Assured: The Isode Blog

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.

M-Switch Anti-Spam False Negative Rate Graph Update

As mentioned in previous posts (Blog post May 9th 08 and Blog post May 14th 08) we have been paying particular attention to the False negative rate of the copy of M-Switch Anti-Spam running here at Isode's offices. We wrote a whitepaper on our findings:

“Measuring the False Negative Rate for Isode’s M-Switch Anti-Spam.”

The whitepaper included graphs showing the daily quantities of Spam we received and the daily False Negative rate going back over 4 months (up to 30th April). We always intended to keep these graphs up to date so that they would continue to track M-Switch's performance and today we've updated them to include May's figures.

We will continue to update these graphs, at the end of each month, so that they always show current data.

Measuring the False Negative Rate for Isode's M-Switch Anti-Spam

A key feature of any anti-spam solution is how effective it is at removing spam. A perfect anti-spam system would have a zero false positive rate and a zero false negative rate. In practice, this is not usually achieved, and systems will invariably trade off the two measurements.

A new whitepaper on the Isode website describes how false negatives can be measured and looks at false negative rates from the beginning of this year for Isode's M-Switch Anti-Spam.

"Measuring the False Negative rate for Isode's M-Switch Anti-Spam"

The graph below shows the false negative rate from January 2008.

ClamAV--Useful, Free Anti-Virus

ClamAV is an open source, free anti-virus tool, designed for email scanning on mail gateways.

It is owned by Sourcefire, which employs the ClamAV developers and provides commercial support for ClamAV.

The most important capability of an anti-virus product is to be able to remove a high percentage of viruses, including rapid reaction to new viruses.

A test by Untangle put ClamAV as one of the top three (along with Kaspersky and Symantec). This test generated a lot of controversy, with some arguing the test methodology to be flawed and others suggesting that commercial vendors are trying to suppress a free alternative.

A comment from AV-Comparatives, which provides independent testing, gives useful insight in explaining why it does not include ClamAV in its standard list. AV-Comparatives notes that ClamAV is not designed or suitable for use on an end system, but is designed to detect spreading viruses, and has a very good response rate to new threats. This is confirmed in its report and other references on the net.

ClamAV detects phishing attacks, as well as conventional viruses and worms. During one day’s operation on the Isode servers, the following viruses and phishing attacks were detected:

• Exploit.HTML.IFrame: 10 Time(s)
• Exploit.WMF: 6 Time(s)
• HTML.Phishing.Auction-144: 1 Time(s)
• HTML.Phishing.Auction-222: 2 Time(s)
• HTML.Phishing.Bank-1232: 1 Time(s)
• HTML.Phishing.Bank-474: 18 Time(s)
• HTML.Phishing.Pay-36: 1 Time(s)
• W32.Sality.Q-1: 5 Time(s)
• Worm.Mydoom.I: 1 Time(s)
• Worm.Mydoom.M: 4 Time(s)
• Worm.SomeFool.AA-2: 9 Time(s)
• Worm.SomeFool.D: 1 Time(s)
• Worm.SomeFool.P: 17 Time(s)
• Worm.Stration.YY: 1 Time(s)
• Worm.Womble.D: 8 Time(s)

The integration with an email gateway is straightforward and efficient. This is important for gateway/boundary use. A number of AV vendors are focusing on appliance and “complete solution,” and either dropping or reducing support for integration with other products.

ClamAV is a good anti-virus option for boundary checking.

Tricast Mail

We've blogged before about how important it is that mobile device manufacturers take seriously the user interface of the email clients that they ship with their phones (as Apple have done) and how their failure to do this so far has helped make retrieving and sending email on a phone an unattractive proposition.

We came across the Tricast Mail email client recently and this blog post (and the video of the interface half-way down) makes the v2 version of the client look rather special. Can't wait to try it out.

Mobile XMPP Client: Agile Messenger

This is the first in a series of posts in which we'll be posting short opinions of some of the available XMPP clients, in the run up to the launch of our XMPP server, M-Link.

There is a good choice of the Internet Standard XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) clients for all common desktop platforms, including decent quality free products. 

