Push Email

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 11:29 +0000, Graham Auld wrote:
>  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.

Oh no, I didn't intent to meant hat you knocked what I'm doing with
tinymail :)

Sorry. I'm not very good at putting the right tone in E-mails :-). My
mistake.


> -----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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> > 
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