Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 06 Sep 2005 21:25:16 GMT
I just noticed that there is now a Ruby-based IMAP server available. Ximapd is only at version 0.0.4, which suggests that it isn't exactly production-ready, but I'll be following it as it develops over the next few months. Like the Ruby WebDAV server that I talked about a month ago, the big value in these sorts of servers is the fantastic things that you can do when you integrate them into non-traditional contexts. For example, a workflow system that can give a web view of the documents that it manages, while also acting like a file server and an email server. Changes to files or email messages are interpreted as actions in the workflow system and then the system state changes appropriately. That lets the users manipulate the data in the system in natural ways using familiar tools.
Another idea: nn email-support ticket system that only shows internal users the mail associated with open tickets that they own. When the ticket is closed, the mail goes away on its own.
Tags imap, mail, ruby, rubyonrails, ximapd | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 28 Jul 2005 22:18:05 GMT
ThinkSecret says that Apple is getting ready to upgrade OS X Server with some sort of improved mail and calendar solution, probably Hula. That’s nice and all, but I REALLY want them to upgrade iCal to support some publicly-available calendar server. The ability to publish read-only calendars was nice in 2002 when it was first added, but it’s been three years, and I’m still waiting for the ability to share read/write calendars with other family members. I’m aware that I could probably do this with .Mac, but I’m not willing to pay $100/year just so I can edit events on my wife’s calendar a couple times per week.
Having said that, Hula looks pretty nice. Even without iCal syncing support, I’ll probably consider it when it’s time to upgrade my mail server software again; fortunately that’s probably at least a year away still. If iCal gets CalDAV support before then, then I might have to be a bit more aggressive with the timeframe. Either that or look for other CalDAV servers.
Posted in Mac stuff, Computer System Administration | Tags apple, caldav, hula, ical, imap, mail, pop | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Sat, 07 Aug 2004 01:38:05 GMT
I’m planning on doing more research on this in a while, but I should mention it now: the latest release of Stalker Software’s CommuniGate Pro email software includes basic VoIP support.
CommuniGate Pro (CGP) is kind of fascinating to me. At it’s heart, it’s just commercial email software. It does SMTP, POP, IMAP, LDAP, and web mail, all of which you can do for free with open-source software. However, if you’re a small business or ISP, and email means anything to you, and you aren’t tied to Exchange, you owe it to yourself to take a serious look at CGP. It’s fast, it’s reliable, it’s completely standards-based, it’s trivial to configure, and it’s cheap. It starts at $500 for 50 users and drops off quickly. For $2,000, you can get a 1,000 user license. Now ask yourself, how long would it take to set up a 1,000-user POP/Webmail/SMTP mail server? How much support time will it take?
I’m starting to sound like an ad. I’ll try to stop.
They also do clustered mail servers, but their previously-reasonable prices suddenly jump well into the 6-figure price range. This isn’t the way to go if you’re looking for SPOF-free corporate email for cheap.
Their more recent releases have added some Exchange-like functionality–they support MAPI- and web-based calendaring with an Outlook plugin (for an additional cost), and they’ll provide spam and virus filtering for a price.
The thing that’s always fascinated me about these guys is that they seem to be a dinky, 5-10 person outfit, but they’re able to keep adding features faster then anyone else on the market, and do it without turning their software into a complete pig. At Internap, we were amazed to discover that their basic server with SMTP, HTTP, POP, IMAP, LDAP, SSL for everything, decent logging, a web UI for configuration and for email, and a mailing list manager all fit into under 2 MB of RAM. Once it got running, with hundreds of busy users, it grew to need 15 MB or so, but that was about it. I think we only managed to crash it once or twice in two years, and that’s under a murderous load–I think I was averaging over 2,000 email messages/day for part of that, and I was rarely the busiest user. We had way more problems getting Linux to keep up with the server’s I/O load, but that’s a whole different issue–we were saturating 2 external RAID arrays for almost the entire day every day.
Anyway, the latest release (4.2) adds SIP and RADIUS to their list of supported protocols. It isn’t really intended for serious PBX-replacing VoIP, but rather for IM and voice messaging. Since Windows XP includes SIP IM software, this seems like a useful addition to CGP. It’ll do VoIP as well, but it’s based on email addresses, not phone numbers, so it’ll be hard to get SIP phones to interoperate with it (although not impossible–most of them will let you dial names, but it’s hard to enter them with a phone keypad).
Personally, I’m going to keep my eye on them over the next year or two–they aren’t very far from turning CGP into a cheap all-in-one solution for small-business communications. All they need is a dialing plan, voicemail, support for external SIP-to-PSTN devices, and maybe faxing.
One quick disclaimer–it’s been a couple years since I last used their software. I’m not a sysadmin at my present job, and I have nothing to do with out email environment. And, I’m not willing to pay $500 for my home email server, although I was tempted back in the .com days.
Posted in Computer System Administration, Asterisk | Tags communigatepro, email, imap, ldap, smtp, voip | 2 comments