We have not found a good free mobile XMPP client, but Agile Messenger from Agile Mobile is a neat commercial one.  It's reasonably priced at 45USD and you can try a free seven day trial version prior to purchase. It runs Windows Mobile and on a wide range of Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. It's very easy to set up and use, and does everything you would expect a mobile XMPP client to do. Importantly, it makes good use of the limited screen size on mobile phones with a tidy layout and adjustable font sizes.

Isode's XMPP Server: M-Link

Anyone paying any attention to the whitepapers we've published and the blog posts we've written over the last few months will not be surprised to learn that we're developing an XMPP server of our own, the first version of which will be launched with our next major product release, 14.2.

The reasons for developing an instant messaging and presence server (and basing it on the XMPP Open Standard) are ones we've discussed before but in short - we've always been an Open Standards company and we believe that instant messaging and presence has applications across many of our solutions areas  as well as helping us communicate with the partners and customers on whom we rely.

M-Link moved into customer beta a little while ago and we offered customers three ways of helping us test the product:

1. Download M-Link, set up M-link on their own domain using our evaluation guide, and link to Isode staff who are using the copy of M-Link running at isode.com (as well as anyone else with an IM account at other XMPP services like GMail or jabber.org).
2. Request an IM account at a service that Isode are running on 'friends.isode.com' and use that account to communicate with Isode staff and other XMPP accounts.
3. Use their existing XMPP service (if they have one) to communicate with Isode staff using M-Link.

As well as testing the product, the documentation and interoperability, customers have also been able to use the beta as a way of improving communications with Isode, the beta test is enabling us to both look at the product (M-Link) and the function (IM as it impacts our business).

We've also been able to properly test some of the many XMPP clients available for the various operating systems and platforms we find ourselves using. We'll be posting our opinions of some of those clients in a series of posts running up to the launch of 14.2

SIP and XMPP - Convergence or Co-Existence?

SIP is the widely deployed Internet Standard Session Initiation Protocol (RFC 3621).  XMPP is the Internet Standard eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. There are substantial architectural similarities between services of these types, and advanced clients need presence, messaging, and session initiation capabilities. Integrating these services makes some sense, and two key attempts have been made.

SIMPLE is a family of protocols that builds presence and messaging over SIP. This layering has resulted in a specification of substantial complexity and rather poor performance, which suggests that this layering is not a good choice.  These technical issues are a key factor as to why XMPP is winning over SIMPLE as the standard of choice for presence and instant messaging.

JINGLE is a session initiation protocol built over XMPP.  This layering works better, and it is clear that JINGLE will have an important role in providing session initiation between clients that support XMPP. It is a clean and effective approach to help XMPP clients support voice and video within a protocol and security framework that is already implemented.

However, JINGLE does not provide a complete replacement for SIP.

A SIP client implementation is a very straightforward mechanism to set up a phone call, and is supported on a large number of phones. If call connect is all that is needed,  SIP is ideal. JINGLE only makes sense if XMPP is needed for other reasons.  VOIP phones will continue to be SIP based, and VOIP deployments will be based around PABX systems that include SIP servers.

Another reason for this is that JINGLE does not provide a framework for phone type services such as call forwarding, putting calls on hold and voicemail integration. The underlying reason is that JINGLE is based on communication starting out with (XMPP) presence, which is a model of user to user communication, as distinct from the more traditional model underlying SIP of device to device communication.   

JINGLE use will grow, based on voice and video services in the context of XMPP clients. SIP use will continue to grow in the context of VOIP phone deployment. There will be co-existence, and gateways between SIP and XMPP/JINGLE.

JINGLE Implementation Growing

JINGLE is a protocol developed by Google and the XSF (XMPP Standards Foundation) to support VOIP (Voice over IP) Communication, and it is used in Google Talk.  We are seeing increased implementation of JINGLE (Wikipedia lists eleven implementations, including Google Talk) and we are aware of
more.

XMPP is the Internet Standard eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. Many XMPP clients now offer a "call" button (typically with a green phone icon) for each buddy (the XMPP roster) that allows direct voice communication between XMPP users.   This integration is a useful capability. Voice communication goes directly client to client using the real time VOIP (Voice over IP) protocol.

In order for this to work, the VOIP connection needs to be established, and this needs a session initiation protocol, to communicate the desire to communicate and then negotiate the details of the VOIP connection to be used.  JINGLE, which reflects the ringing of a telephone, is the XMPP protocol used to achieve this.

