's not usually configured in the proper way) And what is the proper way to configure Sieve and vacation? Perhaps the best way to explain is to point you at my BSD Vacation v2 project: http://www.planix.com/~woods/projects/BSD-vacation-v2.html It's far from perfect, stale due to lack of Round Tuits, etc., but it's also, IMHO, orders of magnitude better than the original BSD/Sendmail version too. :-) It sounds a lot like the Exim filter vacation implementation. -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex 01273-873148 x3148 For new support requests, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/ Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
A milter such as mimedefang could allow you to do filtering on a per-user basis on the mta level, if you are willing to write a lot of (perl in case of mimedefang) code. Actually, this is implemented in the commercial solution based on mimedefang, canit-pro (roaringpenguin.com) : each user can have his own flow and trigger filtering, including spf or greylisting if the administrator allows it. Nothing to do with cyrus, or even sieve, though ;-) (Please excuse top posting, gmail android client is suboptimal) -- Clement Hermann On 7 13, 2009 11:54 AM, Ian Eiloart i...@sussex.ac.uk wrote: --On 9 July 2009 11:51:32 -0400 Greg A. Woods woods-cy...@weird.com wrote: At Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:46:42 +0100, Ian Eiloart i...@sussex.ac.uk wrote: Subject: Re: Automat... We let people create Exim filters at the MTA level, but they operate on delivery not as messages are accepted. They don't have access to all the functionality that a system filter does, but Exim filters have more functionality than Sieve filters. However Sieve in the context of this mailing list is the one inside Cyrus IMAP, i.e. the local ... We don't like that much, either. However, I'd be happy to allow users to reject specific senders (a) at SMTP time, or (b) in the event that a positive SPF or DKIM match were found. I don't know of any Sieve implementations that meet those conditions, though. Luckily the RFC 5228 removed reject as a directly mentioned feature (leaving it only as an ... Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex 01273-873148 x3148 For new support requests, see http:... Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki Li... Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
--On 8 July 2009 12:04:05 -0400 Greg A. Woods woods-cy...@weird.com wrote: What would be better for any and all IMAP MUAs would be a rules editor to write and edit Sieve rules and which would work with Cyrus IMAP for managing server-side filtering (but I personally wouldn't use it either -- I'd just edit the source :-)) This is the one place where IMAP as a protocol fails miserably -- sieve rule management should be integrated into it as otherwise server-side filtering will never become usable by the average person. Except that the sieve server ought to be on the border MTA, so that the user can tell the server to reject the message at SMTP time. -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex 01273-873148 x3148 For new support requests, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/ Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
Ian Eiloart wrote, at 07/09/2009 05:39 AM: Except that the sieve server ought to be on the border MTA, so that the user can tell the server to reject the message at SMTP time. That's not feasible for mail with multiple recipients. Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
Ian Eiloart wrote, at 07/09/2009 05:39 AM: Except that the sieve server ought to be on the border MTA, so that the user can tell the server to reject the message at SMTP time. That's not feasible for mail with multiple recipients. It is if your rule is to reject all email from a specific sender. No, because the MTA either accepts or rejects a message [in connection]. If a message is sent to userX and userY and userX has SIEVE set to reject the message and userY does not then the MTA has to receive the message in order to deliver it to userY. And the MTA would have to check every recipient's SIEVE script. Then what about delivery to an alias that expands to multiple users? Mail delivery just isn't that simple. Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
--On 9 July 2009 09:15:32 -0400 Jorey Bump l...@joreybump.com wrote: Ian Eiloart wrote, at 07/09/2009 05:39 AM: Except that the sieve server ought to be on the border MTA, so that the user can tell the server to reject the message at SMTP time. That's not feasible for mail with multiple recipients. It is if your rule is to reject all email from a specific sender. -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex 01273-873148 x3148 For new support requests, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/ Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
--On 9 July 2009 09:54:31 -0400 Adam Tauno Williams a...@morrison-ind.com wrote: Ian Eiloart wrote, at 07/09/2009 05:39 AM: Except that the sieve server ought to be on the border MTA, so that the user can tell the server to reject the message at SMTP time. That's not feasible for mail with multiple recipients. It is if your rule is to reject all email from a specific sender. No, because the MTA either accepts or rejects a message [in connection]. Not true. The MTA can decide *per recipient* whether to accept mail from a specific sender. It's true that the MTA hasn't seen the message content at this point, but it does have enough information to determine - for example - whether the sender is a member of a mailing list, or is on a recipient's blacklist or whitelist. We do a lot of that. Exim, for example, can do this in its ACLs. It doesn't have a built in SIEVE facility at this stage, but certainly can consult recipient specific blacklists. It can even be built with a perl interpreter, so you could check for sender conditions in SEIVE scripts. If a message is sent to userX and userY and userX has SIEVE set to reject the message and userY does not then the MTA has to receive the message in order to deliver it to userY. And the MTA would have to check every recipient's SIEVE script. Sure, there are some content dependent conditions that could not be tested at this stage. In principle, they could be ignored for the moment. There probably aren't any SIEVE implementations that do what I suggest, and the implementations wouldn't be simple, but there's no principled reason that it shouldn't. Then what about delivery to an alias that expands to multiple users? Mail delivery just isn't that simple. -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex 01273-873148 x3148 For new support requests, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/ Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
Ian Eiloart wrote, at 07/09/2009 10:46 AM: --On 9 July 2009 09:54:31 -0400 Adam Tauno Williams a...@morrison-ind.com wrote: Ian Eiloart wrote, at 07/09/2009 05:39 AM: Except that the sieve server ought to be on the border MTA, so that the user can tell the server to reject the message at SMTP time. That's not feasible for mail with multiple recipients. It is if your rule is to reject all email from a specific sender. No, because the MTA either accepts or rejects a message [in connection]. Not true. The MTA can decide *per recipient* whether to accept mail from a specific sender. How? It's true that the MTA hasn't seen the message content at this point, but it does have enough information to determine - for example - whether the sender is a member of a mailing list, or is on a recipient's blacklist or whitelist. We do a lot of that. Please elaborate. What kind of feedback does the sender get when you reject a message during the SMTP transaction for one recipient, but deliver it for others? Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
At Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:39:54 +0100, Ian Eiloart i...@sussex.ac.uk wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? Except that the sieve server ought to be on the border MTA, so that the user can tell the server to reject the message at SMTP time. Except that's not what Sieve is for. Sieve should _NEVER_ be used to reject or bounce e-mail. It becomes a DoS reflector when so configured. (even use of the vacation feature is questionable, especially since it's not usually configured in the proper way) -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098VE3TCP RoboHack wo...@robohack.ca Planix, Inc. wo...@planix.com Secrets of the Weird wo...@weird.com Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
sieve configuration (was Automatically moving marked mails?)
