Assured: The Isode Blog

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

IMAP and 'push' email

We've blogged about the LEMONADE Profile for mobile messaging on a number of occasions and we've committed to incorporating LEMONADE into our products with Release 12 of our software, now only a few weeks away.

Supporting LEMONADE requires changes to both our POP/IMAP server (M-Box) and our SMTP Server (M-Switch) and will enable users of these products to offer an effective, efficient mobile email service.

Whilst the profile contains many elements (and you can read more about them in a whitepaper here), there are three specific benefits that attract the most attention:

1. Push email
2. Forward without download
3. Efficient re-connection and re-synchronisation

Push email is a term that is often miss-interpreted. The actual user requirement can be summed up by the phrase "Whenever a new message is delivered to my mailbox, I want to be notified 'immediately' that the message has arrived."

The Lemonade working group started from the supposition that IMAP and SMTP are already a good combination for the provision of mobile email, when there is ongoing activity between the client and the server IMAP will automatically inform the client of the presence of new messages.

The IMAP IDLE command, which is a widely implemented standard extension to the core IMAP protocol and contained within the LEMONADE Profile, ensures that the server will inform the client of new messages even when there is no other activity taking place between client and server.

IDLE maintains the connection by issuing a 'NOOP' command, usually every 15 minutes, to ensure that the connection isn't disrupted by a timeout (such as an IMAP server timeout, TCP connection timeout or NAT gateway timeout).

IMAP -IDLE is a very efficient way of offering all the benefits of push email with substantial implementation, deployment and performance advantages over alternative approaches to solving the user requirement outlined above. You can read more about IMAP-IDLE in a whitepaper on the Isode website: "IMAP IDLE: The best approach for 'push' email."

We'll blog more about our LEMONADE-related changes to M-Box and M-Switch as the release date for r12 approaches.

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