So if I continue yesterday’s thought on auto configuration (AC in the rest of the post), then there seems to be a big problem - updating AC file. At first I thought on just checking si.Mail’s homepage when creating new account if newer version of AC file is available, but this poses another problem, getting this information from ISPs and/or mail service providers. This would be tedious work and won’t be ideal. There should be another way.

Finally it came to me. Why not do it like DomainKeys, and spf records are implemented. Use DNS TXT record.  So In layman’s terms, we add new TXT record. Something along example.com. IN TXT “mailAC=http[s]://path_to_AC_file”. You are probably asking why AC couldn’t be put directly into the TXT record the main reason is, it’s too big and thus it would be hard to edit.

So how would this work? si.Mail extracts domain part of e-mail address and fetches TXT records from nameserver for that domain. If it founds correct TXT record it downloads the file and auto configures everything that’s needed to send and receive e-mail messages.

Now imagine that you are a hosting provider using Plesk, CPanel or any other software. (Usually all domains you host have the same type of e-mail access) You just add to your DNS template url to one AC file and all e-mail accounts for all domains you are hosting can be configured from a SINGLE file. Also you have complete control of AC file so if anything changes you can modify AC yourself without bugging anyone. This is also ideal for small companies where users can configure e-mail client bythemself.

Because I’ve gotten quite a few complaints that account creation wizard is troublesome for some users I decided to change account creation drastically. si.Mail already has some sort of automatic account configuration, but I’ve decided to take it to the next level.

With current automatic account configuration you still have to go through entire wizard although that wouldn’t be necessary. At the moment there are some fields that could be auto configured but they are not.

As you can see at the mockup above in reality for auto configuration usually only first 3 fields are necessary and sometimes the 4th one, in cases where user name doesn’t equal any part of e-mail address (user name field would be hidden by default and would be displayed only if necessary). If there won’t be any data for auto configuration, user will automatically get the same window as if it would have clicked on Advanced settings.

So what is your opinin on this?

About two weeks ago I accidentally stepped over a bug which is present in all si.Mail versions from the beginning. Yes I managed to repeat the bug with 0.7 series rewrite :(.  Although bug is not an security issue I urge all to upgrade to 1.1.0.1750 version.

Without going into technical details, if you ever got “Message IDs (from index file = xx and from message file = xy) does not match” then you probably encountered the bug I’m talking about. There are only two cases for this to happen: not enough disk space when downloading new messages, (this was my case) and  unexpected application shutdown e.g power failure, BSOD….  If you are getting message above please Pack messages file (Right click to one mailbox and select Pack from the menu), Modified Pack procedure should be smart enough to found and “restore” those messages. Other improvements and fixes in this release are below.

- IMPR: Added ruler so you can easily indent message parts
- IMPR: We should bail out if attachment file doesn’t exist anymore
- FIX: Some parts of forms are not translated
- FIX: Print preview, print setup were not implemented.
- FIX: Copy/cut and paste in same document resulted in corrupted view of message in editor.
- FIX: Canceling address input tries to close Compose window.
- FIX: if message is at the end of file it should always be at the correct offset. (Offset might be wrong if si.Mail or system crashed before all data was written to HDD or if there was not enough free diskspace).

It seems that I missed two bugs in previous stable. First one is extremely annoying and it’s reccomended, that you update because of it.  Second one is of visual nature. Change log is bellow.

- FIX: left and right keys in Compose window not working in address input field.
- FIX: priority combo box in Compose window is without icons.

As last two stable versions had problems with startup crash and also it is a while since I updated the components and fixed those crashes I believe that this is stable enough so it should be released as a stable release. For those who are not visiting site very often next release will have support for spam plug-ins. Naive Bayesian filtering will be compiled in si.Mail itself. I’m also working on Calendar and Task support for some screens shots and more info you can read this post.

- NEW: Hungarian translation thanks to Széll Zsolt
- IMPR: Build static versions (no external dependencies)of new spellcheck and libssl libraries
- IMPR: Message Subject is now stored in text box so you can copy it into clipboard if needed
- IMPR: made embedded plug-ins unicode aware
- IMPR: upgraded gui components (SpTBX) to their latest version. This also fixed startup exception.
- IMPR: moved some form creation to the step they are actually needed (fAddressBook, fMessageReceivers, fPreview, fFolderProperties)
- FIX: Fixed exception when opening rss item from search mailbox.
- FIX: After creating 1st profile RSS tab is not visible.

