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.
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.
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!
Oh dear. There is a typo in the article - not the title. It IS "Columba" and NOT "Columbia".
Follow the link (FTFL??) and confirm this.
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
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.
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
EVERY gui java app I have ever used is a slow unresponsive mess.
How many would that be? I've used plenty of non-Java GUI's that were a slow, unresponsive mess.
Blame the programmer(s), not the language.
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.
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.
It probably should be Columba as Columba is the genus to which Columba livia, the rock dove, or pigeon belongs. You know, like carrier pigeons and all?
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.
The crash log is so big that it's spread out over 3 states!
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.
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
``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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.