JINGLE is a general purpose session initiation protocol, and can be used to negotiate connections for other services such as video, and can also set up multi-party conferences.

JINGLE is an important standard that seems certain to grow with XMPP and be used alongside XMPP, to support voice and video for XMPP Clients.   Voice calls from such clients can be gatewayed to other VOIP services, mobile and landline.  GTALK-TO-VOIP is an example of such a service.

The XMPP/JINGLE/VOIP combination of open standards, gives a clear platform for solutions to compete against Skype, the (proprietary) market leading software phone system.

Smartphone manufacturers neglect email at their peril

The Web Worker Daily blog reports on a survey from webcredible that suggests that 33% of mobile phone users feel that email is still the most needed mobile utility. The blog post goes on to suggest that this is one of the reasons that (in the US at least) the iPhone quickly attained the status of second best selling 'smartphone', after the BlackBerry.

Both RIM and Apple have, in their different ways, taken email seriously as an application. They have both done their best to provide for the user an email interface that works well on these small form factor devices and have reaped the rewards, something that many other manufacturers seem to have neglected to do.

But there's more to a good user experience than a nice interface. Ensuring that the appropriate standards are used would be another step in the right direction, so that the user does not suffer from the poor performance one would get implementing protocols designed for desktop operation on devices that have limited storage and relatively low bandwidth.

Smartphone device manufacturers who decide to combine a decent user interface with the appropriate open standards for handling and delivering email (such as the LEMONADE profile that we've talked about previously) still have a chance to stake out a commanding market position.

US Military using XMPP

XMPP is the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, which is the Internet Standard for Instant Messaging, Real Time Messaging and Presence. On January 16th, the sale of an XMPP client and server solution by jabber.com to the US Marines for 280,000 users was announced.

This large sale ties in with XMPP activity at lead US Military groups such as JFCOM (Joint Forces Command) and SPAWAR (Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command) (more).

XMPP is also now included in US DoD IT Standards Register as Mandatory.

There is a clear trend towards the US military broadly adopting XMPP, which will have impact on Instant Messaging choices being made by other parts of the US Government as well as military organizations worldwide. We believe that this announcement is further confirmation that Isode's own Instant Messaging product development strategy and our choice of XMPP is the right one.

Modest goes beta

Modest, the new email client for Nokia's Internet Tablets, has finally gone into public beta. This is not only interesting in itself - at Isode, we've several Internet Tablet users - but also because Modest has good reason to be proud of what lies beneath the polished UI.

Modest is not only one of the first consumer-grade second-generation mobile email clients, capable of leveraging the Lemonade Profile to gain impressive performance advantages over basic email clients - it's the first to be using elements of the next-generation Lemonade Profile, providing even more speed - as well as cost savings - to its users.

This will undoubtedly have a strong effect on user demand for support for Lemonade features in their mail service provider's offering, but more importantly it's a clear demonstration that Lemonade is well and truly hitting the mainstream.

Lemonade Interop, Munich

It's the second day of the Lemonade Interop in Munich. We've lost a client developer since yesterday, as as a result clients no longer outnumber servers - instead we're neck and neck, although this counts neither the several remote participants, nor the local presence of a mobile email service provider, Momail.

Interestingly, some of the very latest work is being actively implemented and deployed. For example, Philip van Hoof and I both have the QRESYNC extension for single-round-trip synchronization implemented in clients, and we've four servers to test against. It's impressive seeing a crowd of clients in the room implementing some of the most advanced tricks in the Lemonade book, not only forward-without-download, but CONDSTORE is now routine for advanced clients. I'm particularly struck by the immense progress that's been made since last year, and the increased interest from other client (and client framework) developers too.

Interesting, too, the discussions we've been having over technologies like CONVERT - which would provide the kinds of content conversion on demand that Momail are providing their customers automatically. We've a server implementation of it, now, and the lessons learned - and input from Momail - has been fascinating. NOTIFY, too, as well as the overall architecture of the "Push" email that's in demand from many people, has been carefully looked at.

We're coming to an end, as I type this, having overrun by a little while, but it's been a great time, and it clearly demonstrates that Lemonade is very close to widespread deployment.

