EAI defines a set of RFCs to provide non-ASCII email addresses. pål@eksempel.no. I looked at them with a view to implementing that in Archiveopteryx.

The good news: It's simple and sane.

The bad news: I can tell it's possible to spend a lot of time arguing about minor side issues.

About ten years ago, Abhijit Menon-Sen and I discussed email storage, archiving and access, and set out to write something good. We failed. It's time to think about why; if this reads like a stream of consciousness it's because I'm thinking.

We were right: Archiving all mail and searching it is the right approach. Gmail has a billion users. (Hm. How many of the people who told me I was wrong in 2002 use gmail now? I can think of at least five.) But we still failed. (more…)

Archiveopteryx git head crashes a bit. Not every day, but some people reports that it crashes every week or month, at random times. Clearly there is a bug. Abhijit and I have discussed it and found a way to contain it, and I've written the code.

But I haven't found a way to push the fix to the master tree. I seem unable to commit and push that code. My soul wants to find the bug and fix it, not contain it.

Meanwhile, I had an appointment with the dentist this morning.

In the waiting room I read a fascinating blog post about a Chromium exploit. Sergey Glazunov, clearly an admirably clever hacker, stitched together fourteen bugs, quirks and missed hardening opportunities to form a critical exploit. The bugtracking information for one of the bugs shows that it was reported, discussed for a few days, then it was idle until Sergey leveraged it, and then it was fixed.

Chromium is a nice browser, and I appreciate the hardening and exploit resistance the team has added. I particularly appreciate the team's honesty: They run their pwnium contests and are frank about the results.

But now I am even less happy about making fault tolerant code. I feel that it may be mentally difficult to make a program tolerate faults and at the same time make a programmer not tolerate faults.

All bug trackers suck. That's why Abhijit and I really don't want to use one for aox.

Here's what we do instead. It's subtle.

There's a notes file in the version-controlled source tree. The only way to add to a note (ie. file a bug) is to make us do it. There are some scripts that look at the file. (more…)

A little bit of 3G first: A 3G connection is in one of several modes, ranging from PCH (which uses hardly any power and can't transfer payload data) to DCH (which uses much power and is used for bulk transfers).

The way Archiveopteryx handles IMAP, POP and SMTP is very battery-friendly. (more…)

Github thinks aox is 83% PHP. That is even more of an insult than its previous supposition. 60% C might have been misleading, but that error was understandable (it thought cryptlib was part of aox). 83% PHP is just insulting.

Ohloh also smokes the good stuff: Archiveopteryx is GPL'd, thank you so much.

Archiveopteryx often needs to massage incoming mail to make it syntactically valid. 99% may be valid, but 1% is still a lot. One of the chores is to guess how a message is encoded — unicode, ISO-8859-x or what? For that Archiveopteryx uses a novel and good algorithm. (more…)

LWN ran an article on Archiveopteryx. Some points.

It's BSD-licensed, not OSL-licensed. It was OSL-licensed until last year.

One commenter opined that we might not have tested big mailboxes. Well, we have. Not sure exactly how big. We've routinely tested up to a million, bigger occasionally. At a million it's quite simple: Most mail readers fall over. (more…)