Assured: The Isode Blog

New Partnership: Isode And Fine Point Technologies

We're pleased to announce a new partnership between Isode and Fine Point Technologies. By combining Fine Point's over-the-air (OTA) provision technologies and Isode's M-Box Gateway product, we're able to offer mobile service providers a complete moble email solution for their subscribers with minimal user and operator intervention.

A press release with some more information on this new partnership follows:

Isode And Fine Point Technologies Ireland To Offer Mobile Push Email Solution For Mobile Service Providers

'One Touch' is a secure, easy to activate, automatically provisioned push email solution for mobile service providers looking to provide efficient mobile email services to any user with a mobile phone.

--

Fine Point Technologies Ireland (a leading provider of mobile device detection, automatic device management & service provisioning software solutions) and Isode (the messaging and directory server software company) have joined forces to bring to market 'One Touch'.

By combining Finepoint’s Pervenio Activator over the air configuration system and Isode's M-Box Gateway, One Touch allows a vast range of mobile phone email clients to access new and legacy (POP) email accounts using the open IMAP-IDLE standard for email delivery.

One Touch is a complete solution for Mobile Service Providers (MSPs) who wish to provide high quality, robust, secure and efficient push email services to their end-users.

Ian Deakin, Chief Technology Officer of Fine Point Technologies Ireland, Inc.:

"As a result of our collaboration, we can provide an extremely powerful yet easy to use push mobile email solution for the widest range of mobile devices ensuring that customers can activate the service themselves rather than having to wait for intervention by a third party was important to ensuring a positive end-user experience."

Will Sheward, Isode VP Marketing:

"The marriage of our M-Box Gateway with Pervenio's activator service through integration work done at both of our companies has enabled us to put together a solution that addresses the needs of both MSPs and their end-users. The provision of efficient mobile email access to new or legacy email accounts with minimal intervention from the MSP is something the market needs and has been unable to find at a reasonable price from competitive companies."

MSPs wishing to experience One Touch from the perspective of their users and learn about the deployment and management of One Touch should contact Gerry Simone of (703-994-4418, gerry@simonecommunications.com) for further information.

About Isode

Isode is a leading supplier of highly scalable, high performance and robust messaging and directory server solutions. Isodes products are used in sectors where security, scaleability, reliability and excellent support are core requirements. Isode has commercial, Government, Military and Intelligence sector customers in over 30 countries.

About Fine Point Technologies Ireland

Fine Point Technologies Ireland is the former Pervenio Ltd,  a pioneering, world leading provider in Automatic Device management and Service Provisioning software solutions that enable MSP’s to stay better connected with their customers by detecting the mobile device instantly and configuring automatically the maximum service capabilities of each handset on their network. The company’s products are in service with more than 15 major networks globally, increasing revenues, enhancing profits and improving operational efficiencies for some of the world's leading mobile operators.

Apple's iPhone & making mobile email work well using IMAP

Apple's iPhone has an excellent email client that is an important part of the platform. The iPhone's sophisticated use of IMAP (in contrast to other widely available IMAP clients) is one reason that the email client works so well. 

A new whitepaper on the Isode site looks at how iPhone uses IMAP to meet mobile messaging requirements, and looks at other IMAP capabilities that could be used to support mobile messaging.

3 more LEMONADE RFCs published

We've been interested in and involved with the LEMONADE standards for mobile email for quite some time. Optimising for low (and intermittent) bandwidth links and resource constrained devices is a running theme in our messaging products.

Three more Lemonade RFCs have now been published, all authored in whole or in part by Isode employees (adding to our already impressive list we maintain of Internet Drafts and RFCs by Isode Staff).

• RFC 5465 The IMAP Notify Extension - C. King (Isode), A. Melnikov (Isode), A. Gulbrandsen (Oryx Mail Systems GmbH)
• RFC 5259 Internet Message Access Protocol - CONVERT Extension  - P. Coates (Sun Microsystems), A. Melnikov (Isode)
• RFC 5466 IMAP4 Extension for Named Searches (Filters) - C. King (Isode), A. Melnikov (Isode)

Isode R14.4: M-Box POP/IMAP Gateway support for multiple backends

This is the eighth in a series of messages describing new features in Isode R14.4, scheduled to ship in April 2009. You can see all of the messages on this blog relating to R14.4 by clicking on this link

Isode's M-Box POP/IMAP Gateway enables IMAP mail clients to access POP mailboxes using IMAP, allowing mobile clients (for instance) to use IMAP capabilities against that mailbox.