The Google (Gmail) effect

One of the side-effects of Google's recent GMail announcements (which we blogged about here) is the boost it seems to have given to interest in IMAP in general, as well as the boost to IMAP specifically as it relates to Google's GMail offering.

As an example, one of the most popular destination pages on the Isode website has, for some while, been a whitepaper we released some time ago on IMAP-IDLE (IMAP's 'push' email protocol). In the days immediately following the GMail announcement, visits to that whitepaper jumped by almost 300% and have remained at a high level ever since. It'll be interesting to see if, in the long run, Google's announcement does as much for the IMAP industry in general as it does for Google's own email service.

Enterprise Instant Messaging and Presence

In an article on the Information Week website, Elena Malykhina discusses the potential of Instant Messaging (and mobile Instant Messaging) within enterprises, a refreshing approach given that much IM talk is focused on its take-up amongst individuals.

Three driving factors in the take up of IM amongst enterprises are specifically identified; compliance, security and usability but the article also makes the case for the importance of the 'presence' aspect of Instant Messaging and points out how valuable it can be for the message sender to know the status of a message recipient.

This is one of the points we made in our recent whitepaper, Isode's Presence, Real Time Messaging and XMPP Strategy, in which we made public our own XMPP IM Server development project.

Presence awareness is a real benefit to companies where communications (both intra and inter-company) are often time-critical.

IMAP access for GMail, gPhone to follow?

Google have (rather quietly) introduced IMAP support to their GMail service, in addition to the basic POP support they were previously providing for accessing GMail outside of Google's web-interface.

We've been writing about the superiority of IMAP as a mail access protocol (especially in the mobile space) for some time and its nice to see Google now offering IMAP. It's even nicer to see that Google have included in their IMAP support some elements of the IETF's LEMONADE SMTP and IMAP extensions for mobile email that Isode have been involved in both specifying and promoting.

The ability to access from multiple devices may well make IMAP the preferred protocol for a lot of GMail account holders (I know it will for me) so it'll be interesting to see how Google monetize an access mechanism which, at the moment and unlike the web interface, does not allow for the delivery of Google content ads.

As we've previously noted, IMAP is the best and logical delivery mechanism for mobile email and far superior to proprietary systems (especially when the LEMONADE extensions are taken into account) and I suspect that the appearance of IMAP access, at a time when rumors continue to swirl around the industry of an upcoming 'gPhone', is no coincidence.

The gPhone, which is evidently being built for Google by handset manufacturer HTC is rumored to be an advert supported device so presumably the IMAP email client that ships with the phone will include a mechanism to deliver content-targeted adverts with the mail.

It remains to be seen if the gPhone will allow users to receive email from non-GMail accounts. I suspect that it won't and that instead Google will expect users to route their other email accounts through GMail in order to access them on their gPhone.

This 'routing' facility is something that GMail has had virtually since launch, with Google trying to push GMail as a way of managing all email accounts via one service. I can't imagine that traditional email service providers are going to be terribly happy with this development which will both damage their brand (by moving the end-user away from direct contact with it) and weaken their financial relationship with customers, who might well begin to wonder if there's any reason not to adopt Google as their main mail service provider.

Those email service providers do have a way of fighting back however, by implementing their own 'all in one gateway' service using products like Isode's M-Box POP/IMAP Gateway product.

Isode's XMPP Strategy

In a series of previous blog posts we've explained why we think that XMPP (eXtensible Messsaging and Presence Protocol) is the best open standard for providing presence and real-time messaging services.

It will not therefore come as a surprise to learn that we are planning our own server based on the XMPP protocol (which is somtimes referred to as 'Jabber').

In a whitepaper posted recently on our website we outline why we think that presence and real-time messaging are important to our customers, why we've chosen XMPP and why we are building our own product instead of integrating with an existing XMPP server.

The whitepaper is available here. If you're interested in joining the beta program for this new product, please get in touch using the contact form on our website.

Scaling of Presence and Instant Messaging

As IM moves from centralized services to distributed deployment, scaling of presence status is a key problem. If I have 200 contacts, and my presence status changes from "at desk" to "in meeting," this needs to be communicated with those contacts watching my status. In a distributed environment, this leads to network traffic.

Scaling efficiently is essential for a global IM service. This is being examined for the two proposed open standards for IM: XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) and SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions).

SIMPLE experts have set out a framework for analyzing this problem, including some suggestions to improve SIMPLE in this area.

