Rethinking Email
I have been a long-time Gmail user and prefer using their web interface for my personal email, which I love for a number of reasons. For instance, when receiving a new reply to an archived email, the entire conversation is always shown, regardless of where the individual emails are located.
On the professional side of things, I use Apple Mail, which I am sorry to say is starting to get fairly outdated. It does not have the above mentioned feature where email replies are automatically shown together regardless of location. It doesn’t even support using SSL client certificates for connecting to the email server. The latter can fortunately be remedied by using stunnel as a proxy.
Thunderbird
I have used Thunderbird ages ago, so I decided to install the new version and add both my personal and professional email account and see what has happened these last major versions. To my surprise, Thunderbird has been cleaned up considerably and has lots of new features like tabs, smart folders and a unified inbox.
The coolest new feature in Thunderbird 3 has to be the new search interface. It is just a beauty to see the data mining ability and the ease of refining the search terms as you go. There is for instance the possibility to visually drill down on the year, month and day to find just the thing you are looking for.
Thunderbird Search
Then I recalled trying out Postbox a while ago when it was in beta. It is a commercial fork of Thunderbird, with its own unique set of features and looks, and although many Thunderbird plugins work with Postbox, not all do. I ended up giving this some thought.
What can a commercial company do with Thunderbird that the Mozilla foundation can not do themselves?
I decided to yet again give it a go. The installation is as easy as it can be on the Mac — just drag the application to the applications folder and you are done. The account set-up was super easy, with most things detected automatically, and that even includes the work account. Being a Thunderbird derivate, I knew that it would support SSL client certificates, so I just added mine and it worked instantly.
Postbox
The interface of Postbox looks a lot like Thunderbird, but there are some not-so-subtle differences too. First of all is the polish — Postbox looks and feels more like a commercial product with its clean interface and modern color palette. The only interface section I liked better in Thunderbird is the main toolbar, which is a lot cleaner. It mostly has to do with Thunderbird having support for showing button labels beside the icons instead of below. That small setting makes all the difference in the world, esthectially speaking.
The first technical thing I noticed was that there is only one folder view — you have your accounts on the top, and the folders (including the inbox), changes below depending on the account you select at the top.
I am not a big fan of unified inboxes, and I had a hard time finding a view I like in Thunderbird (not to mention Apple Mail). Postbox, while only having this single view, get how people work with email. Having personal and professional mail in the same unified inbox just adds to the clutter and distractions we try so hard to get rid of.
Making the accounts completely separate is the perfect recipe for me, and lets me focus on one thing at a time, while not being distracted by Facebook alerts or Twitter messages and other things that may pop up in my personal inbox.
Thunderbird Single message
The conversation view in Postbox is excellent too. It works exactly like in Gmail, with collapsible replies and a beautiful interface. There is also this thread and message summary to the right of the message which collects all links, photos, files and other types of attachments for easy access.
Postbox for some reason, even has integrated support for posting to Twitter and Facebook. While I would use a dedicated application for this like Tweetdeck or Echofon, I will definitely try it out and see what they have done with it.
A last thing to mention about Postbox is the built-in tagging support. If you would like to tag email with certain action tied to them like “Follow Up”, “Waiting For” or other tags, it is possible to do so without having to resort to putting these emails in separate folders.
Postbox Single message
If you are not into sorting incoming email to different project folders, you will definitely enjoy the archive feature, which is available in Thunderbird as well. Pressing “a” will move the selected messages into the archive, which is a regular email folder. The thinking behind this is that since Postbox and Thunderbird index all email, you could just search for what you want.
I am personally fond of having separate folders for different projects and mailing lists. Everything else is put into the generic “archives” folder.
The latest version also features support for Things and Omnifocus, which means that it now is as easy as using Apple Mail to get emails into your GTD in-basket of choice!
If you want to purchase Postbox, please consider using my Postbox referral link. This will save you $10, and you will support this site too!
Getting push email on the iPhone
The iPhone does some really remarkable things and has some amazing features. One feature I really wanted to get working was push email. Not only for the increased battery performance, but for the reason the Blackberry was given the more descriptive name of Crackberry.
I heard that Yahoo provides push mail for the iPhone, so I decided to try it out. Setting it up was very easy, and push actually seems to work – that is if you aren’t forwarding your email. Yahoo Mail doesn’t push mail where the To address doesn’t match, even though the envelope address is correct. The basically means that push works fine if you are only using your Yahoo email address directly, but not if you are forwarding email from somewhere else, like Gmail.