On Thu, 09 Jul 2009, Greg A. Woods might have said: snip (even use of the vacation feature is questionable, especially since it's not usually configured in the proper way) And what is the proper way to configure Sieve and vacation? Mike Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
At Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:46:42 +0100, Ian Eiloart i...@sussex.ac.uk wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? There probably aren't any SIEVE implementations that do what I suggest, and the implementations wouldn't be simple, but there's no principled reason that it shouldn't. Yes, I suppose something like Sieve could be used by an MTA, and it could be used in a per-recipient manner. Personally I've found it best though to leave management of MTA level controls to system managers. However Sieve in the context of this mailing list is the one inside Cyrus IMAP, i.e. the local delivery agent, and it confusing it with anything that could happen beforehand in the MTA would be very wrong. I my very strong opinion the reject and redirect actions should not be a part of any valid Sieve implementation. Luckily the RFC 5228 removed reject as a directly mentioned feature (leaving it only as an optional extension). They probably should have done the same to redirect, and it certainly should not be required to be implemented, but luckily implementations are required to provide a means of limiting the number of redirects a script can perform (as well as other required controls). -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098VE3TCP RoboHack wo...@robohack.ca Planix, Inc. wo...@planix.com Secrets of the Weird wo...@weird.com Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: sieve configuration (was Automatically moving marked mails?)
At Thu, 9 Jul 2009 10:39:28 -0500, Mike Eggleston mikee...@mac.com wrote: Subject: sieve configuration (was Automatically moving marked mails?) On Thu, 09 Jul 2009, Greg A. Woods might have said: (even use of the vacation feature is questionable, especially since it's not usually configured in the proper way) And what is the proper way to configure Sieve and vacation? Perhaps the best way to explain is to point you at my BSD Vacation v2 project: http://www.planix.com/~woods/projects/BSD-vacation-v2.html It's far from perfect, stale due to lack of Round Tuits, etc., but it's also, IMHO, orders of magnitude better than the original BSD/Sendmail version too. :-) -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098VE3TCP RoboHack wo...@robohack.ca Planix, Inc. wo...@planix.com Secrets of the Weird wo...@weird.com Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
At Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:27:55 -0400, Jorey Bump l...@joreybump.com wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? Ian Eiloart wrote, at 07/09/2009 10:46 AM: Not true. The MTA can decide *per recipient* whether to accept mail from a specific sender. How? just return a 4xx or 5xx response to fewer than all of the RCPT TO: commands. Please elaborate. What kind of feedback does the sender get when you reject a message during the SMTP transaction for one recipient, but deliver it for others? That will depend entirely on what MTA is attempting to make the delivery. -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098VE3TCP RoboHack wo...@robohack.ca Planix, Inc. wo...@planix.com Secrets of the Weird wo...@weird.com Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
This is getting way off topic now, but I'm not sure how best to reply privately to you. At Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:57:23 -0400, Jorey Bump l...@joreybump.com wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? I disagree. Apple Mail has some fundamental usability issues that need to be addressed. Every time I try it out, I can't get past the fact that there's no easy way to step through all unread messages in a mailbox. How do people quickly read new mail with Apple Mail? Just like you can in many other MUAs (GUI and non-GUI): click on the header to sort by flag, scroll down to the first unread message, then read the successive ones by pressing the cursor-down key. It can't get much more intuitive, but of course you have to understand that sorting and re-sorting the message display is a fundamental feature that needs to be actively used in order to take full advantage of pretty much any modern MUA (even Pine). I'm sure there's a trivial way to bind a keyboard shortcut to jump to the next unread message, but I'm no OSX expert by any means and the most I've done with keyboard shortcuts is rebind the quit sequence so that it isn't quite so easy to hit (since it doesn't confirm in most apps, nor should it ever, really). Personally I don't like the way threads are visualized in Apple Mail, but that's hardly a show-stopper. [[about Thunderbird]] The message filters are also pretty nice, if you don't have access to server-side filtering. I would have said Apple Mail's rules were better, but I don't really use them so I can't say for sure. What would be better for any and all IMAP MUAs would be a rules editor to write and edit Sieve rules and which would work with Cyrus IMAP for managing server-side filtering (but I personally wouldn't use it either -- I'd just edit the source :-)) This is the one place where IMAP as a protocol fails miserably -- sieve rule management should be integrated into it as otherwise server-side filtering will never become usable by the average person. Finally, its support for multiple accounts seems to be superior to any other client I've tested. Again I would have said Apple Mail's ability to handle multiple accounts is better. I liked Mulberry, but without ongoing development it cannot be recommended any more. I tried Opera Mail the other day, but I didn't like it much (though it seemed very complete) and I couldn't get over the fact that it was integrated right into the browser as an extension and my mailbox summary could be just another tab in my browser window. That's way too scary for me. I'd hate to think what the security implications might be, and I suspect there are many, but that they'll be a lot harder to find and fix than they would be if one used an integrated web browser and mail reader in Emacs (or a Smalltalk environment, for that matter). -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098VE3TCP RoboHack wo...@robohack.ca Planix, Inc. wo...@planix.com Secrets of the Weird wo...@weird.com Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
At Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:58:37 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams awill...@whitemice.org wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? Because they are both about collaboration (communication) so users, correctly, put them in the same bucket conceptually. And clients have been bundling this functionality for ages. Well, OK, yes I integrate all these features in my editor for various reasons, not all of which have to do with usability, but from a user's point of view, at least on a platform with a complete and consistent GUI, it really doesn't matter if they're separate applications or not since it's just a bunch of different windows for the user anyway. A unified client makes sense because both mail and calendering require an address book. Well, perhaps that would make sense to a really junior developer who also doesn't understand that an address book application is also a separate tool, and also one which perhaps is going to be using centralized, and multiple separate, remote shared data sources. :-) But the backends do not need to be so unified; Exactly. Thus the front-ends don't need to be unified either. No, iCAL doesn't support full management of proper central calendars. CalDAV does, or GroupDAV. Straight iCalendar is pretty useless as a groupware solution as you can only operate on a calendar and not just an event. I'm not sure what you're talking about. I think you're confusing protocols and applications. I think you're also confusing how some of these protocols, such as RFC 2445 iCalendar can be used. Apple iCal is an application. It can subscribe to remote calendars and it can publish to a remote calendar in standard RFC 2445 format. It can also use CalDAV as a protocol to connect to a calendar server supporting that protocol. I agree though that iCal without using either CalDAV or e-mail to share events is still not as advanced as it could be when it comes to managing remote calendars that could be shared. However with CalDAV the use of e-mail to share events can mostly be avoided (except of course for those who somehow cannot use an RFC2445 or RFC47921 server but can use e-mail). Lightning and Sunbird are identical. No, they're not (though their shared functionality may be close to identical). One is an integrated app bundle, the other is more stand-alone. -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098VE3TCP RoboHack wo...@robohack.ca Planix, Inc. wo...@planix.com Secrets of the Weird wo...@weird.com Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