Isode R14.4 extends this capability so that an IMAP client can access multiple back-end email servers. This will enable an email client with a single IMAP account access to retrieve messages in multiple accounts (e.g., Yahoo!, AOL and Gmail). 

Two modes of access are supported:

1. Consolidation of all messages into a single mailbox, so that the accessing client sees just one mailbox containing all messages.
2. Presentation of an IMAP mailbox (folder) for each of the back-end email accounts, so that the user can see messages for each account independently.

This capability is available both in M-Box Gateway and in M-Box.  In M-Box, the user has a real local mailbox in addition to the back end mailboxes. This is useful to provide a real primary mailbox, while also giving access to the back ends.

A key benefit of this solution is that synchronization with back end mailboxes only happens when the client is connected. This gives much better overall performance for the service provider, relative to a solution that synchronizes the whole time. This is due to two common cases:

• In the first scenario, the user only accesses the mailbox with a mobile client, and so when the user is accessing mail on the backend from the desktop, synchronization simply isn't needed.
• In the second, the user has either become inactive, or simply never checks that particular mailbox - again, synchronization is a waste of resource.

For both of these common scenarios, synchronization on demand gives much more efficient resource utilization.

The Isode Mobile Email Gateway

Isode's new Mobile Email Gateway demonstration provides push email on a wide range of handsets, using IMAP-IDLE, as well as illustrating Isode's browser applications...

We've just launched a new live demonstration system of our Mobile Email Gateway, the primary purpose of which is to demonstrate M-Box operating in gateway mode, taking email from a POP email server and delivering IMAP email, including push email using IMAP-IDLE, to a wide range of mobile devices. You can try it out yourself by visiting the evaluation page on the Isode website.

While push email is mostly associated with smartphones, many non-smartphones have email clients compatible with the IMAP-IDLE standard, the Open Standard for push email. Over the last few months we've noticed increasing interest from email service providers wishing to provide push email access to their end-users without putting those end-users through the expense of acquiring newer handsets or the inconvenience of downloading and installing new client software. The gateway is demonstrates that this is a realistic goal that can be achieved by plugging M-Box into an existing infrastructure.

The gateway isn't only demonstrating the gateway abilities of M-Box. We're also showing the flexibility of Isode's browser-based applications which in this case can be used by end-users to obtain their phone settings, manage their whitepage information, look up contacts and change their password.

The recently published Directory Services Interface (DSI) evaluation guide touches on the customizations possible with Isode's browser-applications (changing styles and attributes displayed) and we'll be publishing a fuller customization guide within the next few weeks.

If you are service provider and want to try out the gateway, simply email marketing@isode.com or sign up using the form here.

iPhone: significant security vulnerability

Along with many others, we speculated that the iPhone would support push email by use of IMAP IDLE (see the Isode white paper "IMAP IDLE: The best approach for 'push' email" for more details).

We've been tracing an iPhone, and it turns out that this is not the case. With IMAP servers other than Yahoo!, the iPhone works by polling (at user configured interval) and so you need to wait to see new messages. Use of IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) by iPhone is very good approach, and we hope that Apple will add IMAP IDLE support in an iPhone software update.

With Yahoo!, the iPhone authenticates using a private protocol called XYMPKI, used in conjunction with IMAP.  Yahoo! do not provide a general IMAP service - they use IMAP only for iPhone access and although the iPhone supports TLS (Transport Layer Security), Yahoo! IMAP does not, which leads to a replay attack.

Anyone able to eavesdrop on the authentication exchange, such as when using any open (public or private) wi-fi service, can easily gain full access to the user's email account until the user changes their password. We would advise against using the Yahoo! service with an iPhone, because of this security risk.

XYMPKI provides Yahoo! IMAP with information on the phone, that enables an alert about new email to be sent by an out of band alert mechanism (which we speculate is SMS).

One of Isode's engineers, Dave Cridland, has posted a more detailed explanation of the vulnerability (which we have, of course, reported to Apple, Yahoo! and CERT) on his personal blog here and here.