XMPP experts have used the framework and example scenarios of this paper to provide an equivalent analysis for XMPP.

The analysis offers some interesting comparisons. We've shown the results for bandwidth usage, for both the current SIMPLE specifications and after the improvements recommended in the draft.

For example, if the domains have 20,000 users, where each user has four contacts in external domains and changes presence three times an hour, bandwidth usage is estimated to be 30 kilobytes per second for XMPP and 830 kilobytes per second for SIMPLE (571 kilobytes per second with suggested optimizations).

Or, in tabular form, including some other examples:

No. users	Contacts/user	Changes/hour	XMPP Bandwidth	SIMPLE Bandwidth	Optimized SIMPLE
20,000	4	3	30KB/s	830KB/s	571KB/s
20,000	20	3	150KB/s	1968KB/s	571KB/s
60,000	10	3	225KB/s	3683KB/s	16775KB/s
10,000,00	10	6	70833KB/s	880555KB/s	545833KB/s

This item was originally posted as an 'Insight Bulletin' for Ferris Research.

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!

XMPP Is the Key to Universal IM

XMPP (eXtensible Messsaging and Presence Protocol) is the open standard for IM and presence, often referenced as Jabber. XMPP provides a specification for client access to servers and for server-to-server communication.

For example, if I am connected to the Isode.com XMPP server as Steve.Kille@isode.com, and my buddy Nancy Cox is connected to the Ferris.com XMPP server as Nancy.Cox@ferris.com, the servers can discover each other and exchange presence information and messages.

This server-to-server capability enables general interconnection between all those using XMPP servers, and provides universal IM connectivity in the same way as email. This will give an IM world to the big proprietary servers, and a distributed XMPP network.

Servers using protocols other than XMPP for client-to-server communication can still use XMPP for server-to-server communication. This provides a framework for the big proprietary IM servers to interconnect in a worldwide, open-standards IM network.

Whether commercial considerations will ever allow this to happen is, however, a different matter. Proprietary IM network operators such as Yahoo and AOL monetize their networks and won't interconnect for purely altruistic reasons.

This item was originally posted as an 'Insight Bulletin' for Ferris Research.

The IM Open Standards War is Over - XMPP Has Won

The IETF has been working on two families of standards for instant messaging:

1. XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), which was based on the well-known Jabber system. There is an increasing number of XMPP servers being deployed -- notably by Google -- and many product announcements.
2. SIMPLE (Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions), which is an instant messaging specification based around SIP. Despite its name, SIMPLE is substantially more complex than XMPP and has not had the broad adoption of XMPP. The notable exception is Microsoft, which is using protocols "aligned" to SIMPLE.

Although not officially declared, the conclusion is clear: XMPP is the open standard for IM.

This item was originally posted as an 'Insight Bulletin' for Ferris Research.

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.

New Anti-Spam and Audit Database Evaluation Guides

Following on from our re-write of the Isode Internet Messaging Evaluation Guide, two more guides (M-Switch Anti-Spam and Audit Database) have now been re-written and are available for download from the Isode website.

Both guides are available from the relevant evaluation pages (here for Anti-Spam and here for Audit Database) and, as with the Internet Messaging Guide, in addition to providing the guides in HTML and PDF formats we've made RSS Feeds available so that evaluators can track changes to the guides as new Isode releases add to product functionality.

Lemonade email client development

Whilst a great many email clients for small devices and mobile phones support IMAP-IDLE (a key part of the LEMONADE profile which enables a 'push email' experience) hard news about development of client packages which support other LEMONADE features are hard to come by, although rumours are numerous. This is understandable given the commercial pressures that developers are under.

One package in development that we do know includes LEMONADE support beyond IMAP-IDLE is the open source 'Modest' package.

Modest, "a small e-mail program specifically targeting modest hardware, such as low-end PCs and internet tablets like the Nokia 770 and N800 internet tablets", is based on the Tinymail library, developed by Philip van Hoof.

What's notable about Modest is the interest and support it appears to be getting from Nokia. The email client on the N770 internet tablet (and the N800 successor device) has long been acknowledged as one of the device's weakest points, something that will come as no surprise to those who have long bemoaned the quality of email clients shipped by manufacturers of mobile devices.