--On 6 July 2009 17:42:04 -0400 Greg A. Woods woods-cy...@weird.com wrote: At Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:40:44 +0100, Ian Eiloart i...@sussex.ac.uk wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? Suggestions? The answers will depend entirely on what platform one chooses and what requirements one has for e-mail use. Personally I'd suggest Mac OSX and Apple Mail as a first cut for anyone who wants an easy-to-manage and easy-to-use, and half-decent MUA. It doesn't do everything I want to do as a hyper-experienced e-mail user, nor is it apparently easy to write proper extensions for, but it certainly does cover all the main requirements the average user has. Equally I'm sure Thunderbird works well for many people too. For an integrated email and calendar tool? After all these years I still fail to see what e-mail and calendar keeping have to do with each other. It's lunacy to put them in the same tool. Use the right tool for the job. I guess people organise lots of meeting invitations by email. We use Meeting Maker, which uses synchronous server/client communications to pop up invitation alerts, reminders, and so on. However, many of our Meeting Maker accounts are used rarely. The mailbox is the only place you can be sure that a meeting invitation will be found, so even a Meeting Maker invitation has to be backed up with an email invitation. Yes, doing scheduling and calendar maintenance requires communicating between multiple parties, but e-mail is _not_ the right tool for this kind of communications! I tend to agree, and that's part of the reason that we use Meeting Maker. However, it still requires use of email to organise meetings when some participants don't have diaries on the Meeting Maker server. I guess that Outlook users regard email and calendaring as belonging in one tool because that's what they're used to. Even Apple Mail - with its data detectors - makes a nod in this direction. Of course, what Mail should do is create an ics file an import it into your preferred calendar tool. Personally I'm still a big fan of centralization wherever it makes sense, and it especially makes sense when the model one is using to design an implement solutions to a given problem requires shared access to unified data. Perhaps Google Apps calendaring is the right tool for some folks. Perhaps Apple OSX iCal works well enough (and for those who insist on using e-mail to communicate calendaring information, well it just so happens that iCal does integrate with your mail reader to send and receive notifications and facilitates some basic ability to share events, but of course iCal also supports full management of proper central calendars too, as well as read-only subscriptions to centrally maintained calendars, etc.). Perhaps Mozilla's answers to calendar management would work for many folks too. Mozilla even cater to those who can't seem to separate calendar management from e-mail in their minds with Lightning, but personally I'd stick with Sunbird if I were to use Mozilla's tools. I think Mozilla have abandoned Sunbird. They haven't the resources for both projects, and Lightning is easier to develop because it has access to Thunderbird's email functionality. -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex 01273-873148 x3148 For new support requests, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/ Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
For an integrated email and calendar tool? After all these years I still fail to see what e-mail and calendar keeping have to do with each other. It's lunacy to put them in the same tool. Use the right tool for the job. Because they are both about collaboration (communication) so users, correctly, put them in the same bucket conceptually. And clients have been bundling this functionality for ages. Yes, doing scheduling and calendar maintenance requires communicating between multiple parties, but e-mail is _not_ the right tool for this kind of communications! Personally I'm still a big fan of centralization wherever it makes sense, and it especially makes sense when the model one is using to design an implement solutions to a given problem requires shared access to unified data. A unified client makes sense because both mail and calendering require an address book. But the backends do not need to be so unified; OpenGroupware [for example] delegates mail to IMAP/SMTP (Cyrus/any-MTA) just about everything else is managed over GroupDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV (HTTP) or some combination. And vCards/vEvents/vToDos typically use e-mail addresses as the identifiers of contacts/participants/executors. This is a pretty typically arrangement. Perhaps Google Apps calendaring is the right tool for some folks. Perhaps Apple OSX iCal works well enough (and for those who insist on using e-mail to communicate calendaring information, well it just so happens that iCal does integrate with your mail reader to send and receive notifications and facilitates some basic ability to share events, but of course iCal also supports full management of proper central calendars too, as well as read-only subscriptions to centrally maintained calendars, etc.). No, iCAL doesn't support full management of proper central calendars. CalDAV does, or GroupDAV. Straight iCalendar is pretty useless as a groupware solution as you can only operate on a calendar and not just an event. Perhaps Mozilla's answers to calendar management would work for many folks too. Mozilla even cater to those who can't seem to separate calendar management from e-mail in their minds with Lightning, but personally I'd stick with Sunbird if I were to use Mozilla's tools. Lightning and Sunbird are identical. Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
Greg A. Woods wrote, at 07/06/2009 05:42 PM: Personally I'd suggest Mac OSX and Apple Mail as a first cut for anyone who wants an easy-to-manage and easy-to-use, and half-decent MUA. It doesn't do everything I want to do as a hyper-experienced e-mail user, nor is it apparently easy to write proper extensions for, but it certainly does cover all the main requirements the average user has. I disagree. Apple Mail has some fundamental usability issues that need to be addressed. Every time I try it out, I can't get past the fact that there's no easy way to step through all unread messages in a mailbox. How do people quickly read new mail with Apple Mail? Equally I'm sure Thunderbird works well for many people too. This is currently my preferred client, although it has its own flaws. However, it has some of the best thread handling and allows me to move to the next unread message with a single keypress: 'n'. The message filters are also pretty nice, if you don't have access to server-side filtering. Finally, its support for multiple accounts seems to be superior to any other client I've tested. After all these years I still fail to see what e-mail and calendar keeping have to do with each other. It's lunacy to put them in the same tool. Use the right tool for the job. Agreed. It's bizarre that this is exactly what gets people addicted to Exchange, when separate protocols offer more flexibility and opportunities for improved integration. I find Outlook/Exchange calendaring to be incredibly underfeatured, yet it's wrapped up in a tidy package with email, so people feel like they're killing two birds with one stone. Yes, doing scheduling and calendar maintenance requires communicating between multiple parties, but e-mail is _not_ the right tool for this kind of communications! Well, it can be, but so can IRC, IM, SMS, etc. Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
