Slashdot Mirror
Columba 1.0 "Holy Moly" Released
Frederik Dietz writes to tell us that after three years of hard developement Columba 1.0, codename "Holy Moly!" is ready for general consumption. Columba is an email client written in Java that boasts a 'user-friendly graphical interface with wizards and internationalization support.' Slashdot covered an interview with the Columba team earlier this year.
Typo in the title, seems to be "Columbia" not "Columba".
--
Superb hosting 4800MB Storage, 120GB bandwidth, $7,95.
Kunowalls!!! Random sexy wallpapers (NSFW!).
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
The question I have though, is what makes this better than the other dozen free email clients?
--
Mod this up, and your penis size will increase by 10-20 percent in volume.
I am sure this was going to be groundbreaking 3 years ago when they started it. Ooooohhh...Java!
All joking aside, I am downloading it now to try it out. The screenshots make it look pretty decent. Although in the age of the new beta Yahoo! mail and Gmail it's going to have to be pretty damn good to get anyone to really use it I think.
Columba, not columbia.
When the team embarked for these three years of develomment, they luckily didn't foresee that their 1.0 release would be announced on Slashdot with a spelling mistake in the name. Otherwise, they would have played videogames instead.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I have to say, I expected something like Lotus Hannover, but to me it looks like a copy of Thunderbird implemented in Java with icons from Evolution.
Directlink to screenshots: 1, 2, 3.
...over Evolution, Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird, Sylpheed, mutt, or anything else? Just because it's written in Java, and I need a full-blown VM around it that comes with a redistribution-hostile license? Or is there anything super-special (and equally well-disguised) about it?
:-)
It's still better than Outlook Express, that's for sure.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Everyone, welcome Yet Another Outlook Clone.
nothing
There are many good email clients out there. Makeing one with java that looks like the rest and doesnt seem to offer anything unique seems pointless to me. EVERY gui java app I have ever used is a slow unresponsive mess. Perhaps this could be fast but still it just another client that looks and behaves like every other one out there? I am probably wrong.. Please fill me in on the wonderful things this one does that others do not.
If something exists that does not need a creator (god) then why must the cosmos need one?
Looking at the screenshots, Columba appears to be a clone of Micosoft Outlook. I guess it will be easy for Microsoft users to move to a different application, hopefully it doesn't suffer from the same security flaws & bloat.
Why people act like Java is dead on Slashdot? More Karma?
They coded a full featured IMAP4/POP3 client which becomes standard in India schools and works on everywhere.
Interface? Don't get me started about Yahoo and Gmail. For example, Yahoo must be the simplest pop3 server on the planet without any APOP or TLS options. I don't even hope for IMAP.
I already switched to Spamcop with 15 mb or so storage, at least they serve IMAP with decent spam tools.
I refuse to comment about gmail on slashdot.
Too bad nobody gets recognition for "FIRST MOD" on an article. It took about 30 seconds to get modded offtopic!
/. hordes got to it. After ignoring Sun's "We strongly recommend you do not install this software" warning (it's unsigned I think) it seems at first glance to be just another Outlook Express-clone.
On an on-topic note, I managed to download and run this thing before the
Built in support for PGP, which is good for the geek in all of us. Not bad HTML support, graphics seemed to get cut up as I scrolled the message though. Probably a Java problem.
If I had a couple of different operating systems, I'd love to stick it on a flash drive and have my mail in any OS.
Of course, this is all irrelevant to me, because I'm forced to use Outlook at work!
Just downloaded and installed, looks good, but hit a bug instantly, even tho its minor its still annoying, such as the new account wizzard dosent stay in focus, such as when you go to another window and back again the main application is disabled and the new account wizzard is not visable, such i would presume they are many minor bugs throught, saying that i dont enjoy using java programs, you can spot them a mile off and they seem icky.
they invested 3 years of their life into the development of this project that alone deserves credit even would it suck good work guys (y) ! :D
So what features would entice to stop using Thunderbird and start using Columbba? I don't see it. On computers where I can install programs, I'd use Thunderbird. On others, I'd just be using a some version webmail client.
It's been 3 years full of sacrifices, nurturing of beer bellies, kaput relationships, horrible startup images, embarassing typos
Ooh, yes, I'm sure I can spare half a gig of RAM just to keep the email client's UI satisfied!!