Some users were sending me e-mails that they are unable to access si.Mail homepage since I moved it to simail.si domain, along with that I also changed hosting provider. Hosting was located on IP address ending with .0. Together we figured out that their routers have broken TCP/IP stack so if you are one of those unfortunates now you’ll be able to access site as IP changed, but I still suggest that you start bugging your router company to fix the issue, because as IP address space is becoming scarce more providers will start using addresses ending with .0.

For those who would like to know more about that can read IPV4 article on Wikipedia (Addresses ending in 0 or 255 part of article, you can also paste this to message when you’ll be bugging your router company)

All forms that use upgraded GUI components are finally rechecked and I believe that build should be stable enough. This upgrade brought approx. 600 kiB siMail.exe file shrink and should also remove startup crash on some computers. In this build I also moved the last batch of form creation from the startup to the step they are actually needed this should made small improvements in startup time and memory consumption. I squeezed small improvement into the build and I’m really wondering if someone will find out what it is :).

What needs to be checked as result of component upgrade (1st one to report bugs should open a topic in bug section of the forum), for Items with exceptions could occur comment, please use Send bug functionality built in si.Mail:

• all forms - components not in menus and/or toolbars must use windows theming
• tabs in message/rss view behave a bit differently, some background code is changed (exceptions could occur)
• embedded import/export message/address book plug-ins are now Unicode aware (exceptions could occur)
• compose window e-mail input text box is Unicode aware (exceptions could occur)
• Forms (windows) which were moved (Address Book, Message Receivers, Server preview, Folder Properties) (exceptions could occur)

Today I finally managed to upgrade components that make most of si.Mail interface to their latest version. As components are not backward compatible this took longer than expected. Even through si.Mail starts up with this components some parts are not yet working. It will probably took me at least a week to sort this out.

Good things to this upgrade are that si.Mail executable file (siMail.exe) is about 700KiB lighter :). As a result to upgrade also startup crash is now gone.

Another thing new components will brought is, that now you’ll be able to create external theme for skinning menus and toolbars.

Site changes:
- updated to latest Wordpress
- enabled comment posting for guest users

It seems that by fixing new messages check countdown bug I introduced another one, which results in recoverable crash. si.Mail crashes at the last step of creating a new account, when it tires to reset countdown for new messages on not yet completely created account. Restarting si.Mail should help.

I’m also getting bug reports of crash that can be repeated on some occasions way back to the si.Mail 0.7.x. I’m getting them mostly from people who are using their displays in portrait mode, or they accidentally minimized main application window to smallest size (640×480), that at startup si.Mail uses 100% of one CPU core and then it just shuts down. I did manage to recreate this issue and it is in process of fixing. There are three things you can do. Wait for next development version with updated GUI controls, which are to blame for the stack overflow, try to downgrade to 1.0.0.1510, or try to manually edit .\Profiles\config.xml . Utf-8 capable editor must be used to edit this file, please find frmMain section, it should look something like this:

<frmMain>
<online>1</online>
<width>1027</width>
<height>1285</height>
<top>-1</top>
<left>-1</left>
<minimizeToTray>1</minimizeToTray>
<feedToolbar>1</feedToolbar>
<msgReceiveToolbar>1</msgReceiveToolbar>
<msgReceivePPToolbar>0</msgReceivePPToolbar>
<msgSendToolbar>1</msgSendToolbar>
</frmMain>

and set value in width and height parts to your maximum screen resolution.

As there will be a long time before next major release and there was a couple of annoying bugs fixed, I’m releasing a bug fix release of stable 1.0 series. For those not playing around with Development builds, update is recommended.

-IMPR: Attachment view skips creating of mailboxes with ? or * in extension part. Please rebuild attachment view for changes to take effect
-IMPR: Improved speed of parsing messages sent via MAPI.
-FIX: Fixed division by zero in images attachment preview plug-in
-FIX: Send at least 1 byte for total mailbox size so in case we are unable to parse server’s response we don’t get division by zero error.
-FIX: Reset countdown for next server message check, if we’ve done it manually.
-FIX: si.Mail not adding attachments to message if they were sent via MAPI.
-FIX: Wrong urlEncode function used, so some characters were not encoded this resulted in si.Mail hanging in rare cases.
-FIX: Fixed exception when sending message and connection to server failed
-FIX: exception division by zero if only one item was in the mailbox and group by was used.