Modest's main developer is a Nokia employee, Dirk-Jan Binnema, and the two co-developers Florian Boor and Nils Faerber  both work for KernelConcepts, a company who's work for the 770 Nokia has previously sponsored. There are rumours that Modest will become the default email client shipped with the 800, an acknowledgement perhaps that whilst third party software is great in demonstrating an active community, its no substitute in the mass market for strong software from the device manufacturer.

It'll be interesting to see which of these features also find their way into Evolution, the default e-mail client for the GNOME Desktop as both Tinymail and Evolution utilise the Camel e-mail protocol library.

This item has been cross-posted to the Lemonade for Mobiles blog.

Network Computing Reviews the LEMONADE Mobile Email Standard

Network Computing Magazine's 'Tech Tracker' has published a review of the Lemonade Profile Email Standard that Isode has been active in promoting.

Lemonade Mobile Email Profile: A Sweet Standard

It's a fair review of the current state of play, although of course we would have preferred more mentions of Isode as we were after all the first company onto the market with servers that comply with the standard.

Where the review does fall down a little is in its  assessment of the state of the client market. Whilst the author correctly points out that the range of clients able to take advantage of the full Lemonade standard is currently limited, the article doesn't perhaps make it clear that any existing IMAP client will function quite happily with Lemonade compliant email servers. Lemonade is, after all, an extension to the IMAP standard, not a replacement for it.

ISPs and Organisations looking into IMAP server replacements, or looking to offer an IMAP service for the first time would therefore do well to future-proof their systems by investing in IMAP servers such as Isode's M-Box. There are already plenty of clients that support some elements of the Lemonade profile (like IMAP-IDLE, the open standards approach to replicating the push-email experience) and there is no downside to preparing for the appearance of new clients supporting other Lemonade initiatives.

"IMAP is, of course, the best"

Everybody seems to have an opinion on the potential impact of Apple's iPhone on the mobile phone/device market.

A search for blog posts tagged 'iPhone' on Technorati currently lists over 10,000 items, a considerable amount given that all we know of this phone is the contents of Steve Jobs' presentation, a couple of pages on the Apple website and the opinions of the (very) few journalists who have been allowed a 10 minute examination of the device.

What is clear however is that this is a device which takes messaging seriously. The attention paid to both SMS and Email client indicates that this is a device that people will want to use as a messaging device, a considerable contrast with mobile phones from established phone manufacturers who appear to have added (bad) email clients to their devices as an afterthought.

It seems likely that the email client supports IMAP IDLE, part of the IETF's Lemonade profile giving users a 'push' email experience based on Open Standards. It will be interesting to see if support for any of the other LEMONADE extensions to IMAP and SMTP make it into the client in time for the iPhone's June release in the US. As Steve Jobs said in during the presentation, when it comes to email delivery:

"IMAP, is of course, the best"

New Isode Whitepaper: Offline Editing, Testing and Version Management of Messaging Configurations

Isode's messaging configuration is held in the directory providing a number of benefits, including client/server GUI management of configuration and the ability to share configuration data between multiple servers.

 

This core architecture provides a means for editing and management of a live configuration. In a new whitepaper on the Isode website we explain how this basic concept is extended to support offline configuration development and review, offline configuration testing and configuration version management. The paper explains the overall approach and shows how Isode tools are used to achieve this.

The whitepaper is available at: http://www.isode.com/whitepapers/offline-editing.html

R12 Re-cap: Internet Messaging

In previous 'R12 Re-cap' posts we've looked at Sodium, X.400 Quick Configuration and MConsole. In this post we're taking a look at Internet Messaging.

LEMONADE

With R12, Isode's messaging servers became the first to be released supporting the new Open Standard for Mobile Messaging (LEMONADE).

Isode has been an active participant in the IETF's LEMONADE working group to define extensions to IMAP and SMTP for mobile messaging. M-Box (POP/IMAP) and M-Switch (SMTP) are the first messaging servers released to support these new Open Standards. Our Internet Messaging whitepapers give more details on LEMONADE and why we believe that this Open Standard is important for organizations looking to provide email access to mobile staff.

Evaluating Internet Messaging

We previously pointed out the improvements made to the Quick Configuration wizard for X.400 Messaging. With R12, Quick Config has been extended to cover Internet Messaging, allowing evaluators to set up a full Internet Messaging evaluation in a matter of a few minutes.

