Push Email

Wed Feb 7 12:29:28 CET 2007

 Hey, sorry I didn't mean to knock what you're doing with tinymail, heck I
support it. It just happened to be today when I decided to chime in on the
push/talk to a phone from outside discussion.

Graham

-----Original Message-----
From: Philip Van Hoof [mailto:spam at pvanhoof.be] 
Sent: 07 February 2007 09:30
To: Graham Auld
Cc: community at lists.openmoko.org; openmoko-devel at lists.openmoko.org
Subject: Re: Push Email

Yes, The thing is that as the tinymail developer, I can't really anticipate
on things like this until they get decided and are known to me.

Well, that's not really true. I can, and have, anticipated 'the unknown'
in the design of tinymail. I frequently tell people "Change is among us",
well this again proves it definitely *IS*.

I anticipated in that the design flexible on how you implement the
observable's part of the game. That can be SyncML but, as you now can see,
also IMAP IDLE on the same thread and using the same connection as your
normal IMAP one.

Who knows tomorrow we will all get mail notification through some obscure
bits in the TCP/IP headers of the GPRS connection? And who knows will we
someday have to look at the VPI + VCI of ATM cells to know from which
provider the messages came? Whether or not it's possible, ATM isn't used for
phones, or whether it's a good solution is not really the point.

Well, not for tinymail. That's an implementation detail for tinymail.

The design that will cope with the event, which is the well known observer
pattern, will deal with it once the observable is implemented.

If you need a "Click" kernel module for that, to feed certain bits to the
application layer, then that's great.

I hope to make that message very clear in clarity ;). The IMAP IDLE support
is not a demo, no, but it's also not a statement: I'm not sticking to 'just'
IMAP IDLE. Tinymail could and 'will' cope with other Push E-Mail
notification methods. It's designed to do so. And it will.

So ... basically .. ( and forgive me for my direct & to the point style of
discussion. I don't mean anything anti-empathic with it :-p ) :

Please develop me the method for notifying your phones about messages over
the networks that will be used, give me the technical details, and let's
implement a libtinymail-openmoko platform specific library that deals with
this. Does that sound good? 

3..2..1 Go! :-)

On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 04:05 +0000, Graham Auld wrote:
> Looks fab, good work with tinymail!
> 
> Sadly I think the issue with OpenMoko/Neo - or any other mobile 
> handset for that matter - is that in order for any of these direct 
> delivery methods to work you have to notify the handset. This means 
> either maintaining an open TCP link over GPRS (or Bluetooth or wifi or 
> a usb cable but they don't count as I'm referring to on the road only 
> connected via phone network use) thereby allowing a channel over which 
> the mail server may send a notification of new mail or send the mail. 
> The real problems with this IMHO being power and comms blocking. Have 
> your phone connected all day via GPRS and I suspect it will use a fair bit
more power than not being connected.
> Also I'm given to understand that the GSM module in the Neo is only 
> capable of GPRS OR a phone call, so things get disturbed each time a 
> phonecall is made/recived.
> 
> Only other way I see of mail delivery without polling is to have some 
> notification method.
> 
> Now with something like the Neo it is quite feasable to have a 
> mailsever plugin/addon/write new mailserver from scratch... That could 
> send a specially formatted sms to my number when it had a mail for me 
> (probably also based on the importance of that message determined by a 
> little ruleset, router/server status reports and mailing lists aren't 
> usually urgent - a new job offer or 'meet in the pub in 5 mins' may be 
> a little more criticle). The phone could be programmed to intercept 
> such incomming SMS' and rather than play a cheesy tone and let you 
> read it, the phone could connect up, download your mail and then alert you
that there's something worth reading!
> 
> Ideally of course I could just run postfix (ok maybe something 
> slightly
> lighter) on my phone and my network provider could make 
> <mymobilenumber>.gprs.vodafone.co.uk point to my handset :D Now I 
> havn't /actually/ asked vodafone yet but I've got this sneaking 
> suspicion that even if I do make it past 20 levels of callcenter 
> pleb/customer services to anyone vaguely technical they'd still not be 
> too keen...
> 
> I know someone's floated the idea of hidden/control SMS' on the list 
> before, under the guise of phone security and other things emaily too. 
> It does strike me as a "nice idea"(TM) however to define some format 
> or paramater of text that could by default be passed to an script 
> handler in openmoko rather than displayed as a text message. Perhaps 
> the first 3 characters could be a sequence of non-printables,
> 0x05 0x07 0x17 <any custom message stuff> 0x04 perhaps; ASCII - 
> Enquiry,bell,end transmission block,<any custom message stuff (with 
> EOT escaped!)>,end of transmission
> 
> Anyone for or against some such control message standard/quasi-standard?
> 
> I know there is a paramater in SMS' to indicate a flash message, I 
> don't know if there are any other paramters that are 'spare' that 
> could be used to indicate a control message, perhaps my scheme is 
> flawed if there are restrictions on the character set/data that can be 
> transmitted in an SMS? My current phone wouldn't let me enter hex 
> strings when writing text's :'(
> 
> 
> Sorry for rambling on
> 
> Graham
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: community-bounces at lists.openmoko.org
> [mailto:community-bounces at lists.openmoko.org] On Behalf Of Philip Van 
> Hoof
> Sent: 07 February 2007 01:42
> To: community at lists.openmoko.org
> Cc: openmoko-devel at lists.openmoko.org
> Subject: Tinymail is now doing IMAP IDLE (Push E-mail)
> 
> Hi there guys,
> 
> Because you guys where so busy discussing how to do Push E-mail on the 
> OpenMoko device, I decided to just go ahead and implement it in that 
> little tinymail of mine.
> 
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFBqqdIghz0
> http://tinymail.org/demos/tinymail_doing_lemonade_idle.mpg
> 
> http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2007/02/07/and-then-there-was-push-e
> -mail-
> support-for-tinymail-imap-idle
> 
> Have fun
> 
> 
> --
> Philip Van Hoof, software developer
> home: me at pvanhoof dot be
> gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
> http://www.pvanhoof.be/blog
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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