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Mobility Email reaches Beta 4
Shane M Coughlan writes "Mobility Email Beta 4 has now been released. It is the fourth beta release of the portable distribution. It is stable enough for people to use as an every day email client. This version changes a configuration option in Mozilla Thunderbird to prevent crashes with the new in-line spell checker. Mobility Email is a full version of Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5b2 with added OpenPGP and Webmail extensions. It is portable, and can run from a USB drive without being installed on a computer. "
I don't use it but I easily see the advantage. I have 5 different IMAP accounts configured in my mailer. All of those are needed for different purposes. Without my notebook, I have to check five different webmail pages when I am at friends places or at an internet café and I can't send gpg signed mails at all. With this program, I just use the USB port, open the app and voilá - there is my mail.
A PDA is not an option because it won't work when there is no connectivity for external devices (like in most non-geek homes) and it's much bigger than a USB stick.
It is kind of hard to find on the linked page, but this is Windows only.
I was a tester for this software, and I can tell you that the Windows version is excellent. Smooth UI and generally a joy to use.
The linux version, unfortunately, is very buggy and pretty much unusable. Hopefully they'll bring the Linux version up to scratch soon.
Until then, I'd stick to a Windows client for email reading.
It says right in the second paragraph, "Simply plug your USB key into any Windows computer in the world and boom." Plus, the download is an .msi file.
No existe.
Unless you use a computer from 1998, the following Windows versions should work with any USB stick without asking for a driver disk.
ME, 2000, XP, 2003
98 SE needs a driver, but those are easy to burn onto a CD if you really need to use a 98 SE computer. The original 98 and 95 have crappy USB drivers, so they aren't usually supported anyways for this kind of stuff.
I know MacOS X can use USB drives fine, probably MacOS 9 too (although I cannot verify this).
I have no idea about Linux, but I imagine most Linux computers that are up-to-date can use USB drives with no driver issues. Besides, how many Linux computers on the road do you expect to find?
I am the author of Portable Thunderbird with Enigmail / GPG (PTEG). I have been following Mobility Email and have had correspondence with its author (Shane). I took a look a the latest release (Beta 4).
It is composed mainly of JH latest PTB release (based on Deer Park) and the launcher that JH, myself, and many others have been tweaking for the past year to get it to what it is today. Mobility Email relies on those two pieces and adds a few additional extensions (RTFA to find out which ones), "pretty" documentation, and a lot of marketing speak.
That being said I think it is a good thing for several reasons. The most important of which is that it attempts to de-geekify (not a word) the whole signing/encrypting/portable mail thing. Many layman are thrown off by the geek nature of the sites that JH and I have for our work. Shane's work makes it easier (partly in part because it is pretty) for the layman to get into it.
Sure it is a rip-off in some sense. The technical work has nearly all been done. It is a repackaging of what is out there. The same could be said for what I put together off of JH's PTB. Although I did a chunk of programming and tweaked the launcher heavily, with some changes being added back into JH's vanilla launcher. Shane does give nods to the community, you just have to search for it.
From TFA:
What is included with Mobility Email?
Mobility Email is based on Portable Thunderbird with Enigmail/GPG by John Urbanek.
The specific software included in the distribution is:
* Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 2 (with additions by John T. Haller).
* Enigmail 0.93.0 by the Enigmail Team.
* GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) 1.4.2 (Win32) by GNU.
* WebMail 0.7.0 by the WebMail Team.
* Hotmail 0.8.0 for WebMail by the Webmail Team.
* Yahoo! 0.5.1 for WebMail by the Webmail Team.
* MailDotCom 0.4.1 for Webmail by the WebMail Team.
* Lycos 0.6.1 for Webmail by the WebMail Team.
* Talkback 1.4.1 by the Mozilla Team.
The only thing I was a little surprised at was that he didn't include the source to the launcher, which is what really does all the magic. JH and I have been including it since the beginning. Maybe Shane is trying to hide as much of the technical fluff as possible from the end user. Either way, I think what he is doing is a step in the right direction.
On another note, I'll be releasing a version of PTEG based off of Deer Park not too long from now. Many have been asking for the feature to encrypt the profile directory as well. I am eventually planning on rewriting the launcher in C (or something more powerful than NSIS) and utilizing some of the symmetric encryption capabilities of GnuPG to encrypt the profile folder.
-John
Yes, as John says I'm trying to "de-geekify" the rather new field of portable/encrypted applications. Rip off is very much a relative term, especially in the opensource world. We build on what others do. My own part in this game is not that of brave programmer, but rather as a person who spends time configuring, testing, and distributing systems. Thankfully there are people like John creating great technologies, and with a little luck we can take them into the mainstream.
The PortableThunderbird launcher (with hooks for GnuPG) that is included with Mobility Email is the exact same one that John uses. The source code for the launcher can be obtained by contacting me. You can do so through the Mobility Email website at http://mobility.shaneland.co.uk/