...surely to goodnes an email client is absolutely the first thing you want written in a proper language.
This is the year 2005, not the year 2000. Java isn't so kludgy anymore.
An email client is something you keep loaded all the time, but you still need most of the machine available to do some real work. Nobody without a ludicrous amount of excess hardware can afford to keep a Java application running that they're not actually using continuously...
Perhaps you should sit down and have a face-to-face talk with those half-dozen or so Azureus users.
You mean a non-managed language, like C++? Worked so well for MS Outlook -- and it's practically buffer-overflow, vulnerability-free!
- shadowmatter
So how much do I need to pay to get my software advertised on Slashdot?
:analyzer for Apache log files, written in Perl. Simple, so it's easy to customize.
- mailvisa: simple bayesian spam filter in Ruby (beats most filters in Debian w.r.t. performance, precission, recall, and memory usage)
- logalize
- wake: remotely wake up machines using wake-on-lan magic packets (written in Perl).
- detach: start commands detached from the terminal (keeps them from dying when the terminal exits)
- chrootexec: run commands inside a chroot jail, as a normal user.
- Perlcookies: random quotes from fortunes files (nice for sigs), but much smaller than the fortune package. Written in Perl.
More on my website, and many more on my harddisk, but these are the more useful ones. While you're at it, take a look at my esasys.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
There's probably a script that searches for the phrase "FP" or something as the first few posts and automatically mods you down. And congrats on the FP. You're gonna get laid!
This is the year 2005, not the year 2000. Java isn't so kludgy anymore.
Yes, it is.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I went poking around the site trying to find out what it supports in terms of roaming. Being able to just pull down a .jar from anywhere, and have a writeable LDAP+TLS address book, IMAP+TLS mail (both protected by SSL clent certs), etc all preconfigured would just be bliss.
Right now, it's hard enough to find a client that supports writeable LDAP address books at all, let alone usably and with TLS and client cert support.
Alas, their website doesn't seem to have any sort of feature summary, so it's rather hard to say w/o grabbing and trying it out.
I honestly don't see the significance of this at all. It's just another email client. It looks decent enough, but I don't see what distinguishes this client from any other clients out there. This doesn't really belong on Slashdot; I'd rather see it on freshmeat or something. Then again, it's a rather slow news day and Slashdot is going down the crapper. I wonder if I spent 3 years of my life working on an email client and then submitted it to Slashdot if ScuttleMonkey would post it. I wouldn't be surprised if he knew someone involved with the project.
Writing it in Java does have some advantages. One is that you can use the same code on a few popular platforms. Think about what that means to maintainability.
Another one I pointed out in another comment:
Yay, I said something good about Java for once.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
All you have to do is write a and submit a story submission. It's as simple as that.
That's pretty much my reaction.
Instead of saying Columba sucks because it's written in java, maybe we should reconsider the old conventional wisdom about java gui programs.
Azureus really is fairly slick.
On top of that, the idea of flaming guys for writing good software and giving it away is sort of hard to understand.
No one seems to be talking about how this sort of thing chips away at lock in. It's not a death blow to lock in, but it does take a little chink out of it, and over time, those chinks add up.
Perhaps you should sit down and have a face-to-face talk with those half-dozen or so Azureus users.
Azureus consistantly uses 200MB+ of ram for me.
This sig will make it clear that ANYONE can use this post for ANY purpose WITHOUT the written consent of the NFL.
Yet Another Email Client? With wizards!! And a SUPERB interface!! Good for them if they learned about project management, coding in Java, or whatever. But I have yet to see why should I even give it a try.
Disclosure: I'm stupid
The crash log is so big that it's spread out over 3 states!
I've had a Tomcat server running for up to 5 months. The only time I restart it is when I make certain changes to the configuration that require it.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
seems to have a slight windows look to it? LOL
rations
It's actually called Columbo, and it featuers the voice of Peter Falk saying, "Excuse me sir, but you got mail!".
I downloaded and unpacked the application onto my laptop (12" PowerBook 1.33 GHz) and double-clicked the JAR file. Went to set up an e-mail account. (I like how the provided example is to set up mail for Bill Gates. Very professional.)