Not being satisfied with the Yahoo solution, I started looking elsewhere. MobileMe started looking better and better, so I finally caved in and signed up for a trial. Email push works excellent so far, but I expect nothing else from Apple. It seems to push email being forwarded from other accounts too!
The one area where MobileMe lacks, and this is a big one, is the support for custom email domains. If you have your fancy personal domain, you of course want to use it for email, but there is no good way of doing thing with MobileMe! Google Apps is currently lightyears ahead of Apple in this department.
The scenario looks like this: I use Google Apps for email, but a filter in Gmail forwards the email to MobileMe and marks it as read in Gmail. MobileMe then pushes this to my iPhone, and when I reply, I just choose the Google account as the sender. This requires that you enable both email accounts in your iPhone. That is why I mark the email as read in the filter – otherwise it would eventually be seen by the Mail app in the iPhone as an unread email.
This is a bit awkward, I know, but the only real alternative is setting up your own Exchange server. (or waiting for Google to get their act together and supporting push for the iPhone)
Address Book on Mac shows the wrong certificate
I recently wanted to email a recipient, for which I had the certificate. The problem was however, that he has an old certificate which has expired, and a new valid one. For some reason though, Address Book associates the old certificate with the email address instead of the new one.
Inspect Certificate in Adress Book
I still haven’t found a way to associate the new certificate with the user.
Postbox public beta available
I recently wrote about Postbox, a new email client. It was then a private beta, but a public beta has now been released. Grab it now at postbox-inc.com.
Postbox brings innovative new features to easily find pictures and other files, but also how to get things done.
I still use Apple Mail and Gmail for daily email handling, but I will definitely try Postbox again now that a new version has been released.
Google releases Google Sync for iPhone, WM, SyncML
Google has just released a beta of their latest mobile service — Google Sync. This service makes it possible to sync your Google Calendar with your iPhone, Windows Mobile or other SyncML client, for free!
They use the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol, meaning that support is already built-in. To enable this on your phone right now, go to the Google Sync website and follow the straight-forward instructions. Be sure to backup your calendars and contacts beforehand though, since all information will be erased on your phone.
The easiest way to manage the contacts is to enable syncing them to Google using iTunes. Instructions for this are available as a part of the setup process on the site, so there is no need to worry.
The above mentioned process will enable synchronization of the default calendar only! If you want to access multiple calendars, or even imported calendars which are owned by others, you need to go to m.google.com/sync using your phone as the Google help pages suggest.
There is a problem however, this does not work with Google Apps domains. To sync multiple calendars with a Google Apps domain, first make sure that you are using the “English” language on the website. There is a link to switch if you don’t.
Second, don’t go to the page mentioned in the help section, but instead go to m.google.com and choose “Sign in with your Google Apps” link. When you have signed in, there will be a sync icon presented, which will take you to your calendar sync settings. From there you can add multiple calendars, which will then automatically be synced to your phone.
One downside of using Google Contacts instead of the local Address Book is that the photos aren’t synced properly. There is however an application available for Windows with no name that syncs the photos from Facebook to your Google Contacts account. While this might not be the best option, it definitely beats not having any pictures at all.
Postbox — a new take on email?
Postbox is a new application for managing email. It has some serious competition to deal with, like Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Mail. Postbox does mail in an intuitive and fast way, which makes it easy to manage messages and actually get things done. Their website sums it up quite well.
“Postbox is a new way to manage online communication. It lets you spend less time managing messages and more time getting things done.”
“Postbox lets you organize your mail by topic so you can focus on one thing at a time.”
“Postbox works behind the scenes to catalog everything in your email.”
“Once you’ve found it, you can really start doing things. Postbox is designed to break down barriers. Any mail content can be annotated or combined with information from the web to create new mail messages.”
The application itself seems to be based on the upcoming Thunderbird 3, judging by the looks alone. This means that it benefits from all great things from the Mozilla suite, such as great spam filtering, clean looks, tabs and client certificate support for IMAP. It does however mean that it uses the XUL interface, which in itself isn’t a bad thing, but it does not integrate very well into the Mac environment.
Postbox main window
Looking at the main window reveals a wealth of information. To quickly view attachments, images, links and contacts there is a shortcut bar on the tab bar itself.
The application puts a big focus on tags, or Topics as they are called in the application. It is very easy to add and view Topics. Having Topics on messages makes it very easy to find messages relating to different projects or keeping on top on what to do next.
Topics / Tags
One of the cool new features is the ability to annotate messages. This makes it possible to edit email and add your own text and title to it. Then you can either replace the original message or create a copy.