--On 7 July 2009 09:57:23 -0400 Jorey Bump l...@joreybump.com wrote: Personally I'd suggest Mac OSX and Apple Mail as a first cut for anyone who wants an easy-to-manage and easy-to-use, and half-decent MUA. It doesn't do everything I want to do as a hyper-experienced e-mail user, nor is it apparently easy to write proper extensions for, but it certainly does cover all the main requirements the average user has. I disagree. Apple Mail has some fundamental usability issues that need to be addressed. Every time I try it out, I can't get past the fact that there's no easy way to step through all unread messages in a mailbox. How do people quickly read new mail with Apple Mail? I have a smart mailbox which shows me only the unread messages in a collection of mailboxes. What I don't like is that it constructs RFC ignorant headers when sending messages to people in Address Book groups. It's a bug that I've repeatedly reported with every version of OSX since the public Betas. I think the current version of this bug (it's their third attempt at fixing it), is that it creates a TO header like: To: undisclosed recipients : ; Which is so close to being right that it makes me want to cry. Previously, it would read: To: Group Name (where Group Name is the name of the group, and happens to be the default group name in Apple's address book). The best solution would be say To: Group Name:; and revert to undisclosed recipients:; if the group name has any syntax problems. -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex 01273-873148 x3148 For new support requests, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/ Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
--On 3 July 2009 14:09:19 -0400 Greg A. Woods woods-cy...@weird.com wrote: There's pressure here to move to Exchange because it supports Outlook better. Take away Outlook in effect by giving them better and different open source and open standards tools and that pressure is sure to go away. Suggestions? For an integrated email and calendar tool? Part of that might best be done by getting rid of the underlying M$ platform on the desktop too of course! Seriously -- moving desktops from M$ to something else that's free and easy to run (both administratively and for users) is definitely a strategy to think about. Many have already made the move to good success and the WWW is full of their stories. -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex 01273-873148 x3148 For new support requests, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/ Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
Ian Eiloart wrote: --On 3 July 2009 14:09:19 -0400 Greg A. Woods woods-cy...@weird.com wrote: There's pressure here to move to Exchange because it supports Outlook better. Take away Outlook in effect by giving them better and different open source and open standards tools and that pressure is sure to go away. Suggestions? For an integrated email and calendar tool? The current version of Horde/IMP is a capable groupware system, especially if coupled by cyrus-imapd. However, I don't think it is something that can lure away an established outlook/exchange user. Yours: Laszlo Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
Ian Eiloart wrote: --On 3 July 2009 14:09:19 -0400 Greg A. Woods woods-cy...@weird.com wrote: There's pressure here to move to Exchange because it supports Outlook better. Take away Outlook in effect by giving them better and different open source and open standards tools and that pressure is sure to go away. Suggestions? For an integrated email and calendar tool? You could have a look at SOGo: http://www.scalableogo.org SOGo is a groupware server with a focus on components reusability (IMAP, LDAP, SMTP and database servers) and open standards (CalDAV, CardDAV, GroupDAV, etc.). It has a very nice web interface (http://www.scalableogo.org/tour/screenshots.html) that mimics the look and feel of Mozilla Thunderbird and Mozilla Lightning. It also has excellent integration with Mozilla Thunderbird / Lightning as it shares look and feel, functionality but more importantly data, with those applications. There is even a Microsoft Outlook plugin available (http://www.zideone.com) and synchronization with mobile devices is possible as there is a Funambol connector available. You can try it out on our demo server: http://sogo-demo.inverse.ca A new version will be available this week which will feature tons of improvements. Thanks, -- Ludovic Marcotte lmarco...@inverse.ca :: +1.514.755.3630 :: http://www.inverse.ca Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 10:40 +0100, Ian Eiloart wrote: --On 3 July 2009 14:09:19 -0400 Greg A. Woods woods-cy...@weird.com wrote: There's pressure here to move to Exchange because it supports Outlook better. Take away Outlook in effect by giving them better and different open source and open standards tools and that pressure is sure to go away. Suggestions? For an integrated email and calendar tool? We use OpenGroupware (OGo) for our groupware backend. It integrates with Cyrus IMAP. OGo serves as the backend for our corporate CRM and the task workflow is used across the corporation for task management. -- OpenGroupware developer: awill...@whitemice.org http://whitemiceconsulting.blogspot.com/ OpenGroupare Cyrus IMAPd documenation @ http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/whitemice/wmogag/file_view Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
At Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:40:44 +0100, Ian Eiloart i...@sussex.ac.uk wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? Suggestions? The answers will depend entirely on what platform one chooses and what requirements one has for e-mail use. Personally I'd suggest Mac OSX and Apple Mail as a first cut for anyone who wants an easy-to-manage and easy-to-use, and half-decent MUA. It doesn't do everything I want to do as a hyper-experienced e-mail user, nor is it apparently easy to write proper extensions for, but it certainly does cover all the main requirements the average user has. Equally I'm sure Thunderbird works well for many people too. For an integrated email and calendar tool? After all these years I still fail to see what e-mail and calendar keeping have to do with each other. It's lunacy to put them in the same tool. Use the right tool for the job. Yes, doing scheduling and calendar maintenance requires communicating between multiple parties, but e-mail is _not_ the right tool for this kind of communications! Personally I'm still a big fan of centralization wherever it makes sense, and it especially makes sense when the model one is using to design an implement solutions to a given problem requires shared access to unified data. Perhaps Google Apps calendaring is the right tool for some folks. Perhaps Apple OSX iCal works well enough (and for those who insist on using e-mail to communicate calendaring information, well it just so happens that iCal does integrate with your mail reader to send and receive notifications and facilitates some basic ability to share events, but of course iCal also supports full management of proper central calendars too, as well as read-only subscriptions to centrally maintained calendars, etc.). Perhaps Mozilla's answers to calendar management would work for many folks too. Mozilla even cater to those who can't seem to separate calendar management from e-mail in their minds with Lightning, but personally I'd stick with Sunbird if I were to use Mozilla's tools. -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098VE3TCP RoboHack wo...@robohack.ca Planix, Inc. wo...@planix.com Secrets of the Weird wo...@weird.com Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