At the dialog whose instructions were
, I entereed my login and host name. I have an IMAP server, so I clicked the drop-down box where "POP3" was currently selected. No response. Clicked again. Nothing happened or changed. Clicked again and again.
Tried to set up a new mail account after the fact. POP3 is the only choice. As an IMAP user, Columba to me is nothing more than a broken Evolution clone.
For more information, click here.
It would be interesting if this could be made to run on a cell phone because it's already in java. It does seem a bit BIG in terms of UI elements, but that could be modified.
Currently, the only options on cellphones include paying 5 or 6 bucks a month (at least on the verizon network).
Of course, I don't think there's a way to install a bew app without verizon's permission? Not sure.
Anyway, lot's of questions in my mind about putting this to use on mobile devices.
Looks like we have to install "Java Web Start" to use Columba, even if we already have a JVM installed (and its browser plugin). The best advantage for Java applets over other languages and platforms is that the user doesn't need to do anything to install the new app other than hit the webpage. Users don't care about "Java", they care about what it can do, and what they have to do (as little as possible) to do it with Java. Why not produce these applets in Flash, which doesn't require extra software installations?
That ignorance of Java's main benefits for applets is written all over the language. For example, the security model requires the user to change their Java "Control Panel" settings to OK an applet to use a proxy to make connections to servers other than the one from which it was served. Even if the proxy is on that server. But of course the applet can just make URL connections to a proxy CGI on that server, sending it the URL, without the benefits of transparency, performance and maintainability of an actual proxy server. While the applet can just issue a "showDocument(<URL>)" call on the browser in which it's running. Which will make the browser connect to any URL. So the security model requires Control Panel interaction by the user to protect from something a malicious coder can produce anyway. More inconvenience and less power.
These inconsistencies are among the reasons that client SW like Columba has not swept "Web desktops" in the 10 years since Java first offered its promises. Now that sophisticated applets are really arriving, is the platform both too weak and redundant to compete?
--
make install -not war
OK, so how do I need to set up my java to download it? It's giving me....
a r
An error occurred while launching/running the application.
Title: Columba
Vendor: Free Software (MPL1.1)
Category: Download Error
Found unsigned entry in resource: http://columba.sourceforge.net/webstart/columba.j
It's simple enough. Java is popular, thus the slashdotters hate it.
Perhaps you should sit down and have a face-to-face talk with those half-dozen or so Azureus users. No, maybe you should. Anecdotal evidence (hell, who bothers to measure these things?) suggests computers with Azureus running in the background slow down quite significantly. Of course with modern computers offering so much more performance than most people really need, it's not really a problem but that doesn't mean Java applications do not demand a seriously larger share of system resources than comparable applications written in other languages.
Hmmm... Can't even get the project name right, what does that say?
Maybe you should have 20 or 30 less torrents running at once, pr0nmaster.
P.S. any java runtime new enough to run columba already has Java Web Start. JWS has shipped with all JREs since 1.2, which was released 5+ years ago.
Reasons why mutt still sucks as an IMAP client
- No IMAP server-side searching, sorting, threading
- Can't search across multiple mailboxes
- Can't download messages without downloading attachments
- Many settings are applied to ALL IMAP servers
- Overly-agressive checking of ALL folders by default (though this can be reconfigured)
- Can't flag IMAP messages on the server as deleted--only purges them
- No user-defined labels
- Can't store onfiguration on the server (pine and mulberry can. you say this is a good feature...)
- IMAP passwords are stored as plaintext
Reasons why Outlook Express has ALWAYS sucked as an IMAP clientI'm sorry to say, Java takes up a lot of RAM.
/usr/lib/jdk/bin/java -cp /home/srdjant/eclipse/eclipse/./startup.jar org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main -os linux -ws
[srdjant@tigerclaw ~]$ ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
[...snip...]
srdjant 4897 5.0 21.8 322352 112756 ? S 22:46 0:08
As can be seen from the 5th column (VSZ), the Java Virtual Machine eats up some 320MB. And this is
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_02-b09).
Yes it's 2005, and yes Java's kludgy.
Perhaps you should sit down and have a face-to-face talk with those half-dozen or so Azureus users.