Quick Config is installed as part of M-Switch and is described in detail in the Internet Messaging Evaluation Guide linked from the documents section of this evaluation page. Quick Config will configure all of the elements of a test system, including M-Vault and M-Box, you should therefore ensure that you have M-Switch, M-Box and M-Vault installed before running Quick Config. If you have already installed versions of Isode products earlier than R12, please remember to read the Release Notes for information on upgrading to R12.

Anti-Spam

As well as functionality for mobile messaging, we've enhanced our anti-spam solution with support for: SPF (Sender Policy Framework); TLS (data confidentiality) for inbound and outbound SMTP; and IMAP quota and ACL capabilities. M-Switch Anti-Spam is available for evaluation here.

BlackBerry and LEMONADE Approaches to Mail Filtering

We recently participated in a Ferris webinar which discussed, amongst other things, the new IETF standard for mobile email (LEMONADE).

After the webinar, which included our sending of the first LEMONADE Forward without Download message, the moderator commented that LEMONADE was now "closer to what is mainstream in proprietary standards like RIM...".

This backhanded compliment got us thinking about whether a real comparison of the BlackBerry and LEMONADE approaches to common mobile email issues would indeed indicate that LEMONADE still had some catching up to do in order to compete with proprietary protocols.

The first of the short whitepapers resulting from that thinking "BlackBerry and LEMONADE Approaches to Mail Filtering" is now available on the Isode website. Mail filtering is important for mobile email as it saves bandwidth and enables the user to concentrate on those messages that need to be (or can be) dealt with on the move.

The paper concludes that LEMONADE's approaches to email filtering can provide equivalent services to Blackberry filtering, with a number of overall benefits.

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.

New documentation for M-Box

We've recently made quite a few changes to the documentation that we make available to users and evaluators of our POP/IMAP message store, M-Box.

New evaluation guides covering the use of M-Box, M-Switch and M-Vault as an Internet Messaging solution are available from the Internet Messaging evaluation page.

A new M-Box Administration Guide is also available from the main documentation page.

LEMONADE: Forward without download

In a previous post we explained the push email aspect of the LEMONADE profile which we're incorporating into Isode servers from R12, due in a few weeks.

Whilst push email is a major issue for many operators of mobile email services (ISPs or Companies), it is by no means the only important requirement of a mobile email solution. How messages are handled by mobile devices, which are often bandwidth and storage restricted, is another challenge.

In situations where the user receives a large message that requires immediate attention (perhaps one with a large attachment like a graphic file) LEMONADE compensates for the limitations of the mobile device or connection by allowing messages to be forwarded without first being downloaded to the device. This requires LEMONADE support in the IMAP and SMTP servers.

In the LEMONADE model, forward without download is 5 stage process:

1. The client asks the IMAP server how big the message is and only downloads the required pieces. The user decides to forward the message/attachment without downloading it
2. The client asks the IMAP server to prepare message for forwarding, the server returns a one time access cookie (URL)
3. The client asks the SMTP server to forward the message, it provides the cookie returned by the IMAP server
4. The SMTP server fetches the message using the cookie directly from the IMAP server
5. The SMTP server forwards the message to the new recipient.

You can read more about Forward without download on the 'Lemonade for Mobiles' website, which was launched recently to help promote understanding of this important new Open Standard.

We'll write more about R12 features, not just LEMONADE related items, in posts over the next couple of weeks prior to R12's launch.

New Whitepaper: IMAP IDLE - The best approach for 'push' email

The concept of "push email" has been widely marketed as a desirable feature of mobile email services, to enable users to get immediate notification of and access to new messages.

A new whitepaper on the Isode website looks at various approaches to meeting user requirements, and concludes that the Internet Standard IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) IDLE command is the best way to achieve this service.

You can here the whitepaper in fiull here.

New whitepaper from Isode: LEMONADE Profile - The key standard for mobile messaging

LEMONADE is the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) technology being standardized for support of Mobile Email. Isode has been an active participant in the LEMONADE working group and we'll be incorporating the Profile in to the next major release of our messaging servers (R12).