--On 3 July 2009 01:02:35 -0400 Greg A. Woods woods-cy...@weird.com wrote: At Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:26:16 -, jul...@precisium.com jul...@precisium.com wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? In the present commercial environment - they are more likely to learn (with the not so subtle help of certain consultants), that their MUA works perfectly well with an Exchange server - and that their current server provider is probably using some dodgy free system... so the client should change email providers. It's not always easy to counter that sort of thing. I really don't know anyone, neither amongst home-based users nor corporate e-mail users, who truly believe they're better off with an MS-Exchange server handling their e-mail, Outlook users here don't like the fact that some of their MUA functionality is greyed out. I'd like to hear of some OSS solution. We're currently using Cyrus-IMAP and Meeting Maker with an Outlook connector. Unfortunately, the types of recurring meeting that you can create don't overlap - both Exchange and Outlook support types that don't map to the other software. There's pressure here to move to Exchange because it supports Outlook better. especially if they've previously used a decent IMAP client connected to a Cyrus server. Most folks put up with it because they don't have any choice and that's because their IT guy got a good free game of golf or similar from the sales guy who sold him up the creek on using Exchange. BTW, I find telling folks that Cyrus was built to satisfy the needs and demands of tens of thousands of picky but highly intelligent users in an academic environment where e-mail is arguably even more important than it often is in corporate circles, and where the developers really couldn't pull the wool over anyone's eyes usually makes the nay-sayers think twice, or at least hopefully shows them one tiny inkling of a clue that their own experience may not be at the true centre of the e-mail universe. Switching to thunderbird is likely to be a harder change for some departments or companies than changing service providers. (especially if they have existing business processes or integration with other office products etc) Well, as many have said, Thunderbird is hardly the pinnacle of perfection when it comes to IMAP clients. Sadly many of the other common, and especially other free ones, are not ideal on all fronts either. For me Apple OS X Mail has been better than some, but it also has some very annoying traits, My biggest annoyance is that it creates non-compliant message headers when mailing to Address Book groups. I use Mulberry at work, and Apple Mail on my laptop. and it lacks the one feature I earlier suggested is ideal for handling IMAP 2-phase deletion and expunge. Mulberry mail was on the right track, but it seems to have died. Yes, I'm convinced that's for the absence of a simple user interface. 90% of it's features should be hidden from 90% of users. The cross-platform thing doesn't seem to work very well, either. Maybe the Qualcomm folks will do something better with Thunderbird with their Penelope extensions. As always, the best thing is to choose the right tool for the job. It can hardly be accidental that Microsoft's flagship email clients don't quite interoperate nicely with standards based IMAP servers. Seems to me it's a driver towards sales of Exchange server services. Indeed -- it is no accident, and it's not just about MS-Exchange, it's a whole philosophy and business methodology engineered to put the screws to open standards and open source. -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex 01273-873148 x3148 For new support requests, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/ Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
On Fri, Jul 03, 2009 at 01:02:35AM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote: I really don't know anyone, neither amongst home-based users nor corporate e-mail users, who truly believe they're better off with an MS-Exchange server handling their e-mail, especially if they've previously used a decent IMAP client connected to a Cyrus server. Most folks put up with it because they don't have any choice and that's because their IT guy got a good free game of golf or similar from the sales guy who sold him up the creek on using Exchange. There's pressure here too to move from Cyrus to Microsoft Exchange. It seems to be coming from administrators rather than students. Is there someplace an unbiased comparison of the two? I see lots of negative reports about Exchange, but they mostly come from people who are using another product based on open standards. -- -Gary Mills--Unix Support--U of M Academic Computing and Networking- Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
--On 3 July 2009 09:25:06 -0500 Gary Mills mi...@cc.umanitoba.ca wrote: On Fri, Jul 03, 2009 at 01:02:35AM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote: I really don't know anyone, neither amongst home-based users nor corporate e-mail users, who truly believe they're better off with an MS-Exchange server handling their e-mail, especially if they've previously used a decent IMAP client connected to a Cyrus server. Most folks put up with it because they don't have any choice and that's because their IT guy got a good free game of golf or similar from the sales guy who sold him up the creek on using Exchange. There's pressure here too to move from Cyrus to Microsoft Exchange. It seems to be coming from administrators rather than students. Is there someplace an unbiased comparison of the two? I see lots of negative reports about Exchange, but they mostly come from people who are using another product based on open standards. I was speaking to a friend who provides Exchange servers for small businesses locally. He says that the most important thing is to have a really good (fast, available and accurate) disaster recovery procedure, because you need it a lot. -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex 01273-873148 x3148 For new support requests, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/ Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
Ian Eiloart wrote: I was speaking to a friend who provides Exchange servers for small businesses locally. He says that the most important thing is to have a really good (fast, available and accurate) disaster recovery procedure, because you need it a lot. Here in Germany we have a bigger pressure. Microsoft offers university to get Exchange for free for the whole campus at Microsoft's cloud, so they want to offer a complete outsourcing. Sure, they don't have any procedure how to get all data out of Exchange after this for free period but they get very aggressive, writing directory to the board of directors of the university. Whilst it is complete nonsense that an internet cut results in non-mail-connectivity between one office to the other (how dumb is that, to write to your room neighbour, you have to go to via a remote exchange cloud...). Things are getting hard. We believe in open standards, we want to have our mails and appointments in a system which is at every time perfectly changeable. We don't want a data dead end resulting in a complete dependency on one manufacturer. Zimbra is another show stopper here. Many want Zimbra because it is soo cool and blah blah blah. But with 14,000 accounts, our central LDAP infrastructure and the Solaris 10 servers with ZFS, running Cyrus IMAP, there is no really good reason to migrate all to Zimbra just to have CalDAV calendaring. Zimbra means endless redo logs, bad performance with many accounts, ... ... I don't like these all in one solutions, but the people here LIKE THEIR OUTLOOK! Everybody wants to use Outlook and our students want Google, they like Gogle! Safe harbour for personal data? not interesting to this youth which even posts pictures of their drunk parties on facebook :-\ Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
