kishorebhargava

Last week I spent a large amount of time staring at server loads on a server which had gone berserk. Server loads on a *nix machine are normally measured as the amount of CPU being utilised at a given point in time. Simple commands like “w” or “top” normally display the load during the last one, five and fifteen minute periods. Most of the time the server in question does have a load on the higher side (just under 2.0), but last week it had gone up as high as 98.0 (almost fever). The server does have 16GB of RAM, so it was still responsive and things were working but a sustained high load did have us all worried.

We sort of knew the reason as well, it was a runaway process trying to update a database and we did not want to stop it.

The only positive point in all of this, I had time on my hands to sit around and discuss various interesting technologies and gadgets with the others who were involved. One of the favourite topics being email, and how it controls our lives these days.

I have shied away from getting either a CrackBerry device or the service. The devices until recently were terrible, they were large, ugly and overall very clumsy. Since the introduction of the “pearl” things have improved on that end but I still stayed away from it. The good thing is now that many other phone manufacturers are providing software that allows you to use the service on their devices. Eg. Most of the new business phones from Nokia have this software available.

The issue is not just with the device, its also with the service. I currently have an unlimited GPRS/EDGE connection with Airtel.I am paying Rs.499/- per month for this. The cheapest CrackBerry service is Rs.899/- per month and that too is limited to email only. You cannot surf or do other things on the net with that connection. You do get access to WAP, so are limited to Airtel Live! etc but not anything else. As far as I know, you need to pay separately for full access.

Now comes the question of push mail. On a normal GPRS connection, you can setup your device to collect mail every few minutes (eg. 5 minutes) and mail would continue to flow, but its still a pull and not a push. This is where IMAP IDLE comes into the picture. If you googled for CrackBerry alternatives, you would find lots of free alternatives available. Invariably, all of them either ask you to download and install a package on your device or just state that your device must support the IMAP IDLE protocol.

Of the three mail clients I use, I tested two of them and both supported IMAP IDLE. Thunderbird and the email client on the Nokia E-Series phones both support IMAP IDLE. Now to check if my server supports it, cause you do need to have the support both at the client end and at the server end. A simple check is to telnet to the IMAP port (143) of of your server and see what is shown in the capabilities.

* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS CHILDREN NAMESPACE THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES SORT QUOTA IDLE ACL ACL2=UNION STARTTLS] Courier-IMAP ready. Copyright 1998-2005 Double Precision, Inc. See COPYING for distribution information.

The goobledygook above has one very important word in it. “IDLE” which means my server supports the push that I need, not that its just plain lazy!

After that its simple, on Thunderbird, setup an IMAP account with your server details and you are good to go. To test it, login to the webmail of your server and send yourself a test message, the moment you hit the send button, you will see the mail pop-up on Thunderbird.

On the phone too the setup is trivial. Setup the IMAP account, then select the option of “Automatic Retreival”. Notice how it does not mention the frequency at which mail will be collected, the reason, its now setup for push.

I have my phone setup with “get headers” and actually collect only mail that I want to read. One other thing that you should note here, your EDGE connection will now just be continuosly on. It does drain battery a bit but thats the price you pay for push mail.

Of course, the bigger price is that you will always be in email hell! Email pouring in at odd hours which you could have safely ignored and looked at in the morning will now be sitting on your phone waiting for action. Whats worse is that most senders now expect a response within seconds too!

Welcome, to the curse of “push” mail.

Cheers…Kishore
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PS: before somebody asks, the third email client I use is Alpine.