Assured: The Isode Blog

Handling of (Internet) Email Errors Needs Work

When Internet email goes wrong, the end user is generally presented with a message of varying clarity describing the problem, typically from an entity such as “mailer daemon”, which will likely include some or all of the original message.   Before 1995, this is the best that could be expected, as Internet mail evolved without a standardized approach for handling errors.   There is a standard approach for handling errors (Delivery Status Notifications or DSN) which defines a format for DSNs.  An email client should be able to use this, to present errors to the user in a clean and consistent manner in the context of the original message.   

In practice, this does not happen, and it is the end user who suffers.  Something should be done about this.   The standards writers have done their part.   Two groups should be directly addressing the problem:

1. Server developers should implement this specification correctly.   There is no reason to do anything else
2. Client developers should recognize correctly formatted DSNs, and present them cleanly to the end user.   

Those procuring and deploying systems would also do well to pay attention to this feature.

Open Standards for Mobile Messaging - an important milestone.

In an important step in defining open standards for mobile messaging, the IESG (Internet Engineering Steering Group) has approved the 'Lemonade Profile' as a Proposed Standard. 

This is the final technical approval for the LEMONADE work. We've blogged about lemonade and its importance a number of times already.

The LEMONADE profile is a a set of required extensions, restrictions and usage modes of the IMAP and mail submission protocols. The profile allows clients (especially those that are constrained in memory, bandwidth, processing power, or other areas) to efficiently use IMAP and Submission to access and submit mail.

Included in the profile is the ability to forward received mail without needing to download and upload the mail, optimization of mail submission and efficient resynchronization in the event of loss of connectivity with the server.

This profile does not define technology, but references other specifications to define a coherent set of protocol specifications to meet a specific objective. This is not a typical Internet specification, as most Internet standards are used on a "mix and match" basis. The profile has been driven by requirements from the telecoms world (and in particular the Open Mobile Alliance) to have a coherent set of standards that can be specified for a service deployment.

This definition is key to those seeking to build an open standards based deployment of mobile messaging.

New Internet Messaging Evaluations

For quite some time we've made available for evaluation on our site all of the products that make up our solution for Internet messaging for ISPs namely our SMTP message switch (M-Switch), our LDAP Directory (M-Vault) and the newest of our products our POP/IMAP Message Store, M-Box.

What we haven't done is publish evaluation guides that show how these products are used together to deliver an efficiently managed and scalable Internet messaging solution for ISPs and other email service providers.

Today that has changed with the publication of three new evaluation guides showing step-by-step how to install and configure these products as an Internet messaging service. The new guides, together with an overview of the evaluation and all the required program and configuration files can now be found here.

Message security for ground-to-ground messaging is vital and lacking

Together with seven other companies involved in the Aviation ground to ground messaging market, Isode have today issued a press release calling on Aviation Authorities, currently planning their transition to messaging based on ICAO's AMHS standard, to incorporate into those plans AMHS message security features provided for by the 'Extended' ATS Message Service.

The Extended ATS Message service provides for two security services to be integrated into the application:

1. Content integrity - ensuring that a message has not been tampered with in transit.
2. Origin authentication - enabling the recipient to verify that the message comes from the claimed sender.

Both of these services are based on the widely used X.509 digital signature standard supported by public key infrastructure (PKI).

You can read more here.

Email for Mobile Phones: Variety of Solutions will Cause Confusion

There are all sorts of solutions to mobile phone email appearing.  These include:

• The proprietary approaches from RIM and Microsoft
• Similar solutions from smaller vendors
• Offerings from Yahoo and Google/gmail
• Open standards based solutions

We saw an interesting recent review of three more offerings of a different class on the Mobilecrunch blog.

The essence of all of these is to provide a very simple interface on the phone (supported on a wide range of phones), using a backend server that connects to a variety of email systems.   One of them converts all emails to SMS (fragmenting if needed).  The other two interact with the phone using a proprietary protocol to the client that essentially downloads all waiting email. If you only get small messages, and want to read most of them, this type of solution could be useful. Users with more complex requirements will want a solution that interacts directly with their mail server.

The number of solutions appearing make clear that this is an area where things are happening fast.  This will make it very hard for users to understand and to distinguish between different approaches/products.