Well, who would have thought? News of Hotmail’s death for mail.app users is exaggerated.

Microsoft has relented and deferred the transition from WebDAV to its own DeltaSync standard. This means that Mail.app users with HTTPMail and MacFreePOPs plugins won’t be cut off on 30 June after all.

After listening to customer feedback from the original accouncement, Microsoft told its users “it became clear that you needed additional time to evaluate alternative solutions”.

Still, this only postpones the executioner’s axe. Don’t fritter away all the extra time Microsoft has given you in making a decision.

With apologies for any distress.

[Via The Fastmail.fm Weblog ] Apple Mail, fastmail, GMAIL, hotmail, httpmail, macfreepops, mail.app, microsoft, webmail, webdav

UPDATE: Not quite as bad as it sounds — See later post.

In April Microsoft announced that it would be terminating WebDAV access to its Hotmail accounts at the end of June this year and replacing it with a proprietary service of Microsoft’s own creation (DeltaSync).

This is bad news for Mail.app users with Hotmail accounts, who have been using utilities like HTTPMail and MacFreePOPs to access their email. After 30 June, they won’t work. (There are reports that 10.5.3 has broken HTTPMail for some users, merely hastening the inevitable).

For those unwilling to let go their Hotmail email address, another solution beckons. While the plugins might not work any more, a web-based service is offering the same function.

IzyMail , so it claims, “enables you to access webmail from major providers such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, Windows Live, Fastmail or Gmail with any eMail application”. It even has a special page on setting up Hotmail on the iPhone.

It provides users with incoming and outcoming servers that can be plugged into Mail.app’s Accounts preferences. IzyMail does the heavy-lifting behind the scenes, and delivers fresh Hotmail into your Inbox via POP.

It offers free accounts (with some limitations) and a paid option (c. USD 18/year):

Or perhaps it’s time to take another look at Gmail. microsoft, hotmail, httpmail, macfreepops, wevdav, webmail, izymail, mail.app, apple mail, gmail, fastmail, yahoo, aol, desperate measures

I hate to go on endlessly about Fastmail , but how sweet is this announcement today?!

All users email is now on replicated servers. This means that every email delivered or deleted and every email action performed is replicated within a second to a completely separate server with a completely separate copy of all users emails.

We now have at least three levels of redundancy, three copies of every email, and all those copies are on RAID redundant storage themselves.

1. All users now have their email stored on a system with RAID disks and all servers and RAID arrays have dual power supplies. This means a single drive or power supply failure should cause no interruption to service at all, we just replace the drive/power supply while the system is live and online…
2. All users now have their email replicated to an identical replica system (RAID drives, dual power supplies, etc). Each system is completely separate…. The replication is performed at the semantic email level, not at the filesystem level. So a filesystem corruption on the source server will not be replicated. This means if there is a disk or filesystem corruption on a single machine, we can just switch to the replica…
3. All users have their email store backed up incrementally each night to a separate system and RAID array. The backups of email are kept for 1 week after the email is deleted to allow restoring in case of accident. In an emergency situation if both a master and replica server should fail catastrophically, we can still perform a restore from this backup…

[Full text ]email, backup, redundancy, fastmail, RAID, IMAP, redundant storage, sweet dreams

Fastmail , my main email server provider, has recently introduced greylisting (Wikipedia ) in an attempt to reduce the amount of spam getting into inboxes.

Greylisting works by initially rejecting email from an unknown mail server. The theory goes that legitimate emails will be resent and are then accepted the second time, whilst spammers won’t bother resending, so their emails are, in effect, blocked.

It’s a noble idea, and in a perfect world would work perfectly.

Over the weekend, the company acknowledged defeat in its attempts to tweak the feature a little. The story is worth retelling. It shows not only a well-intentioned company frustrated by practical realities outside its control but also how sneaky spammers are:

Recently we’ve observed that some spam zombie machines are smarter than others, and do SMTP retrying which means that they bypass greylisting. These machines have been reponsible for a large number of “stock scam” spams that include random text and an attached gif. Between Oct 17 to Oct 20 we were trying out a new greylisting policy that involved taking feedback from the spam scoring system, and re-greylisting systems with an increased delay if they had delivered emails that had been detected as spam by the scoring system. Our testing suggested that this quickly and effectively blocked the zombie machines.

Unfortunately it also blocked a small number of poorly configured real email servers that were being used for forwarding because they would also forward all spam emails, and thus be judged as the source of the spam. This caused some emails to be delayed for many hours or in some cases over a day. We’ve now removed this policy totally. While the concept seems a good idea, unfortunately the small number of incorrectly configured hosts out there mean that this just causes too much of a problem for them.

email, spam, greylisting, graylisting, resending, fastmail

Not long ago Mail.app guru Joe Kissell was talking up the virtues of IMAP for email.