I can't run Azureus for more than a few hours without it eating all of my RAM and bringing down my entire system. I have 1GB of RAM and 1GB of swap, and Azureus eats through all of it like lightning. When it does finally eat through my RAM and swap, my machine completely freezes, forcing me to hard-reset.
If I do manage to kill Azureus before it does that, X will hold on to the majority of Azureus' resources, making my system highly sluggish until I restart X.
It's a damn shame, because Azureus is the only BT client with an interface I can tolerate, but the sheer havoc it wreaks on my system is inexcusable.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
...how small can it be if its written in Java? ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
No, it should just be written in a language where that isn't a problem.
This app is standalone, though written in Java. It would be great as a webmail interface, embedded in webpages. So we don't have to install our mail clients everywhere we might check our mail, like at public Web terminals. Without being trapped in dumb HTML widgets.
The source is open. Who wants to refactor the components into applets for IMAP webmail?
--
make install -not war
(...) dude, I just started reading your sentence, and instantly I hit a bug tho it's not major it's like I keep on reading and I never get that satisfaction of being sure I'm not reading Finnegan's Wake or some other stuff like dude, I just started reading your sentence, and (...)
Q: How do I advertise on Slashdot?
;-P
A: Submit an article.
Q: How do I guarantee that my ad gets posted?
A: Post a comment that gets modded as funny.
Q: How is my spelling?
A: It's pretty bad.
Yet Another Calendar-Less Email Client.
Yippee!
``I'm sorry if I was a little strong, but I wince when people started saying that somehow languages can be "safe" or "unsafe". It sounds dumb.''
Why? It's a simple fact. In C you can code programs that have buffer overflow vulnerabilities, format string vulnerabilities, memory leaks, and invalid type conversions. In languages like Lisp and ML, you cannot. That's what makes C unsafe and Lisp and ML safe.
Of course, you can write secure code in C and insecure code in ML. However, if you read vulnerability announcements, you will see that most of them are buffer overflows and string vulnerabilities (e.g. SQL injections that are possible because SQL queries are formed by concatenating strings). Both of these can be completely eliminated by using safer languages. This tells me that the distinction between safe and unsafe languages is a meaningful one.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
And what mystery language, pray tell, do you know of where I can track an infinite number of items and NOT spend any RAM on tracking them?
I used the Java Webstart link, but got the following error: ... /home/[...]/libjdic.so: libgnome-2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Caused by: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError:
Actually, I do have a libgnome-2.so.0, but it is a 64-bit version (for x86_64) whereas the JVM that I used is 32-bit.
If I instead launch using a 64-bit JVM, then the native libraries that come with Columba can't be loaded.
- Brian.
Does it run with Kaffe?
I'm not fond of Sun's java, due to licensing and its hugeness ( im on fbsd )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Actually thats after running idle for a few days with _0_ torrents loaded into the interface (admittedly I hadn't restarted it from the last time I did have torrents running but 200MB of ram for totally idle seems rather silly to me, should be better about recycling.)
This sig will make it clear that ANYONE can use this post for ANY purpose WITHOUT the written consent of the NFL.
I can't run Azureus for more than a few hours without it eating all of my RAM and bringing down my entire system.
Just for another data point I run Azureus under Linux (FC3, JDK 1.5.0_02) for weeks at a time without problem. After 10 days of running, the thing right now weighs in at 187 MB. That seems kinda piggy for what I do with it, but my 1 GB machine is perfectly usable. Azureus reliably checks RSS feeds and downloads stuff automatically.
I wish it used less, but that's an entire $25 of RAM, so I'm not sweating it.
About my email habits: I use IMAP for my mail. I check my mail from several machines, on different OSes, so I like as many things as possible to be done and kept on the server, and cross-platform clients are good. I don't use the preview pane, I like being able to able to read mails in a large window (whether it's separate (Thunderbird) or docked in the program (Eudora) doesn't matter to me).
Overall, it reminds me a lot of Thunderbird when I tried it several years ago and decided it just wasn't there yet. None of the things I didn't like aren't fixable (The junk mail controls allow moving to folders on the server, so the functionality's there somewhere), they're just not fixed yet.
