Scott’s Blog

I wrote before about implementing internal mailing lists in our company using GNU Mailman. That never got too far because of the user interface. Our test group of users didn’t like it. Since then I played with a few other mailing list managers, but having been very busy, I didn’t get anything implemented for real. We’ve also been having problems with our GroupWise upgrade and simultaneous migration to new mail server hardware, for which I’ve opened a support ticket with Novell. Because of this the list manager server went onto the back burner.

Recently in my blog meanderings I came across a mention of Dada Mail, another open-source mailing list manager. I thought I’d give it a try. I’ve also been thinking that a mailing list manager would make a decent virtual machine appliance, so I’ve decided that in order to satisfy our corporate need and provide some give-back to the open source community, I’d try to learn about rPath Linux, a special Linux distribution for building software appliances, and rBuilder, a free service to help you bundle applications as application server appliances. I don’t know how much time I’ll have to put to this, but right now I’m thinking I’m going to try to build a virtual appliance that uses Dada Mail as a mailing list manager and is mostly pre-configured right out of the box. If it works, and provided the Dada Mail maintainer is cool with it, I’ll make it available on rBuilder Online.

It seems that Novell Forge is slightly broken today, and users who are trying to download the latest version of MailSaver are having problems. I have posted the latest version of MailSaver, which is MailSaver 4.0 Beta 3, here for the time being, until I can get the problem sorted out with Novell Forge.

Sorry for the problems, and thanks for your interest in MailSaver.

I have received several bug reports from various MailSaver users who have been beta-testing MailSaver 4. Some of the bug reports have to do with running it in GroupWise 7.0. Unfortunately I am not able to make MailSaver 4 work properly in GroupWise 7.0 without SP1. MailSaver DOES work properly in the Windows client for GroupWise 7 SP1. I am very sorry that there is a problem with the 7.0 client, but when your system gets updated to 7.0 SP1, MailSaver will work as expected.

Thanks to all the testers for some very good feedback. I will be finalizing version 4 of MailSaver in the next week and releasing it on Novell Forge.

I’ve still not had enough testing feedback on MailSaver, so I’m going to wait a bit longer before I publish release 4. I’d like to have some more and varied users test it and let me know how it works for them. Our in-house tests have been fairly good but I still want more feedback.

Hopefully next week I’ll release v4.0.

Get the installer for MailSaver 4.0 Beta 3 (and future betas) here.

I’m nearly done and just need lots of testing. This version will be distributed internally at our company to our intrepid testers, so the next build (or the one after that) will likely be the final of 4.0. Hopefully that will happen within the next two weeks.

More progress today on MailSaver:

• Support for proxy accounts (thanks to many requests from users.
• Support for saved query folders (my personal pet feature).
• Better support during caching mode (eliminate out-of-sync saved status).
• Better handling of folders that are not supported (calendar, contacts, documents).

I should have a new v4 beta2 install bundled and up on Novell Forge later today. Check the MailSaver Download Page on Novell Forge.

MailSaver Beta 1 is available for download from Novell Forge. Go to the MailSaver main Novell Forge page for information on what’s new in this release.

“But wait, you just posted this morning that you were working on it again! What gives?” I hear you say. Well, I’ve been working on MailSaver 4 off and on for the last 12 months, and a lot of the work was already done, including the internationalization part, which took a lot of effort to figure out and to translate properly. The version up on the site is a beta, so try it out if you use MailSaver and post feedback as comments here or on Novell Forge if you like.

Well, with our GroupWise 7 upgrade on the near horizon, I’ve picked up and started working on MailSaver again. The old version is still in heavy use in the company, and working well enough for what it is, but the new one will have lots of new features that have been requested from both internal people and the user community out in the big wide world.

The most frequently asked-for feature is internationalization. MailSaver would work in any language version of GroupWise 6, but the configuration menu wasn’t available unless you were using an english version. This has been fixed, and now MailSaver works in pretty much all languages available for GroupWise, except double-byte character set languages (asian languages that use pictographs).

Next, GroupWise 6.5 and 7.0 compatibility has been requested a lot. The existing version works in GW6.5, but hadn’t been tested very much. It didn’t work at all in 7.0. The development version now works properly in 6.5 and 7.0.

Third, lots of people have asked for me to make it work in a proxy account. I haven’t figured this out yet but it’s on the todo list, and a brief perusal of the documentation makes it look very possible.

Finally, of the several internally requested features, I’ve added the ability for MailSaver to remember the folder the user selects to save messages to on a cabinet-folder by cabinet-folder basis. For example, if the user saves the cabinet folder “Projects” using MailSaver into P:/Projects, the next time the user selects to save that folder, it will automatically go the same P:/Projects folder. The new version will also flag each message with a “Previously Saved” flag, that will cause it to avoid re-saving messages and attachments that have already been saved, thereby eliminating duplicate files. It will also deal better with HTML-only messages, so that it can handle non-rfc compliant messages created by some email systems.

Some bugs with necessary VB runtime files being missing and not properly installed by the MailSaver instalation program have also been fixed.

I should have the new verision published by some time in June.

I really want to get MailSaver 4 done for year end. I’m thinking I’m not going to be able to have all the features I wanted to implement due to lack of time. Two things are making life difficult for two new features. First, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around using MailSaver while proxying as another user, and second, I have unsuccessfully been experimenting with search folders.

I have successfully added a few important things however, and I’d like to get them into users’s hands, before all my time gets eaten up by the new financial management system server construction in January.

First, I have internationalization working so that the menu selections for MailSaver work in severa non-english versions of GroupWise. This works well for every language I have implemented so far. Second, I have fixed the bug that caused MailSaver to stop processing when it encounters a corrupt file or zero-length attachment in your message store. Third, I have added the feature of saved location retention per Cabinet folder in MailSaver. This makes MailSaver remember the last place you saved a Cabinet folder to, so that it automatically saves to the same place again. Finally, I’ve added a “previously saved with MailSaver” attribute to messages, so that if you use MailSaver on the same folder with the same contents multiple times, you don’t get duplicates of the saved messages.

These features comprise enough for me to be happy with a release, so hopefully I can get things cleaned up enough to package and create an installer for the user-base before the New Year.

I’ve been working on MailSaver 4 today. I managed to get the bug I mentioned in the last post, where MailSaver would stop, fixed. What was happening was that MailSaver would encounter a message with a zero-byte attachment, or with a subject line that had some bizarre character set that it didn’t know how to handle, and it would quit in the middle of processing a list of messages. Now, it just skips the message it doesn’t know how to handle and continues. Much better.

I also spent some time today writing a (gasp) Help file for MailSaver. Yes, there is actual on-line help for MailSaver now available, and it will be included when Version 4 ships.

I’m still trying to figure out if there is a way to get MailSaver 4 to work correctly with proxy accounts, so that if you login as user A and then use proxy to become user B, you will be able to archive user B’s mail with MailSaver. That’s proving kind of tricky, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to get it to work or not.