Viraj's Weblog

I've packaged up the IMAP calendar proxy I've been working on and made it available at my site. Please read the README.

It's nowhere near production-ready, but I figure people can try it and see how it works. I'd appreciate any feedback. I suggest making a backup of your Mozilla calendar file before using it.

The only IMAP server I tested with was CommuniGate Pro. I'm hoping others will behave the same.

Update: Some users have reported issues. Please try latest version on my site. If problems, edit ImapCalendar.py and uncomment the debug line in the init method. Send me the output, removing any passwords, and let me know what IMAP server you're using.

Over the past few days I've been writing a hack to let Sunbird access a calendar via IMAP. Basically it is a Python HTTP proxy that runs on the same host that you run Sunbird. You configure Sunbird to post to something like http://localhost:8001/Calendar and the proxy converts the request to IMAP.

It keeps track of differences in the calendar updates, and only changes the specific events via IMAP, instead of reposting the whole calendar (changes, additions, removals). This saves alot of bandwidth when using large calendars.

It's not an elegant solution as I would've liked to do it within Sunbird itself, but it let me learn about IMAP a bit. It's not quite ready for use, but if anyone is interested let me know and I will post it on my site when done. I'd like to do some caching and have it work when offline, as well as reconnect to the IMAP server if the connection is broken, etc.

A few years ago I heard of a company called Bynari that was working on an Exchange replacement. In fact at my previous job it came down to either Bynari Insight Server or Communigate Pro. The reason I picked the latter was twofold. One, I had pretty good experience with using Communigate in a large ISP environment (1 million users). Two, the storage system I had was a NAS mounted via NFS, and (at the time) Cyrus IMAP (which was included with Bynari) had many caveats listed on their site about using NFS. They didn't recommend it.

These days I have no such restriction and am free to experiment. I downloaded the latest eval version. What I like about Bynari is it's primarily based on open source tools: Apache, OpenLDAP, Cyrus IMAP, Postfix, ProFTPD, Amavis, SpamAssassin, Clamav, etc. Installation was a cinch on CentOS. Their site mentions Debian support as well, but strangely I only see RPMs.

So what's good about it? The web admin is surprisingly straightforward. It's probably the first interface that that actually makes LDAP comprehensible. It was easy for me to setup domains, add users, etc. The webmail/groupware interface is also pretty nice. This is probably the most important thing I'm looking for, because I want to remove dependency on Outlook. I don't much care about the Outlook Connectors and such. Bynari's webmail is not Outlook Web Access, but does have a decent calendar interface. You can schedule meetings and see shared folders via the web client. It's lightweight and things work as expected. I did like the way Cyrus was storing messages: plain text files. Maybe Cyrus was just configured to run this way, because I remember it using Berkeley DB files in the past.

Some problems I noticed was when someone accepted or rejected a meeting, the attendee response is not visible in the original calendar entry. You can't tell whether someone accepted or rejected it. This seems a bug to me, which I've asked their support about. Also, on the recipient end, the calendar entry does not include the attendee information. So I can imagine users having questions like "Who was this meeting with again?"

I tried to migrate a 1.9gig PST file. Bynari provides a PST import tool via the web interface. But come on, 1.9gigs submitted in a web form? It crashed my Safari, and Firefox said "blow me." That import method does not seem useful to me. The way I imported data in Communigate was to install their Outlook connector, and use Outlook to import the PST. Well I tried the same with Bynari, and it pretty much crashed Outlook... sigh. Next I tried just copying from PST to the IMAP server in Outlook, which again crashed. I do have to get data from Outlook users into whatever server we use, and I want that to be done easily.

Meanwhile Scalix got some good press at LinuxWorld. It seems their new version has improved the admin interface, which was sorely lacking in the version I tested. I like Scalix's webmail interface, but I hate the complexity of the HP openmail system. It reminds me of people being hired just to administer openmail. It's a fucking mail server, it doesn't have to be this complicated! Looking at the Scalix manual all you see are chapters filled with cryptic om(insert-jobsecurity-acronym-here) commands. It's just silly to expect someone to spend time learning this crap, because when something goes wrong in such a closed system, no one will know how to fix it.

It looks like Communigate is still the choice for us.

A friend sent me a link to someone criticizing Hula. He claims group calendaring should get people laid.

Came across the Hula project on Slashdot. This is an email and calendaring server that is striving to have a Gmail-like interface. The developers seem very optimistic.

I decided to download it to check it out. I have a CentOS 3.4 box at home, and installation was not too difficult. I was able to get it up an running to check out its webmail interface. Some notes:

• Download and install Subversion. Do a svn checkout as described on the Hula page
• Install the kernel-source RPM
• Because of some problems finding the atomic_ kernel functions, you need to do some trickery:

mv /usr/include/asm/atomic.h{,.old}
cp /usr/src/linux/include/asm/atomic.h /usr/include/asm/

• Configure with the following:

CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/kerberos/include ./configure --prefix=/opt/hula

The rest of the instructions should be fine. The system is definitely not ready for prime time, but it's cool to checkout. I hope it moves forward.