In preparation for our YippieMove ’09 unveiling next week (you can get a pre-announcement sneak peek now) WireLoad is today releasing version 0.2 of OFC WireLoad Edition.

When we began work on the new Status page of YippieMove ’09 we searched high and low for good charting software, both server based and dynamic. OFC 2 came out on top. OFC is an excellent Flash charts program written primarily by John Glazebrook. It supports several different chart types including line graphs, bar graphs and pie charts. It dynamically reads its data using JSON.

To meet WireLoad’s specific design goals for YippieMove’s status page a number of modifications were made. We needed a particular look and feel, we wanted the fastest possible load times and there were a couple of glitches when using our particular data sets that needed fixing. Since many of these changes were very specific to our use case we opted to just branch the software and not disturb the ordinary development of OFC. This branch is what we are releasing today as OFC WireLoad Edition 0.2. We hope it will benefit the OFC community and perhaps interested parties will be able to find pieces and parts they can use elsewhere.

OFC 2 Hyperion was used as the base. An overview of the changes can be found below.

Visual Changes

• Support for a gradient background.
• Chart encompassing border.
• Look of axises changed.
• Pie chart drop shadow.
• “Fuzzy” grid lines sharpened up.
• New ‘spinner’ progress indicator.

Functional Changes

• Fast loading progress indicator which starts showing before the whole flash file has downloaded and remains until the graph data has been loaded.
• New on the side legend for pie charts.
• New build script for building without the Windows specific Flash Develop.

Size Reduction

• Each chart type can be enabled or disabled at build time, which enables a site specific light-weight build. Many individual functions such as image saving can similarly be disabled.
• Embedded fonts are no longer required for 0-90 degree rotated X axis labels or rotated Y axis labels.
• Reduction of some redundant code.

The final version used on YippieMove’s status page is about 50KiB, down from 200KiB in the original.

If you want to set OFC WireLoad Edition 0.2 up for a test, be aware that when using IE7, SWFObject did not always properly detect the running Flash version in our testing. So you may see unexpected degradation to your non Flash content. Updating to the latest version of Flash seems to resolve the issue, regardless of your installed version – it’s the reinstalling itself that fixes the problem. Word on the net is that there is an installation corruption issue happening to some IE7 users.

Downloads and a complete change log can be found on WireLoad’s open source page.

We got exciting news to share with you — a complete new version of YippieMove is on the way. The new version comes with a ton of new features and a super-slick interface.

In this sneak peek we will introduce one of the three major new features in YippieMove ’09. The feature we will reveal to you is…*drumroll*…an open step 2. That’s right, when we launch YippieMove ’09 you will be able to transfer your email between any of our 100+ pre-configured accounts, not only to Gmail. If that’s not enough, you can even enter your own server, just like in Step 1, using the option ‘Other.’ Isn’t this amazing? This opens up so many new doors.

We’ve already extensively tested this feature with our ‘custom migration’-service, but now we’re ready allow the rest of you in too!

Enough said, here is a screenshot from the new version.

Transfer to anywhere

We’ve worked really hard on making YippieMove the worlds easiest (and best) email transfer too. We hope you enjoyed this sneak peek. Stay tuned, as we expect to be able to launch YippieMove ’09 to the public this quarter.

WireLoad is proud to today introduce YippieMove Complete, the latest addition to YippieMove, which adds the missing piece of the puzzle for many small and mid-size companies (SMB) that are considering switching email provider. YippieMove Complete is a package that includes everything needed for a smooth transition, including:

• Unbiased technical consulting. What is really the best email solution/provider for your needs?
• Creation of user accounts on the destination server according to your needs
• Redirecting the email from your old server to the new
• Transfer of your old emails from the old server to the new server

Since we launched YippieMove, we’ve been contacted by many SMBs that are planning to change email provider for various reasons. Whatever your reason for switching is, YippieMove Complete can help you. We will do all the work for you and let you focus on what’s important to you – your business.