This proprietary approach with a significant security vulnerability is bad.

Apple and Yahoo! should know better.

   Slashdot It!

More on the POP to IMAP Gateway

Since we announced a new evaluation guide on providing IMAP access to POP email accounts, by configuring our M-Box POP/IMAP server to act as a gateway, we've had a considerable surge in evaluation requests.

The gateway function of M-Box has been one that has been part of the product since its launch and, despite placing a product page explaining this feature on our website, we have perhaps been a little guilty in not promoting this feature as much as it deserves.

The possibility of providing IMAP email access to POP accounts, or even LEMONADE compliant IMAP email access to non-LEMONADE IMAP accounts is clearly one that is proving to be popular.

Of particular interest to new evaluators has been the provision of 'push' email services (based on the IMAP-IDLE protocol) to users, and we've set up in-house test system that demonstrates this ability with a wide range of back-end systems, including IBM Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange.

In the near future we'll be setting up an external server that will allow evaluators to quickly test out the system in a live environment without having to install or configure the system themselves. More on this shortly.

In the meantime we're continuing to explore provision of IMAP and 'push' email to other popular non-IMAP services, including webmail systems like Google's Gmail.

IMAP access to POP email accounts

We've released a new evaluation guide today showing how to configure our M-Box server to act as a POP/IMAP gateway (more).

Using M-Box in gateway mode enables email service providers (administering an ISP or company email system for example) to give IMAP access to POP-only email accounts.

As M-Box is fully compliant with the LEMONADE Profile 1 IMAP extensions, end-users will also gain access to LEMONADE features such as IMAP-IDLE (the 'push' email protocol supported by many existing IMAP clients).

We've written whitepapers previously on why IMAP email access is important, especially for mobile devices and workers who need to access mail from multiple locations, and we can envisage a number of different deployment scenarios for this product including companies wanting straightforward IMAP access to POP email accounts, those already offering POP & IMAP access but who want to add LEMONADE functionality to their existing IMAP offering and those wishing to offer IMAP access to popular webmail systems that provide POP but not IMAP access.

A LEMONADE 'first' for Isode

We've been talking about the new LEMONADE standard for mobile messaging for some time and how we have plans to incorporate it into our IMAP/POP server (M-Box) and our SMTP Server (M-Switch).

As of yesterday LEMONADE moved out of the 'intend to do' category and moved into the 'have done' category when Isode sent the first message, outside of a test environment, that demonstrated a key LEMONADE function, the ability to forward a message to another recipient without first downloading it - a key capability for mobile devices like PDAs and Mobile Phones with limited storage and bandwidth.

We forwarded without downloading, over a GPRS link, two messages to Josh Maher and David Ferris of Ferris Research in preparation for a webinar that we're participating in this evening (more details and signup link).

The first contained PowerPoint presentations and PDF documents from a Ferris webinar that took place a month or so ago. The forwarded message was 55Mbytes in size but using forward without download only 2.2 kBytes of data were sent and 1.53 kBytes of data received by the client during the operation.

That's 15,099 times more efficient than forward with download.

The whole process took 26.3 seconds compared with the four hours plus it would have taken had you been insane enough to try this using normal forward with download over a GPRS link.

Because one of the recipients uses a Gmail address (with a 20Mbyte message size limit) we then sent a second message with a single attachment, one of the group of attachments forwarded in the first message. This demonstrated the LEMONADE capability to access parts of messages that have not been downloaded.

Forwarding that message without downloading was 'only' 1739 times more efficient than forward with download and took 7 seconds.

We believe that this is an important step  - bringing LEMONADE out of the lab and into the real world.

Free Ferris Research Webinar: Key Standards for Mobile Messaging.

On October 4th Isode will be co-sponsoring and participating in a free Ferris Research webinar:

"LEMONADE and SyncML: Key Standards for Mobile Messaging"

Isode CEO, Steve Kille, will be joined by speakers from Sun, Funambol and Synchronica to discuss the two key Open Standards that are challenging the proprietary solutions for mobile messaging and personal information management.

You can read more about the webinar (starting at 8:30am Pacific, 11:30am Eastern, 4:30pm UK, 5:30pm CET and lasting for one hour) at the Isode website here.

Click this link to register for the webinar. There is no charge to attend.