So no, I won't be using it, but I'll check back in a year or so and see if it's improved.
No, I don't mean to inflame. It looks like Just Another Email Client (tm). OE, Eudora, T-Bird, Pegasus - they all look like this. They all send and receive email. The screens are arranged the same way. Educate me.
There is the The Polarbar Mailer which has been around for a while. But Polarbar started life as the JStreet Mailer, but when Innoval stopped selling it, it became the Polarbar mailer.
Fight Spammers!
Looking on the page regarding their choice of license you will find the following, rather charming, text.
"There's no virual [sic] effect as seen with the GPL here."
I'm not going rehash the whole the-GPL-is-clearly-not-viral explanation here but I won't be looking at this software because people who spout this kind of rubbish aren't the kind of people with which I like to be associated.
Greetings,
1 _0.gif
I just downloaded and tried to configure Columba 1.0 under OS X 10.4.2. My verdict? Skip it.
The people behind Columba used some widget library that's system dependent. This is throwing a number of null pointer exceptions under OS X with the Java 5 JVM. They all relate to something called "jgoodies"; they're doing something that appears to be system dependent.
One of the main reasons for using this would be portability. They seemed to have missed the boat altogether since it doesn't run under an otherwise standad Java configuration! Why bother with writing a Java application if it's not cross-platform? Why use non-standard widget libraries? Attaining cross-portability in Java is hard enough as it is; these guys chose to make it even harder. Thank you for blowing away the only reason I might've had for using the Columba email client.
You can see a screen capture showing the exceptions here:
http://eugeneciurana.com/personal/images/Columba-
Can't say if this works at all because I was unable to tell Columba about my IMAP server. I got another of those jgoodies-related exceptions when I tried to select something other than POP3.
Cheers,
E
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
it has [b]wizards[/b]?
Well that changes everything.
At least the home page project does have an answer to "what is Columba", if not why.
<rant>
So many projects forget to explain what they are about. Go to the Plan 9 website, for example, and there is no "blurb". Instead only a link to a paper, which starts out with a section on OS history.
Or you can read the release notes, which say "The fourth release of the Plan 9 operating system from Bell Labs packages a major overhaul of the system at every level." Like we are supposed to already know what "the system" is. Yes, it's Plan 9, but what IS Plan 9? There is no overview.
At least Columba gave us an overview. Now if Columba had only had a "why" section as well, we might have seen a higher level of discourse in these slashdot comments. But instead the discussion is dominated by that one question, which could have been easily addressed on the website.
</rant>
Looks like Outlook express... if I am on windows I don't see why its that amazing...
Visit my site @ http://www.madtorrent.com
Java is an interpreted or (to be charitable) a semi-compiled language that imposes necessarily huge performance and efficiency penalty. It make sense as an ad hoc crutch to provide extra functionality to html but using it for stand alone applications make no sense whatsoever.
It's funny how _no other BitTorrent client_ eats my RAM like Azureus does.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Wake me when someone integrates simple push button calendar publishing with an email client. Yes, I know about Sunbird. Not so simple to publish/sync, is it?
Speak truth to power.
I intalled Columba to try it out. Sad to say, it looks really tiny. I tried to add a Contact, and found there were no fields for basic things like Phone Number. (!)
I'm puzzled how people can talk about software like this as some kind of alternative to Outlook. I'd LOVE to leave Outlook behind, but nothing comes close to matching its important features - not Thunderbird, not Evolution, and _definitely_ not little Columba.
Not that this should matter, but what version of the JDK are you running? Upgrade to 5 (1.5) if you haven't already.
I see many complaining on here they don't see why this would be useful over say Thunderbird. I see exactly where this is nice. Right now I share a profile in Thunderbird between OS/2, Linux, and Win XP. I hane to have Thunderbird installed in all 3 OSes and then create a profile, then point it to that shared profile. With this, I can have it say on the shared partition or a USB key and it'll run in all 3 OSes, one install. I would really like that. Heck, I could probably put it on that USB key and run it on a Mac too, so my mail is always with me instead of buying those expensive USB keys with mail clients built in already. This may open up doors with devices like that.