What does email downtime cost you per hour? If you’re an SMB, it’s likely that it costs you thousands of dollars an hour in lost productivity. YippieMove Complete can make sure that the transition goes as smoothly as possible, and in most cases, without any email downtime at all.

YippieMove Complete is starting at only $499.95 with 10 transfers included. If you ened more transfer than that our normal rate applies (including volume discount).

Requirements

The requirements are simple; we need access to your old email server and your DNS records. If you don’t know anything about this, our sales team can provide you with further details. We can even contact your provider directly as a last resort. The second requirement is related to the transfer of the old emails. In order for us to successfully transfer your old emails, the old email server needs to support IMAP.

More info

For more information about YippieMove Complete, visit the product page.

I think it’s fair to say that few people outside of Google have more experience of working with Google’s IMAP implementation (GIMAP) than we have. Since we launched YippieMove more than six months ago, we’ve performed a lot of transfers to Google using IMAP. Truth be told, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to find workarounds for bugs in Gmail IMAP implementation. In this brief blog-post, we will explore two bugs that we’ve reported to Google, but which Google seems to have little interest in fixing.

Inconsistency between SELECT and CREATE

The first bug might not be very juicy but it took us a while to recognize it. What we first thought was a bug in our system turned out to be a bug in GIMAP. As it turns out, in GIMAP, SELECT is case sensitive, while CREATE is not. Here’s a brief example to illustrate the bug:


0001 SELECT "INBOX/Sales Invoices"
0001 NO Unknown Mailbox: INBOX/Sales Invoices (Failure)
0002 CREATE "INBOX/Sales Invoices"
0002 NO Folder name conflicts with existing folder name. (Failure)


In this case, there is already a folder named ‘INBOX/Sales invoices’, but since SELECT is case sensitive, and CREATE is not, we were unable to select the folder and with an upper case ‘I’ and at the same time unable to create the folder.

We first encountered this bug when a user migrated from a case sensitive IMAP server to Gmail. Hence we could have two folders named ‘foo’ and ‘Foo’ without it being any problem until we tried to copy those to Gmail.

Rejection of random messages

The next bug is of far more serious nature and it is a bug that we run into everyday. We’ve spent a significant amount of time trying to narrow down this problem, but almost entirely without luck. What happens is that GIMAP decides to reject certain emails. Sometimes the upload works when retrying later, sometimes not. To make this even more interesting, GIMAP can reject emails that it just gave us. For instance, let’s say we’re copying messages from [email protected] to [email protected]. Even that a GIMAP just gave us a particular email, another GIMAP server rejects the same email. Strange, isn’t it?

When I said that we’ve spent a serious amount of time trying to narrow down the problem, I was not kidding. We’ve done statistical analysis on tens of thousands of messages trying to find some kind of pattern (including trying to find a correlation between the content in the header and the body), and still no luck.

That said, the failure rate is quite low. Out of all the messages we upload, only a small fraction gets rejected (a quick database query reveals that it’s currently at 0.04%). And if a message gets rejected, we clearly state what message we failed to upload in the Transfer Report that we send out to our customers upon completion.

In Google’s defense, they do state that they do not officially support ‘upload of messages,’ but that is a quite weak argument, as pretty much any other IMAP-enabled service on the market supports this. Not to mention that without APPEND, simple drag and drop operations may fail in email programs.

For the curious geeks reading this article, our software does comply with RFC 3501, as well as other related RFCs.

As a side note, we’re not the only ones experiencing the APPEND bug. The Google Group discussion for Gmail IMAP and POP is full with threads regarding this. The only official-looking response given multiple times by wár17 § is to upload in small batches as you otherwise is likely to hit the bandwidth limit. However, we can testify that this is not the case as the number of messages and the size of the mailbox seem to have little effect. We’ve had this problem with small mailboxes (<10 messages and only a few hundred bytes) and at the same time had mailboxes that exceed several Gigabytes running through flawlessly.

Update: While it seems like the rejection of emails is somewhat random, there are certain emails that are more likely to get rejected. The other day we ran a transfer of a folder including 600-something bounced messages. They were all rejected.

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