Netty 3.0.0.CR3 was my first serious attempt to achieve high test coverage by writing many test cases in my life, and it was very exciting for me. I was able to fix more than a dozen bugs with them.

EclEmma was very helpful to review all the source code and to achieve high test coverage. The byte code instrumented by Emma ran much faster than other open source test coverage tools, yet providing reliable numbers.

Granted that both the API and implementation of Netty became stable enough, I’m going to focus on writing JavaDoc and user guide for the next week. The first GA is expected in a couple weeks – please stay tuned!

As always, your feed back is more than appreciated.

Finally, I have managed to move Netty to JBoss.org and announce the first release candidate. If you were using Google Groups, you need to subscribe again.

Here’s the new URL:

• http://www.jboss.org/netty/

and here are the related announcement messages:

• The Netty project moved to JBoss.org
• Netty 3.0.0.CR1 released: the first release candidate!.

For those who don’t know what Netty is yet — The Netty project is an effort to provide an asynchronous · event-driven network application framework for rapid development of maintainable high-performance · high-scalability protocol servers and clients, including its related out-of-the-box protocol extensions and tool suite. To somewhat oversimplify, it’s a framework that allows you to write a NIO client and server very easily.

Update: The latest development snapshot of Opera 9.5 has full support for virtual folder with powerful filter which supports a regular expression. Let’s give it a try! Adding GPG signing and better multiple identity support would be an icing on the cake.

I’ve been struggling with various mail clients to deal with my huge IMAP mailbox which contains about 200k messages. I didn’t want to split it into more than one. It’s not my job but an e-mail client’s job; see what GMail does!

Although Opera Mail does a great job on dealing with such a big IMAP mailbox, it lacks a couple critical features which make me have a difficulty in organizing my messages. I have missed Evolution virtual folders especially.

However, all other GUI/Web-based e-mail clients than Opera Mail are very poor at dealing with a huge IMAP mailbox. It seems like IMAP support is not a high priority task for most e-mail clients in the world. The latest alpha version of RoundCube seems to be very efficient but it lacks too many features at this moment.

Before I give up again and stick to Opera Mail, I decided to give a try to various IMAP-to-Maildir synchronization tools – isync and OfflineIMAP. Long time agao, I had a bad experience with OfflineIMAP and it seems like it doesn’t work with my account yet. By contrast, isync was indeed a great tool which does its job without any problem.

One problem with isync is that its configuration file format is somewhat undocumented, so I’d like to share my settings:

# ~/.mbsyncrc
MaildirStore Local
Path ~/.maildir
Inbox ~/.maildir

IMAPStore Remote
Host <hostname>
User <username>
Pass <password>
CertificateFile ~/.mbsync.crt

Channel Local-Remote
Master :Remote:
Slave :Local:
Create Slave
Sync All

You also need to set up your crontab to run mbsync periodically because Evolution doesn’t provide an option to execute a command before refreshing the local Maildir. Here’s my crontab:

*/5 * * * * pgrep -f "^(/usr/bin/)?evolution" > /dev/null && mbsync -a -q

Please note that I used pgrep to make sure mbsync runs only when Evolution is running.

Finally, I succeeded to make Evolution run pretty fast with my IMAP mailbox, although it’s a kind of workaround. However, I don’t think this is a ugly hack. Considering that Opera Mail stores my all messages in its local storage, what Evolution does for the local Maildir is very similar to what Opera Mail does. It creates a full text index for all messages and maintains the index for every message operation. What’s missing is immediate mailbox synchronization based on IMAP notification, and it shouldn’t be difficult to be integrated into Evolution codebase IMHO.

PS: I had a difficulty searching for isync because Apple has a product with the same name. The actual executable of isync is mbsync, so try this google search.