A second Azureus datapoint -- I run it for weeks at a time on MacOS. I've got 512M, I think, and it's a 400Mhz G4. Seems to run ok for me. It works ok under both 10.3.9 and under Tiger, and under various flavors of Java 1.4
the Java Virtual Machine eats up some 320MB
Isn't the proper column to look at RSS? The docs for ps describe that as "the non-swapped physical memory that a task has used (in kiloBytes)." VSZ, on the other hand, is "virtual memory usage of entire process (vm_lib + vm_exe + vm_data + vm_stack)". If I add ups the VSZ column for everything I have running, it's well more than the physical RAM I have, so that doesn't seem useful for comparison.
And really, 112 meg for an IDE (I presume that's Eclipse you're using) doesn't sound bad. My copy of Firefox weighs in at 92 meg RSS, and I just have 2 windows with three tabs each open.
Ooooh, Java! Big deal, the G-dot pwnz its ass. Gmail all the way!
I'm not sure how much RAM Azureus eats up on my system (never bothered to check), but I've run it for three days straight to get some larger files and never had it cause the problems you describe. And I only have a half-gigabyte of memory.
there are a dozen or so email services that provide imap with a provided web ui for those who are travelling or cannot be bothered to configure imap in their clients. html widgets are stupid? enabling java in your browser - now thats stupid.
There are too many email clients out there! Why bother even looking at another new one. I've checked out the Columba page and I didn't immediately see a list of features. I'm not interested. The Ristretto class library there looks more interesting than the email client.
I've tried Groupwise, Notes, Outlook, Outlook Express, Incredimail, Eudora, Netscape email (does that still exist? :)), Sylpheed, KMail, Evolution, Thunderbird, and every Web mail service under the sun.
I don't know what other people are looking for, but none of them have ever quite met my needs. So, I just pick the one that, to me, seems to have the largest base of testers and developers and the most active development and I hope for the features to come.
Reasons not to choose Groupwise, Notes, Outlook(s), or Incredimail are flamebait for another time.
None of the choices seem to support HTML for email composition very nicely. They all try to give you a nice WYSIWYG to things like fonts, colors, images, etc., but they don't give you a way to change it if the WYSIWYG doesn't do things exactly the way you want it. It's like FrontPage for email.
I want the option to use some version of standard regular expressions on the entire message, including full header, for my own spam filtering. Naturally, it needs something for people who don't have a m/^f.*ing$/i clue what a regular expression is, but this is "Advanced" filtering. I want to put a rule somewhere that says something like
I also want to be able to export my email in some standard format that I can backup and restore in the future to any email client.
So, right now, I'm a Thunderbird user. It doesn't have the features I want, but neither does any other client.
Oh well... at least I still have that cool "You've Got Mail!" wav file from my AOL dayz :)
-- GM
Sure, java imposes a performance penalty compared to native code. But it's not necessarlily a *huge* penalty is it?
(founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera)
This would be a bug report if I didn't get that when trying to file one on their web site (click contribute, then bug report):
Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Client sent malformed Host header
Anyways.
Steps to reproduce:
1) run the app through Java web start
2) click Edit, then General Options
3) click on the button next to "text font"
4) pick font size 12 instead of 11
expected: the text of emails has size 12
observed: the window closes, I'm back to the JavaWS window.
Someone from Columba is probably reading the article (how could they not notice the slashdotting?), so guys, fix your bug reporting system and add that report in there. The app looks good otherwise.
Argh, do these open source email clients really have to directly clone Outlook's UI? (See Evolution.) I admit, it's a pretty nice interface. And a version of Outlook that had IMAP support which could be categorized as anything other than demoralizing would certainly be welcome.
But come on, with all the brain power working on these things I'd like to see someone come up with another way of working with email.
Opera's M2 is on the right track, I think, but I'm also unable to use it regularly because of IMAP issues.
Ah well. [Downloading Columba now...]
Wow, that looks so great. It looks exatly like ... like ... almost every other fucking mail client out there. Why can't people come up with something a little more innovative?
Java... user-friendly graphical interface... wizards... internationalization support
Sounds awful! Probably has a 'genuine people personality' too.
What exactly is "user friendly" about using the same old and still sucking core interface?
Outlook, Thunderbird, Holy Moly - whatever they're called, you can barely spot the difference in screenshots.