On Fri, 2009-07-03 at 09:25 -0500, Gary Mills wrote: On Fri, Jul 03, 2009 at 01:02:35AM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote: I really don't know anyone, neither amongst home-based users nor corporate e-mail users, who truly believe they're better off with an MS-Exchange server handling their e-mail, especially if they've previously used a decent IMAP client connected to a Cyrus server. Most folks put up with it because they don't have any choice and that's because their IT guy got a good free game of golf or similar from the sales guy who sold him up the creek on using Exchange. There's pressure here too to move from Cyrus to Microsoft Exchange. It seems to be coming from administrators rather than students. Is there someplace an unbiased comparison of the two? No, I don't think the two are even comparable; not because Exchange is so terrible but because Cyrus is an IMAP server and Exchange is a Mail Server a collaboration platform (aka groupware, which is a terrible term). I see lots of negative reports about Exchange, but they mostly come from people who are using another product based on open standards. I'm always amused at tech conferences how many of the pitches are for products for or relating to dealing with Exchange and keeping it running. Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
I don't like these all in one solutions, but the people here LIKE THEIR OUTLOOK! Everybody wants to use Outlook and our students want Google, they like Gogle! Safe harbour for personal data? not interesting to this youth which even posts pictures of their drunk parties on facebook :-\ Have you looked at the ZideOne plugin? That provides pretty darn good functionality and works with a variety of Open servers (via CardDAV, CalDAV, and GroupDAV). It will even work with straight up apache. http://www.zideone.com/ But storing contacts in LDAP is something nothing is every going to support as LDAP schema is just a mess. Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
At Fri, 3 Jul 2009 09:25:06 -0500, Gary Mills mi...@cc.umanitoba.ca wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? There's pressure here too to move from Cyrus to Microsoft Exchange. It seems to be coming from administrators rather than students. Is there someplace an unbiased comparison of the two? I see lots of negative reports about Exchange, but they mostly come from people who are using another product based on open standards. The thing to do, perhaps, is as good a cost-benefit analysis of various features against licensing, hardware, and support costs. A somewhat useful example of such analysis, though quite a bit has to be inferred because of the nature of its authorship, and it is somewhat dated now, is the report about the conversion away from FreeBSD when Hotmail was taken over by Microsoft and (eventually) moved onto Microsoft products. I suspect this venture cost Microsoft much more than they were even able to admit to themselves, let alone what we as outsiders can guess. Personally I believe that Microsoft knew it would be critical for them to acquire a large Unix-based internet service and convert it over to M$ products just to prove to the world (and perhaps themselves) that it could be done, and the fact that many of the documents about this conversion were leaked and/or published is in fact evidence supporting my theory. This Hotmail conversion process now provides the background material for all the current conversion guides M$ uses to sell customers and potential customers on the idea that it is feasible to convert from open (and free) systems to closed, licensed, systems. If M$'s documents about their Hotmail conversion actually sway you toward using M$ solutions, perhaps you should also read the famous Microsoft Halloween Papers. I suppose for folks without reasonably extensive systems programming experience the value of an open-source based system is much more difficult to assess. Part the question is about control, and part of it is about capitalism and profiteering (which of course usually requires control to be taken away from users and held tightly by those hoping to profit from the services and/or products they sell). Can the elephantine behemoth of Microsoft really provide cost advantages to all their users because of their size and control, or is it just evidence of how well they are able to control the market and profit from it? -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098VE3TCP RoboHack wo...@robohack.ca Planix, Inc. wo...@planix.com Secrets of the Weird wo...@weird.com Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
At Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:00:20 +0100, Ian Eiloart i...@sussex.ac.uk wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? Outlook users here don't like the fact that some of their MUA functionality is greyed out. I suppose that's evidence of part of the problem -- what's greyed out is (IIUC) actually _not_ MUA functionality! There's pressure here to move to Exchange because it supports Outlook better. Take away Outlook in effect by giving them better and different open source and open standards tools and that pressure is sure to go away. Part of that might best be done by getting rid of the underlying M$ platform on the desktop too of course! Seriously -- moving desktops from M$ to something else that's free and easy to run (both administratively and for users) is definitely a strategy to think about. Many have already made the move to good success and the WWW is full of their stories. -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098VE3TCP RoboHack wo...@robohack.ca Planix, Inc. wo...@planix.com Secrets of the Weird wo...@weird.com Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
At Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:26:16 -, jul...@precisium.com jul...@precisium.com wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? In the present commercial environment - they are more likely to learn (with the not so subtle help of certain consultants), that their MUA works perfectly well with an Exchange server - and that their current server provider is probably using some dodgy free system... so the client should change email providers. It's not always easy to counter that sort of thing. I really don't know anyone, neither amongst home-based users nor corporate e-mail users, who truly believe they're better off with an MS-Exchange server handling their e-mail, especially if they've previously used a decent IMAP client connected to a Cyrus server. Most folks put up with it because they don't have any choice and that's because their IT guy got a good free game of golf or similar from the sales guy who sold him up the creek on using Exchange. BTW, I find telling folks that Cyrus was built to satisfy the needs and demands of tens of thousands of picky but highly intelligent users in an academic environment where e-mail is arguably even more important than it often is in corporate circles, and where the developers really couldn't pull the wool over anyone's eyes usually makes the nay-sayers think twice, or at least hopefully shows them one tiny inkling of a clue that their own experience may not be at the true centre of the e-mail universe. Switching to thunderbird is likely to be a harder change for some departments or companies than changing service providers. (especially if they have existing business processes or integration with other office products etc) Well, as many have said, Thunderbird is hardly the pinnacle of perfection when it comes to IMAP clients. Sadly many of the other common, and especially other free ones, are not ideal on all fronts either. For me Apple OS X Mail has been better than some, but it also has some very annoying traits, and it lacks the one feature I earlier suggested is ideal for handling IMAP 2-phase deletion and expunge. Mulberry mail was on the right track, but it seems to have died. Maybe the Qualcomm folks will do something better with Thunderbird with their Penelope extensions. As always, the best thing is to choose the right tool for the job. It can hardly be accidental that Microsoft's flagship email clients don't quite interoperate nicely with standards based IMAP servers. Seems to me it's a driver towards sales of Exchange server services. Indeed -- it is no accident, and it's not just about MS-Exchange, it's a whole philosophy and business methodology engineered to put the screws to open standards and open source. -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098VE3TCP RoboHack wo...@robohack.ca Planix, Inc. wo...@planix.com Secrets of the Weird wo...@weird.com Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Automatically moving marked mails?