Now PC World has a post on the advantages of IMAP over POP as the protocol that should be handling your email.

It points out the gains of having email stored on a remote server, especially if you move around or need to access the same email at home and at work (or anywhere else). Storing your email remotely also allows you the freedom to use different email clients—Thunderbird on a PC at work, Mail.app on the Mac at home or whatever.

Needless to say it is also nice to have the security of remote storage. Whatever happens to my MacBook Pro or its harddrive, I know my mail is safe.

For example, deleting the settings for a POP account in Mail can delete all the messages stored in that account’s local folders. When they are gone, they are really gone. With IMAP, I know that can never happen. I just download them again into Mail.app’s local cache. That’s saved my bacon a few times.

Of course, you need to have the IMAP option in order to use it. Many ISPs still don’t offer it. I have been a long-time and very happy Fastmail user.

Geir at codehaus has just jumped from POP to IMAP. He gives tuffmail (another specialised email service provider) a glowing review.

A quick glance at the features tuffmail offers (cf. Fastmail’s features ), suggests that it is more flexible and more expensive than Fastmail.

You can build your own package with the mailboxes, storage and features that you need. It offers Roundcube as an interface for its webmail service. On the other hand, you don’t get the WebDAV disk that an enhanced Fastmail account offers.

No doubt there are other providers with IMAP offerings just as rich and useful. It’s the best USD 40 that I spend each year.

In return I get an utterly dependable, first-class IMAP service. If only all the things to which I am addicted were that cheap!mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, imap, pop, storage, tuffmail, fastmail, specialist email providers

Rakesh Agrawal at Lambi Pooch has written a detailed account of the pros and cons of using Gmail for his work email.

He finds lots to like — Gmail mobile, searching, simple interface (he is coming from Outlook), spam filtering — but also much that could be better.

Among areas of improvement, he lists formatting limitations, lack of disk space, problems with “masking” and occasional hiccups of service.

The post prompted John-Erling Holmenes Fredriksen at Life of Elling to list the ways in which Fastmail is a better service.

He shares my passion for Fastmail:

Before Gmail arrived, I used this paid e-mail service as my main e-mail client. It is still the most advanced and feature-rich online e-mail client I have seen. The amount of things you can do with this client is just amazing.

He describes the superior way in which Fastmail handles “Personalities” and the benefits of Fastmail’s POP polling feature.

He doesn’t mention other things about Fastmail that make it vastly superior in my mind — its IMAP account makes the email equally available to me on any computer in a (more simple) web interface and in Mail.app or other email client of my choice, daily off-site backups, the 1GB WebDAV-accessible file space that comes with the 2GB of email quota in my enhanced account, an https connection by default, more flexible arrangements for hosting domains, aliases and much more.

In fact-checking for this post, I notice that Fastmail is currently offering reduced prices. An Enhanced account will set you back only USD 35 a year (67 cents a week). That’s as good as free. Better, actually, when you consider what you get in return.

For the email fanatic, Fastmail is a clear winner.

Propriety: Sadly, I don’t work for Fastmail and have no financial interest in the company.fastmail, gmail, Google, IMAP, web 2.0, productivity, email, mail.app, apple mail

Hotmail users with Intel Macs face problems using Mail.app to read their emails.

Cris Pierry points out that HTTPMail, a Mail plugin that enables the downloading of emails from Hotmail’s web interface has not yet been compiled as a universal binary.

As a result it won’t run as a plugin in Mail.app on Intel Macs. He provides instructions on forcing Mail to run under Rosetta, which produces quite a performance hit but allows you to use HTTPMail.

As far as I know, other options for “translating” emails from web-based email services, Mail Forward and MacFreePOPs, are not yet universal binaries either.

For Cris, running Mail under Rosetta is unbearable. He is going to use the web interface to get his email while he moves over to Gmail.

UPDATE: As Gavin suggests in the comments on another post, there is an easy work-around for Hotmail users:

1. Set up a Fastmail account (it’s free and it’s excellent. I have a (paid) account there, so I know how good it is). Of course, any good email service that offers polling of web-based mail will do the trick.
2. Set the Fastmail account to poll your Hotmail account and to download the messages into your IMAP account at Fastmail.
3. Collect your Fastmail messages in Mail.app.

hotmail, web-based email, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, universal, Gmail, fastmail