I'm sure that a lot of people like the interface that way, and a lot of people would be more comfortable with a different one.
Too bad nobody has the guts anymore to try something that doesn't look like a M$ rip-off.
So I'll stay with mutt, even though at times some graphics would be nicer than text-only.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Yeah, it's also known as a "Book of Synonyms", eg http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0446 313106/002-4403523-3097628?v=glance this dictionary of synonyms and anyonyms.
- Labels: Hardly anyone uses them, but the gmail labels are way better than the folders that Outlook and all the other clients offer. I have plenty of mail that belongs in multiple categories.
- Threads: Gmail handles threads, possibly even more elegantly than VM. Outlook doesn't even bother trying.
- Client-side scripting: The reply button is so zippy on Gmail. Beats crappy old Yahoo for sure.
- Gmail searching: A search based on Google's search engine. There's no other search engine that I'd rather.
Does anyone else want a mail client that works just like gmail but can access POP3 and IMAP anywhere and runs locally on his own computer?I have two questions! question 1 - why did it take 3 years to make an Outlook clone? question 2 - Why exactly do they think we need another Outlook clone? I mean what makes this program so special? What will make me want to use this one over any other mail program out there? It seems to me that it's a waste of time to create a program that's no more innovative than this one. Anyone care to enlighten me?
Jay Dale "If you're not living on the edge then you're taking up too much space!"
Injection attacks have nothing to do with languages. Read up our your security before claiming a silver bullet. No language is "safe", there are only weak programmers.
Well I've got Windows and Linux partitions on my PC - the big bane is which do I use for my POP3 account email? Now I have the potential (after some configuration) to use the same client and run it from both OSeseses.(I hope!)
It might also be nice to be able to stick it on a USB key as well.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Generally I agree with you, but just want to point something out - it sounds like you are saying that somehow apps written in Java are not vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. Clearly that's not true. Or am I missing something?
Now that the Nintendo Revolution has unveiled its melee weapon controller, it shouldn't be long until we're all beating hookers with lead pipes and experiencing all the glory that next gen gaming will provide us! Now that gaming hardware is catching up, it *can't* be long until DNF is relased, woohoo!!
First off, let me state how languages can not be vulnerable to injection attacks. Injection attacks are possible, because code is generated in an unstructured way. For example, most SQL interfaces work by concatenating strings to form queries, which are then passed to the database server. This allows you to put delimiters inside the strings, which will cause the SQL engine to interpret the string as two queries, even though your program is only trying to send one query.
The way to prevent injection attacks is to assemble queries in a structured way. Consider how Common Lisp macros work. A Lisp program is made of lists that look something like (a b c d), where a is the function you're calling, and b c and d are the arguments to that function. Common Lisp macros allow you to construct such lists; so they are a way to construct code. The way you construct a list in Lisp (note: I'm simplifying here, it's just meant to get the idea accross) is (list a b c d), which would give you a list containing whatever a, b, c, and d are. There is no way you can get this construction to somehow create _two_ lists. Contrast this with doing the same thing with strings. If you construct the list like "(" + a + " " + b + " " + c + " " + d + ")", you could create make d something like "some-value) (delete-all-files)", and you would end up with two function calls, the second of which deletes all your files.
Applying all this to constructing SQL queries is a bit more difficult, because SQL queries don't have such a regular syntax as Lisp code. However, with effort, it's possible. You could, for example, construct your query as Lisp code, and then have a function that transformed the result into SQL, applying escaping as necessary.
I didn't say anything specifically about Java in my post. I don't know how Java deals with SQL very well, but I do think they have some interface based on objects and methods that you call on these objects, as an alternative to the string concatenation based interface. If this object and method interface is done properly, it would indeed eliminate the possibility for SQL injections. Knowing Java, though, it would probably be very cumbersome.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It's admittedly very cool, but I have to ask with the big push towards free (or otherwise) online based email services, is it too late to make any difference.
Working at a small software startup I find that I use my company account far less than before, and increasingly receive mail from companies/suppliers/magazines/pretty much everyone from Gmail or Hotmail.
I'll definitely check it out, but other than the novelty value, why bother?
SonicNonsense.com - Random stuff from a bunch of random people.