The LEMONADE Profile is approved, and it is anticipated that it will be published shortly as an Internet Standard. A new whitepaper on our website, "LEMONADE Profile: The Key Standard for Mobile Messaging", explains what the LEMONADE Profile is about and why it will be the central specification for Open Standards mobile messaging.

You can find the whitepaper at: http://www.isode.com/whitepapers/lemonade-profile.html

M-Box POP/IMAP Gateway changes.

In our recent R11.4 release we made an important change to the M-Box POP/IMAP Gateway product which we launched in December of last year.

 

This product now operates in 'synchronization mode', which manages its relationship with the backend POP server to which it connects. Prior to R11.4 when the gateway connected to the POP server to download messages, those messages were deleted on the POP server.

 

Now messages are deleted on the POP server only if the client deletes the message on the M-Box POP/IMAP gateway. Both servers remain in sync.

 

M-Box can easily be deployed in POP/IMAP Gateway configuration by placing it in Gateway mode using the Internet Messaging Administrator also released with R11.4. You can evaluate M-Box by clicking here.

Isode's M-Box and LEMONADE

It's nice to see that the new Open Standard for mobile messaging, LEMONADE, which Isode has committed to supporting, is now getting some attention in the press. Two articles published last week (links below) correctly identify the importance of Open Standards in challenging the proprietary systems currently making the running in the fast expanding market for mobile email.

We intend to incorporate the Profile 1 LEMONADE extensions into M-Box in the next major release (R12) of the Isode product set.

But even without these new features, M-Box as it stands today is still one of the best performing IMAP servers available, with a robustness and scalability that you'd expect from Isode products. M-Box benchmark results are published here and the product itself, as with all Isode products, is available for evaluation either on its own or as part of our Internet Messaging evaluation suite.

Those LEMONADE articles can be found at:

• Unstrung.com: Mobile Email Standards Bubble Up
• Techworld.com: Open Standard Lemonade to Beat Blackberry

Isode is recruiting...

Isode's significant growth over the last four years has created four new opportunities within our development team:

• Java Developer
• X.400 Developer
• Internet Messaging Developer
• Software Product Tester

All four posts are based in our Head Office in Hampton, Middlesex. you can read more about these vacancies on our website.

'Prosumer' - new target for mobile email?

The consulting and research company, Informa Telecoms and Media have published a new report on the Mobile Enterprise. In the report they identify the 'Prosumer', an employee who's company pays for a portion of their monthly phone bill and who has been excluded from accessing corporate email wirelessly due to technical barriers including device configuration/capabilities.

Informa believe that this large segment of users do have a need to access corporate email through their mobile device and that manufacturers like Blackberry will move increasingly towards back-end server solutions, and away from their current focus on the mobile device.

We think that this is right, blackberry type solutions are great at what they do but the requirement for a new handset excludes a very large number of companies who would like to roll out mobile access but cannot justify an investment in new handsets for employees who have traditionally used their subsidised personal mobile phones for company use.

This rise in demand for efficient corporate email access via already existing devices (perhaps with new email clients) coincides nicely with the work that Isode and other companies have been doing to implement the IETF's LEMONADE standards. These new Open Standards bring efficient mobile email access to existing handsets though a combination of LEMONADE Compatible clients on phones and LEMONADE compatible IMAP mail servers such as Isode's M-Box (or even IMAP access to POP only accounts via a product like Isode's M-Box POP/IMAP gateway).

Access, Replication and Synchronization for Mobile Email Devices

We've added a new whitepaper to the Isode site, "Access, Replication and Synchronization for Mobile Email Devices"

Mobile devices are increasingly tasked with handling email and associated data, such as address books and calendar information. The paper examines the many approaches to getting data onto to and off of the mobile device, looks at synchronization issues between the mobile device, desktop and server, outlines the Open Standards protocols designed to address these issues and recommends a model for mobile and desktop access to email, address book and calendars.

Particular attention is paid to the two main evolving standards designed to address these issues, The Internet Engineering Task Force's proposed LEMONADE standard and SyncML. The OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) is evaluating both these options for supporting mobile email devices. The paper suggests that these two options are complementary, not competitive with SyncML used for synchronizing personal calendars and address books, as it is ideal for these functions and LEMONADE (based on IMAP/SMTP) used for email as SyncML does not have adequate functionality to support the same wide range of usage scenarios.

You can read more here.

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 o