Hi, in order to fix a customer's wrong perception of how a mail server should work, I was wondering: Is there a way to make Cyrus IMAP move marked-for-deletion mails to a trash folder, effectively purging it from the original folder? Tnx, -garry Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
At Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:35:15 +0200, Garry ga...@glendown.de wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? The point is not when decent MUAs are used, like Thunderbird, but rather crap like Outlook ... which is unable to do a decent, logical handling of deleted mails... ;) Decent MUAs are _always_ available, at least to some extent. People who won't choose to use decent software when it is available and instead insist upon using broken crapware _must_ learn that they are on their own -- they are unsupported, they get no sympathy. In this case though I'm not sure what the problem is (at least based upon this one feature -- groupware might be broken in other ways). Problem is, $customer is using a groupware which - when using IMAP - will display deleted or moved mails as struck-through mails, which will no doubt confuse certain users ... therefore, it would be nice if Cyrus could be convinced to have a special delted-mails handling ... as it is close to impossible to change Outlook's handling ... Actually that's the desired way for an IMAP client to work! (and the majority of the good ones I'm aware of do work that way where possible, though sadly not two of the ones I'm using at the moment) What could possibly be confusing about a summary index entry showing a message using a struck-through font face? It should be self-evident to anyone with a gram of experience using any modern decent graphical computer user interface that the message has been marked as deleted. (some more limited GUIs could use a particular colour or grey level to achieve the same indication) Some MUAs which operate in this correct manner do confuse users sometimes by not handling the somewhat un-natural expunge operation automatically. However I find it's very easy to teach users about this extra step by simply explaining to them that it gives them slightly more control over when they choose to release these marked messages from the the most immediate level of undo (or all possibility of undo if the MUA doesn't support the move to trash feature). Guess I might need to take a look at the source if it's not in there, and see if it can be added ... There's no logical sane way to do what _you_ think your customer might think should happen. IMAP does not work that way. It cannot safely do so. Please think long and hard about interoperability with multiple simultaneous MUA access, possibly from different types of MUAs. I suppose being Cyrus is open-source software it could indeed be bent to do illogical and/or unsafe things, but I think you really want to find out the truth about how your users perceive the correct behaviour before you go about abusing it into some caricature of what you think they might want. -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098VE3TCP RoboHack wo...@robohack.ca Planix, Inc. wo...@planix.com Secrets of the Weird wo...@weird.com Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
On Wed, 2009-07-01 at 14:48 -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote: At Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:35:15 +0200, Garry ga...@glendown.de wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? The point is not when decent MUAs are used, like Thunderbird, but rather crap like Outlook ... which is unable to do a decent, logical handling of deleted mails... ;) Decent MUAs are _always_ available, at least to some extent. People who won't choose to use decent software when it is available and instead insist upon using broken crapware _must_ learn that they are on their own -- they are unsupported, they get no sympathy. Agree. Although I find TB's handling of deleted mail at least equivalently retarded as Outlook. Neither has a @*^$* key binding for expunge! In general IMAP in recent ($version=2003) versions of Outlook works very well. In this case though I'm not sure what the problem is (at least based upon this one feature -- groupware might be broken in other ways). Problem is, $customer is using a groupware which - when using IMAP - will display deleted or moved mails as struck-through mails, which will no doubt confuse certain users ... therefore, it would be nice if Cyrus could be convinced to have a special delted-mails handling ... as it is close to impossible to change Outlook's handling ... Actually that's the desired way for an IMAP client to work! (and the majority of the good ones I'm aware of do work that way where possible, though sadly not two of the ones I'm using at the moment) Ditto. What could possibly be confusing about a summary index entry showing a message using a struck-through font face? It should be self-evident to anyone with a gram of experience using any modern decent graphical computer user interface that the message has been marked as deleted. Agree. Some MUAs which operate in this correct manner do confuse users sometimes by not handling the somewhat un-natural expunge operation automatically. However I find it's very easy to teach users about this Yes, throw-in-the-trash vs. taking-out-the-trash. Users grasp the difference very quickly. And I've had some dim ones... extra step by simply explaining to them that it gives them slightly more control over when they choose to release these marked messages from the the most immediate level of undo (or all possibility of undo if the MUA doesn't support the move to trash feature). And with delayed-expunge they can call up the help-desk and even get back messages they accidentally expunged. Cyrus is awesome. Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
On Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:48:41 -, Greg A. Woods woods-cy...@weird.com wrote: At Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:35:15 +0200, Garry ga...@glendown.de wrote: Subject: Re: Automatically moving marked mails? The point is not when decent MUAs are used, like Thunderbird, but rather crap like Outlook ... which is unable to do a decent, logical handling of deleted mails... ;) Decent MUAs are _always_ available, at least to some extent. People who won't choose to use decent software when it is available and instead insist upon using broken crapware _must_ learn that they are on their own -- they are unsupported, they get no sympathy. In the present commercial environment - they are more likely to learn (with the not so subtle help of certain consultants), that their MUA works perfectly well with an Exchange server - and that their current server provider is probably using some dodgy free system... so the client should change email providers. It's not always easy to counter that sort of thing. Switching to thunderbird is likely to be a harder change for some departments or companies than changing service providers. (especially if they have existing business processes or integration with other office products etc) It can hardly be accidental that Microsoft's flagship email clients don't quite interoperate nicely with standards based IMAP servers. Seems to me it's a driver towards sales of Exchange server services. I don't know what the primary goals of the Cyrus developers are - but I can only assume that serving their existing userbases as best possible and faithfully supporting open standards, are of more importance than gaining market share relative to proprietary server products. Perhaps there is even an element of fighting this by trying to aid in driving customers towards using an open source MUA. That would be fair enough I think.. but I understand why it would be frustrating to those who are in some way competing with providers who use Exchange. Perhaps if Cyrus were to adapt to too many Microsoft peculiarities.. Microsoft would end up driving the nature of the MUA-server relationship overall. Personally I agree it would be nice if Cyrus would do something to compensate for the deletion issue - but I can understand if there is a reluctance on the part of the developers to do this. Julian Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