Annotate view
Messages are threaded in a beautiful Gmail style view, sorted chronologically. On the top a list of included authors are displayed for an easy overview.
Thread view
I will post a review later when I have had time to try it out for a few weeks. It looks promising, but it has to fill some great big shoes if it will replace Apple Mail as my default email application.
Postbox is currently in closed beta, but add your name to their waiting list and you will be notified when it is available for download.
[Postbox]
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- Folders
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- Postbox main window
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- Thread view
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- Topics / Tags
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- Annotate view
How to send secure email using PGP
One of the biggest deficiencies in a virtual world is that authenticating a person is very hard. In the real world we can rely on our eyes, photo ID and other things. Neither of these things work directly in the digital world.
So, how can we authenticate users? Using PGP to fill this gap is very common, and this is what I will discuss today. PGP has a stormy history, but I will not go into that here, but instead refer you to the PGP Timeline.
What is needed to send secure email, files or other types of messages to people over the internet? We will use the GnuPG package, which should be easily installed in just about any system, including Windows. In a Ubuntu or other Debian based system, just write apt-get install gnupg and you will be all set.
You should also install seahorse, which is an application for gnome which enables you to easily manage your keys. The application should the be available under Applications -> Accessories -> Encryption keys once you have it installed.
The first task is to create your very own key-pair to enable you to sign your messages and to let others send encrypted messages to you. By choosing Key -> Create new key and then selecting PGP Key, you will be presented with a form where you enter your details. You will then be presented with a password entry for your key, and it is crucial that you select a very long password. It should preferably be longer than 20 characters.
You should create a key which is at least 3072 bits long. This will provide protection for a long time in the future. While you are at it, you might as well use 4096 bits. Note that it will take a while for the key to be generated, so please be patient.
Now that you have your own key-pair, you should first of all export the key by selecting the key and clicking properties. The key must be kept it in a very safe place, such as a safe or in a bank.
You may now select Sync and publish keys in the Remote menu to upload your key to a public key-server, such as pgp.mit.edu. This will enable others to easily get your public key automatically.
If you use your favorite text editor and open ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf and enter the following two lines in the end, GnuPG will try to automatically fetch public key when they are missing:
keyserver hkp://wwwkeys.pgp.net
keyserver-options auto-key-retrieve
To actually use GnuPG now, you will have to configure your email client for this. Evolution has built-in support for PGP and support for Mozilla Thunderbird can be added by installing the enigmail extension. Ubuntu users may install the mozilla-thunderbird-enigmail package.
Note that it is advisable to check Always encrypt to myself. Without this setting, you will not be able to read encrypted messages you send to other people!
You are now ready to send and receive encrypted and signed mail!
But, you say, how does this key identify me as a person? Well, it doesn’t – yet. To do this, you must sign other people’s keys, and have other people sign your key, meaning that they vouch for your identity.
This is normally done face-to-face or in bigger key-signing events. The general principle is that you will bring the fingerprint of your key, and others must then verify that the key is correct. You must also you a valid photo-ID, and here is the key – by showing your photo-ID, you have tied your PGP-key to you as a person. You can get more information on key-signing events by visiting The Keysigning Party HOWTO.
This means that you must be very thorough with the verification procedure, since it is the ground on where the principles behind the PGP trust model rest. If this is not done correctly, the whole encryption is void, since you really don’t know who the person in the other end really is.
So, to sign someones key, just open the properties for that key and select the Trust tab.
Here you should click the top check-box when you have verified the person using photo-ID and checked the fingerprint of the key. Seahorse will automatically synchronize your key with a key-server once you have signed the key. The check-box underneath is where you can select whether to trust the signatures of the person you are signing. If you check this box, you will automatically trust all keys which the person you just verified trusts. Remember that you should not tick this box if you believe that this person does not manage his keys correctly, or has some other reason to distrust his signatures.
Note that all steps mentioned in this article can be done using the command-line tool gpg. If you want to use this way instead, just read The GNU Privacy Handbook or try gpg --help for some general information.
I have now just discussed the basics of PGP, but do not feel afraid to explore the possibilities. A good place to start is The GNU Privacy Handbook where you can read more about PGP and more specific GnuPG. If you have decided to try PGP, you are welcome to send me a signed and encrypted test message. My key-ID is 0x98CEC53A and it can be found on most key-servers. To find people using PGP in your neighborhood, log-on to Biglumber and do a quick search.
Privacy is becoming more and more important in the world. I hope that you will try this out and spread it to your friends and family. In the end, we should all hope for a safer, more secure and open society.