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

the question I have

[Anonymous Coward]

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 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.

Looks like Thunderbird

[MSch]

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.

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:Typo

[Demerara]

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.

I don't get one thing

[Ilgaz]

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.

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.

Re:3 years

[Anonymous Coward]

they invested 3 years of their life into the development of this project that alone deserves credit

3 years, hah that's nothing. Just wait until Duke Nukem Forever comes out.

Hey, Cool!

[RAMMS EIN]

So how much do I need to pay to get my software advertised on Slashdot?

- mailvisa: simple bayesian spam filter in Ruby (beats most filters in Debian w.r.t. performance, precission, recall, and memory usage)

- logalize :analyzer for Apache log files, written in Perl. Simple, so it's easy to customize.

- 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.

Going to hell for this, but whatever...

[Y-Crate]

The crash log is so big that it's spread out over 3 states!

That was fast

[generic-man]

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

Please specify your incoming mail server properties.
If you are unsure please
ask your system administrator or internet service
  (cut off)

, 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.

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)

Re:Written in Java

[Quattro Vezina]

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'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.

First impressions under OS X

[ciurana]

Greetings,

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-1 _0.gif

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