keep on rockin' in the free world

Ok, I guess it's still in time to wish people a happy new year. Apart from the obligatory sessions of eating, drinking and reconnecting with my inner-child, Christmas has been a great time to enrich the internal uranium, and I feel full of ²³⁵U again. I'm sure I'll need plenty of it in the new year. So, once more, best wishes to all, at let's make the world a better place in 2008.

One thing to get there is of course is to polish that raw diamond that we call modest. I've been quite happy with the progress we've made since our bèta less than one month ago. We've closed quite a number of bugs, and made steady improvements in performance and the handling of specific emails and mail servers. And we've been making frequent releases, roughly every week. If you're using these weekly updates, you might not necessarily see so much difference between versions, depending of course on your particular use case. But believe me when I say that we are not sitting still :)

Anyhow, there are a couple of problems we're looking into now:

• first, performance problems with really big folders (ie., many thousands of mails). We're trying to come up with a solution, but it's not easy (as is the case with most interesting things in life). Please bear with us;
  
• second, problems with specific servers. Here you can help us! We're testing modest with different POP/IMAP/SMTP servers. But, there are many more different ones in the world, with a wide variety of versions, configurations - a combinatorial explosion. If your server doesn't play nice with modest, please file bugs with all the details (server, version, configuration,...). Also, protocol traces or PCAP-files (tcpdump/wireshark) are very useful, as are test accounts. Remember, if we cannot reproduce it, we probably can't fix it. If there's information you don't want to share with bugs.maemo.org, you may also mail me directly. That does require you to trust me, though.
  
• finally, we've seen some problems with rare emails not being shown correctly. Again, if you get such an email, please file a bug, and attach the email (after stripping it of any privacy-sensitive information of course).
  

Anyhow, for the large majority of users, modest seems to be working quite nicely; if you haven't tried it yet, I invite you to give modest a try, and tell us what you think.