So, now I’ve got your attention with the subject line (and how many of you were thinking rude things when you saw it?) I’ve got a favour to ask.

This ‘ere Zimki app I did needs a bit more testing – the techie chaps reckon that they’ve sorted the proxy error out but it does need a poke or three.

Can you please go to rssfoo, tap in a search term, and let me know if you get network timeouts or anything please? It’s usually an alert box that comes up saying ‘object error’ or somesuch. If I’ve got no reports, I’ll assume it’s fixed.

Ta – there’ll be a better update from me hopefully tonight, but right now I’m up to my ears in work…!

I’m hacking on a feed reader sort of thing right now, and experimenting with parallel feed fetching. I’ve spent a few hours this afternoon trying to find a perl-based feed reader module that will do RSS2.0 and Atom, and failure has dogged me in my travels. I’m not so bothered about the RSS2.0 stuff since I already have that covered, but I can’t find anything which will sensibly do Atom and has some reasonable documentation (the latter being probably where most things are failing right now).

Tried (so far): XML::Atom, XML::FeedLite, XML::RSS::FromAtom, XML::Atom::Syndication. Any others?

I’m finding myself with a few spare hours a week again, so I’m touting round the agencies for work. Last Friday, I went to see someone in Huddersfield with a view to helping their extranet system. The vacancy title was ‘Web Developer with a bit of Sysadminery’, so I was put forward and pretty much got an interview straight away.

The interview started off OK, and they already had a copy of my CV, so were pretty savvy about my background and where my strengths were. The first half hour passed with ‘can you set up a webmail service’, ‘what security methods might you use to prevent data loss’, etc. Usual stuff for sysadmin foo, but it did feel a bit strange there were no programming questions – after all, the agent had said that PHP and MySQL would be involved.

About 35 minutes in, they said “So, you can build web sites?”
“Yes,” says I. “But I’m not a designer, I’m a developer – I write PHP, and someone else puts a lick of paint on it.”
“Oh! We wanted a designer…”

It turns out they’d already got a programmer who would write the PHP, and a sysadmin who would install stuff. They just wanted to pay someone to shift something x pixels to the left, or fix the way the float worked. That’s it.

This is not the first time I’ve come across this, and I’m sure it won’t be the last – but please for Pete’s sake, I wish the agencies would do their bloody jobs and realise what the role entails. After all, they’re the ones creaming off a share for doing sod all!

It’s been a day or two since I did the big email migration to IMAP, and a few little bits and bobs of foibles are starting to pop out of the woodwork; so, here for Google to index and other people to find, are the few things I’ve noticed:

• Some Eudora mail using the Eudora-specific tag <x-flowed> hasn’t ported properly – most noticeably the stuff which is from me (ie. things which have been in the outbox). Eudora Rescue has an option to sort this out but it hasn’t made any difference, it seems (I tested it on another box just to make sure).
• In converting the mailbox formats to maildir, mb2md has created full trees instead of just maildir boxes with mail in. Thus, if I’ve had a structure where I’ve got “Personal -> Friends -> Dave” where I filter all email from Dave, it’s actually put the email from Dave in both Friends and Personal as well (duplicating it). To fix, I deleted “Maildir/.Personal.Friends” and “Maildir/.Personal” which enabled other IMAP applications to see these two as folders, not combined folder-and-mailboxes (which appears to confuse Mulberry sometimes when moving things around).
• Mulberry itself has a failing in that it can’t render images in-line (it does style HTML, but not very well). This is a bit of a bugger, and I’d been recommended I also try Gyazmail on the Mac: while this does do full HTML and images in the mailer, it doesn’t allow multiple email addresses tied to a single account – thus I’ve rejected it as not meeting my needs.

I’ll post more if I notice anything else 🙂

Ever since I started using Unix systems in the late 80s I’ve used mbox-based email clients: I started out with mail and mailx on an HP9000, then discovered elm at University; after a brief foray with Netscape Communicator I settled on Eudora which stayed with me for many years. It got to the stage late last year where I was regularly checking 14 POP3 boxes, with another 12 being irregularly checked when I had a spare few hours to deal with things like maillists, bounces, and administrivia. Add to that the whinge that actually I sometimes don’t want to be checking mailboxes all the time (such as when I’m on client sites) coupled with a requirement to have mail clients on several machines, and it became blatantly clear that I needed an alternative solution.

So, I spent a few hours over December looking at other solutions, and eventually settled on dumping all my mailboxes in favour of a separate IMAP server with exim, and a client which would be cross-platform: Mulberry.

Setting up the IMAP box has been relatively easy, save for the learning curve involved in moving from Slackware Linux to Debian Etch (my reasons for that will be posted at a later date once I’m more comfortable and can post the pros and cons of such a move). The hardest bit has been converting over 16 years of stored email in Eudora to a format which can be understood by an IMAP server (courier-imap in this case).

For those of you who don’t know Eudora, it stores email in a sort-of bastardised mbox format, with any extended indexing and status data in a TOC file which although closed-format has been reverse engineered to a certain degree. I spent a night or two trying to parse this and finding bits and bobs on the Internet (including some Python scripts which do stuff with old versions up to Windows v5) before Lisa pointed me at Eudora Mailbox Cleaner which, although a classic Mac app I could run with Rosetta, wouldn’t do what I wanted it to with my Windows installation. However, linked from there is Eudora Rescue which happily parsed my entire Eudora mail directory and spat it out elsewhere in a format which I could do something with. Hurrah! So far so good.

So, the next step was to port the lot into a Maildir format, and David had already pointed me at mb2md which not only converts mbox to Maildir, it also preserves all the nice Status headers which Eudora Rescue has added. All that needed to be done was to remove “.mbx” and “.toc” file extensions before running it through mb2md.

It all went without a hitch. Perfect.

Now the biggest pain in the bum is converting all my filters to exim’s filter format for server-side filtering, but I’m pleased to say that it’s going reasonably well and works fine on Mac, Windows and Linux – and it’s another stage passed in the port away from Windows for day-to-day stuff.