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.

Comments

Columba or columbia

[SysKoll]

Columbia is an email client written in Java

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.

Why would I prefer this...

[c0l0]

...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. :-)

Re:Why would I prefer this...

[NoOneInParticular]

tsk, foulmoothing on so little pretext. Yes the JVM is written in an unsafe language. This simply means that the JVM is a single point of failure. However, if the JVM is safe, all java apps are safe. Now try to argue the same thing with every C-app, and envision the amount of effort that goes into (a) ensuring that the JVM is safe and (b) ensuring that every c-application on the face of the earth is safe. Then estimate the chances of success for (a) and (b). Furthermore try to envision the amount of effort that has gone into ensuring that the Java sandbox is foolproof, compared with the effort in avoiding buffer overruns in your random c-app. Only when carefully thinking this through, start calling people dumbasses, dumbass.

Re:I don't get one thing

[El Cubano]

works on everywhere.

Please be sure and qualify your statement properly. It should read: works on everywhere where Java is.

Java is not platform independent. It is a platform as much as Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Irix, Windows, vxWorks and others are platforms. It just happens that Java has been designed to run on other platforms.

IMAP

[Noksagt]

mutt has been the best text mode client for IMAP I have found. On the GUI side Outlook Express is!

Hillarious! Most would consider pine to be the best IMAP text mode client (Mark Crispin, who created IMAP, has a hand in pine) & mulberry as the best GUI client (written by more people who write IMAP servers). If you restrict it to open source clients, mutt is "o.k." in the text regime & Mulberry/Evolution are good for GUIs.

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 client

• No IMAP server-side searching, sorting, threading
• Can't download messages without downloading attachments
• Can't store onfiguration on the server (pine and mulberry can. you say this is a good feature...)
• No IMAP server-side drafts/sent mail folders
• Can't run multiple instances on one PC
• No flagging
• Makes too many connections to the server (so can't truly take advantage of IDLE)

I'm a dumbass and I'm okay, I code all night and..

[RAMMS EIN]

``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.