jul...@precisium.com wrote, at 07/01/2009 05:26 PM: Personally I agree it would be nice if Cyrus would do something to compensate for the deletion issue - but I can understand if there is a reluctance on the part of the developers to do this. This issue involves the IMAP protocol and is not specific to Cyrus. The only meaningfully defined special mailbox is INBOX. It would be disastrous for Cyrus to change deletion behaviour by moving deleted mail to some arbitrarily named mailbox. What name should it use? One that pleases users of Outlook? Thunderbird? Some random webmail application? Until the IMAP protocol is updated or replaced, delete expunge is a fact of life. It's true that the concept of delete/expunge is difficult for many new users to grasp. In my experience, the worst consequence is when users who delete but never expunge exceed quota and don't know why because deleted messages are hidden from view. A visual indicator (such as a strike-through, symbol, special color) is far more preferable, as it at least makes the problem evident. I agree that the whole process borders on the ridiculous, but that's a problem with IMAP, not Cyrus (and most users would probably clamour for similar functionality if the behaviour was removed). In any case, users expect to control this in the MUA, so it's probably best to keep it out of the server. Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
On Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:46:00 -, Jorey Bump l...@joreybump.com wrote: jul...@precisium.com wrote, at 07/01/2009 05:26 PM: Personally I agree it would be nice if Cyrus would do something to compensate for the deletion issue - but I can understand if there is a reluctance on the part of the developers to do this. This issue involves the IMAP protocol and is not specific to Cyrus. The only meaningfully defined special mailbox is INBOX. It would be disastrous for Cyrus to change deletion behaviour by moving deleted mail to some arbitrarily named mailbox. What name should it use? One that pleases users of Outlook? Thunderbird? Some random webmail application? Until the IMAP protocol is updated or replaced, delete expunge is a fact of life. It's true that the concept of delete/expunge is difficult for many new users to grasp. In my experience, the worst consequence is when users who delete but never expunge exceed quota and don't know why because deleted messages are hidden from view. A visual indicator (such as a strike-through, symbol, special color) is far more preferable, as it at least makes the problem evident. I agree that the whole process borders on the ridiculous, but that's a problem with IMAP, not Cyrus (and most users would probably clamour for similar functionality if the behaviour was removed). In any case, users expect to control this in the MUA, so it's probably best to keep it out of the server. I'd dare suggest some sort of ugly hack whereby an MUA need only create a special folder named e.g _deleteto_Deleted Items .. which doesn't even need to be subscribed to. The existence of such a folder would tell the server to move 'deleted' mail to the Deleted Items folder (or whatever name followed the magic _deleteto_ prefix) It doesn't need to be an 'automatic' fix for outlook out of the box - just one that is relatively easy for helpdesks to talk someone through - or to describe on a web page. I guess this sort of hack would give most of you the horrors though! Julian Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
jul...@precisium.com a écrit : I'd dare suggest some sort of ugly hack whereby an MUA need only create a special folder named e.g _deleteto_Deleted Items .. which doesn't even need to be subscribed to. The existence of such a folder would tell the server to move 'deleted' mail to the Deleted Items folder (or whatever name followed the magic _deleteto_ prefix) It doesn't need to be an 'automatic' fix for outlook out of the box - just one that is relatively easy for helpdesks to talk someone through - or to describe on a web page. I guess this sort of hack would give most of you the horrors though! It is ugly indeed. If you have to walk someone through a solution, better explain them add the expunge button to the outlook toolbar, and click it to permanentely delete messages. Also, it should be relatively easy to write an outlook plugin that auto-expunge messages on deletion, possibly copying them to some Trash folder first. You may find one already written : IMAP is not so uncommon, and this is a common concern abount IMAP and outlook. The kind of functionality you want could be achieved more elegantly and more usefully by implementing lemonade-imap-sieve (sieve-like scripting on the imap operation level, not only on delivery, see http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-lemonade-imap-sieve-05). Also, be aware that Outlook's IMAP implementation is commonly considered as being flawed, and behaving poorly on very large mailboxes. It goes better with Outlook 2007, or so I'm told, so YMMV. Regards, -- Clement Hermann (nodens) - L'air pur ? c'est pas en RL, ça ? c'est pas hors charte ? Jean in L'Histoire des Pingouins, http://tnemeth.free.fr/fmbl/linuxsf/ Vous trouverez ma clef publique sur le serveur public pgp.mit.edu. Please find my public key on the public keyserver pgp.mit.edu. Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
It's true that the concept of delete/expunge is difficult for many new users to grasp. In my experience, the worst consequence is when users who delete but never expunge exceed quota and don't know why because deleted messages are hidden from view. A visual indicator (such as a strike-through, symbol, special color) is far more preferable, as it at least makes the problem evident. I agree that the whole process borders on the ridiculous, but that's a problem with IMAP, I disagree, I think the process is quite elegant; certainly simpler to manage that a *@(*@ Trash folder. In delete/expunge mode restoring a message (or many messages) keeps their original context whereas Trash accumulates messages from potentially many folders. not Cyrus (and most users would probably clamour for similar functionality if the behaviour was removed). Yep. In any case, users expect to control this in the MUA, so it's probably best to keep it out of the server. Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
Re: Automatically moving marked mails?
The kind of functionality you want could be achieved more elegantly and more usefully by implementing lemonade-imap-sieve (sieve-like scripting on the imap operation level, not only on delivery, see http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-lemonade-imap-sieve-05). That would be very useful; but I wonder about the performance implications. Has anyone (any server?) implemented this? Also, be aware that Outlook's IMAP implementation is commonly considered as being flawed, and behaving poorly on very large mailboxes. It goes better with Outlook 2007, or so I'm told, so YMMV. I've had very few problems with $version=2003. It certainly is a much better implementation than ThunderBird's. Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
