July 2007 Archives

As reported on the internets, hackers have been able to get Apache and Python running on the iPhone by modifying the firmware. While that’s cool, it’s also an opportunity for me to point out that Nokia has official ports of both Apache and Python available for their smartphones. They even offer an online service that acts as a proxy between the device and the Internet, making the web server available over the net no matter where the phone is. Just sayin’…

I used to be a Mail hater. I hated the amount of spam I was getting, the difficulty I had accessing my mail when on the go; the sweet time Mail.app took to perform even the simplest of tasks. I was pretty desperate about finding a new mail client; I planned to produce one for a long time, and I even switched to using Outlook 2007 in Parallels for a while.

Then I switched mail servers, and all my problems went away.

Some background: for the past 12 years or so, I’ve ran my own email server. At first, it was the usual open source fare of sendmail + a random pop/imap server; then I graduated to cyrus, and finally, to Mac OS X Server, which was supposed to wrap cyrus and other components up in a nice user interface.

But those servers didn’t really work all that well. They were a chore to manage — even the mail service in Mac OS X Server had a bunch of obscure configuration files and dependencies deep in the system itself — and stuff like spam detection, mailing lists and web mail were half-assed at best.

Then, a few months ago, I decided to migrate our company over to Kerio MailServer. There are three aspects to it that have totally transformed my email experience.

First, Kerio’s spam filtering works, out of the box, exactly like you dream it should. The server, on its own volition, moves email to your Junk folder if it thinks it’s spam. Also, if you manually move a message to Junk, the server’s spam filter learns to consider that message spam. Conversely, if you move a message out of the Junk folder, Kerio understands that it’s not spam, and adjusts its filtering accordingly.

The freakishly cool thing about that is that it allows Kerio and Mail’s own junk filtering to learn from each other. If Kerio moves a message to Junk, Mail learns from that; if Mail moves a message to Junk, the server learns. And by manually moving emails in and out of the Junk folder, the user can teach both Kerio and Mail simultaneously.

The second Kerio killer feature is that it’s trivial to specify all of your mail rules on the server, rather than in Mail. You just log in to Kerio’s web mail interface and specify the rules with an easy-to-use rule builder. This, together with the great spam filtering, means that you are able to access your Inbox on a variety of devices, and only receive the messages you are interested in: not spam, not the mailing list messages that you have set up to end up in folders.

Finally, Kerio implements Microsoft Exchange’s ActiveSync protocol for syncing. It includes an iSync plug-in that syncs my Mac’s Address Book and calendar events to the server. My Nokia mobile phone has a client for ActiveSync called Nokia Mail for Exchange. With it, my phone gets pushed new emails, calendar events and address book entries automatically over the air, without me having to ever sync my Mac and the phone explicitly. It all just happens.

Because of these three features, almost nothing about my email use is now the same. These days, only a dozen or two emails a day end up in my Inbox. That’s few enough that I read and triage all of them on my phone as they arrive (since the server is pushing them to the device, I get them instantly, rather than after a specified interval). Then, when I’m on my Mac, I reply to the messages that survived the triage (ie. weren’t deleted on the device), and file them away. Bliss.

Actually, there was one bit of hackery that I had to do myself. Both Mail and the Nokia mail application are lousy at actually deleting email from the IMAP Inbox; they mark the messages as deleted, but never purge them. This is not a problem when you use Mail exclusively, but a lot of other email apps, the Nokia one included, display non-purged deleted emails struck out in the inbox.

Again, bliss.

Jeff Johnson chronicles his six months at MK&C in his trademark fashion. Thanks, Jeff, for everything!

The Open Directory Project is a co-operatively edited directory of the web, launched in the nineties by Netscape to counter the Yahoo! directory behemoth, and since adopted by hundreds of portal sites as the basis for their content.

The highest profile ODP user is Google. If a site is listed in the ODP, Google uses the ODP description of the site in search results. Here’s how Knox appears in Google:

Too bad the description is completely wrong. Knox isn’t a compression utility and Knox doesn’t sync. If I encountered that link when looking for encryption utility, I’d just skip to the next one. I’m afraid people do just that.

In theory, help is near: just visit the directory page for the offending entry, hit “Update listing”, and plead your case. Right after I did just that, the volunteer editor of the Mac OS Security category quit. I can just assume that my update request was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So to fix Google’s glaringly wrong description of our flagship product, we’d now need a volunteer to take up the job of managing the Mac OS Security category, hope that this person agrees to change the description of the Knox site, and then wait something like a month or two (or three) for the change to propagate to the users of the data, including Google. Sigh.

Would anyone here like to volunteer for step one?

The new MK&C Forum is now open at forum.karppinen.fi. It’s based on Beast, and as such is the first Ruby on Rails application we have deployed here at MK&C. We’ll see how it goes.

The old forum, living in our FogBugz installation, never really got off the ground, and I think part of the reason was the lack of common forum features such as sticky topics. I’ll be making good use of those in the new forum, putting together Frequently Asked Questions lists and other help resources.

As a side note, we’re in the middle of a pretty convoluted server migration process, so the new forum is temporarily running on a Mac mini, next to the television at my home. Performance seems to be just fine so far — watching EyeTV doesn’t seem to affect the forum experience :)

Go get yours. Knox 1.5 is a big update – our first in almost 14 months – and it adds an awesome new feature: full disk encryption of non-boot disks.

In short, you can reformat a USB stick or any other external drive as a Knox vault. When you hook up the drive, a password prompt appears and the vault is opened; when you close the vault, the drive is ejected and you can disconnect it safely. I made a screencast demonstrating this a few months ago; it’s not good enough to post on the main Knox site, but it illustrates the whole-disk vault feature adequately.

What you don’t see in the screencast is what happens if you don’t have Knox installed and hook up a disk encrypted by Knox. Each Knox-encrypted disk comes with two things: a copy of Knox, and an encrypted disk image for the content. You can just double-click the Knox copy on the disk and be off to the races.

We also changed the Knox licensing a bit to support the new full disk encryption. An unlicensed Knox copy can now be used indefinitely as a vault opener/manager — meaning that you can have a Knox-encrypted USB drive and share it among as many users and machines as you like. It’s an amazingly convenient way to share files securely.

There’s only one downside to this release, and it’s the fact that Mac OS X Tiger is now required. Supporting Panther just wasn’t feasible for us anymore — my apologies if you’re affected by this. If you are a Panther user, I suggest you continue to use Knox 1.1.1 until Leopard is released. I’ve rigged the automatic update check to not report the new version for Panther users, so that you won’t be bothered by the notifications.