Assured: The Isode Blog

Google Wave: Important for Messaging

Google Wave, recently announced by Google and available later this year, is important for messaging. The launch presentation is worth viewing by anyone interested in messaging.

Google Wave has an abstraction that seeks to replace both email and IM, and perhaps shared document editing too. Google argues that email was designed a long while ago, and that with modern technologies we can do much better. A converse argument is that email is a natural and basic electronic communication that evolved without design (much as soccer evolved without the need for formal rules or design). Things that really impress me about Google Wave are:

• The amount that can be done in the browser, in a way that is clearly browser independent. This is a long, long way from static HTML.
• The way that messages are shared as you type. (Scary, but really neat technology.)
• The use of XMPP (Internet Standard eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) for federation. The need for getting XMPP (as well as HTTP) into the browser seems an increasing priority.

This is a technology to watch.

Desirability of a Multi-Vector UI

I watched my son using his iPhone the other day to exchange SMS with his girlfriend. The UI was modeled on iChat (Apple’s IM client), and it seemed a natural way to use SMS. My Nokia phone has an integrated messaging interface, and gives a uniform UI for SMS and email. I can see my SMSs with a listing pretty much like my email. The key observation is that UI can be remarkably independent of the underlying technology.

Under the hood, Wave is essentially “bboards on steroids.” It is a shared data structure to which multiple users can contribute. Having this will add to the list of things that I need to interact with.

What I would like is a single UI that deals with all of the underlying abstractions (email, IM, SMS, Wave) — a communicator that can present information in an appropriate manner and use whichever channel is appropriate. It would be good to decouple the UI from the transport more strongly.

Email Won’t Go Away

I often end up in interminable email discussions with multiple nested quotes of previous messages. Engineers seem particularly fond of this style. Google Wave seems to offer a much superior interface for this type of dialogue.

However, it does not seem a replacement for all email. Email can often be a highly transactional mechanism. When dealing with emails to external organizations and individuals, there will often be shared internal review of the message and a carefully worded response before it is sent. The sharing and dynamic nature of Wave does not seem appropriate for the external communication. Email as it stands seems to have uses for which it will not get replaced. It seems to remain a basic and essential communications building block.

Google Wave Won’t Be the New Desktop Client

For those with almost permanent access to fast networks, shifting to a Web-based communications option seems quite plausible. For those who travel on trains and planes, carrying your email world on your laptop remains highly desirable. The ability to use Google Gears to replace this seems pretty much a fantasy for now.

It also feels right to me that having an optimized tool (both in UI and protocol terms) for tasks that are done a lot (and I do email a LOT) seems sensible. If you have special communications protocols such as IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and XMPP, why try to layer things over HTTP?

The lack of competition in desktop email clients is a problem. I use Outlook, which I think is the best option available, but it could do so much better. The lack of serious competition to Outlook is a real problem (and yes, I know about Thunderbird). Competition in the browser market has really improved things for everyone. We need a good desktop client. It is crazy that there is not a client that does efficient IMAP and XMPP with an integrated UI.

Google Wave does not provide an answer to this, but it certainly challenges all who are concerned with communications UI.

This was originally posted on the Ferris Research Blog.

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.

Update to M-Switch Anti-Spam False Negative Graph

As promised in my last blog post we have just updated the graph on our whitepaper:

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

The graph now contains the data from the 1st May 2008 - 31st July 2008. As you can see our False Negative rate continues to be consistently low as a result of the continuous improvements to our data set.

 

 

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