FastMail.FM weblog

I’ve added support for a couple of new features in WebDAV.

1. modified time update support, so clients like NetDrive can now set the modified time of a file to help with synchronisation.
2. lock support so MacOS 10.3.x can now write files (you still can’t use https until 10.4, that’s a client issue)
3. client “quirks”, so quota usage works on macs (you can see how much free space you have!)
4. also, international character support works around a bug in Konqueror.
5. an attempt to correctly handle clients (like NetDrive) that write filenames in the Windows local character set instead of UTF-8 (*grrr*)

On that last topic, I’d love to hear feedback over in this forum thread about your experience with non-English characters and your client. I’m trying to come up with a full set of workarounds per client to get the best language support we can.

It will fall back to trying to use your “DefCharSet” value from the the Options screen on the web interface - the same way that the email management screens fall back to that character set if the encoding of an email is buggy.

Bron.

I’ve added a warning message to the ‘as zip’ link on the Files screen, as well as to the ‘Download Zip’ menu item and fixed the ‘Delete’ warning.

Downloading a zip of a large directory can be very expensive in bandwidth, and we charge you for the full amount even if you cancel the download part way, because it’s impossible due to caching for us to know how much was downloaded.

Obviously, this warning depends on you having Javascript enabled - but at least for most people there will be a second chance to cancel before you pay the bandwidth use for an accidental click!

Bron.

How this affects you:

Some users will notice their file storage used and/or total quota has changed.

A couple of hundred people have more data in their file storage than space available to store it. If you are one of these you will have to delete files to get below the quota limit before you can upload any new files (directories don’t use quota, so you can still create new directories and move files around).

What happened:

There were a couple of issues with File Storage quotas - one was that if you downgraded your account but had over the reduced quota amount, it failed to change your quota. The second was that if you ran the ‘fix account’ script for any reason, it would calculate the total including everything you had deleted over the past week (the backups) as well as the current messages. Obviously not ideal!

I’ve fixed the usage calculation to exclude deleted files, and run the fixup script - just for the file storage quota and usage parts - over every active user in our database (yes, it took a while!) - so your quotas should now be correct.

Apologies for the strange numbers a few of you have been seeing!

Bron.

We discovered a bug in the FastCheck code on the server side that meant folders with many unread emails would take a long time to check. This bug has now been fixed, so FastCheck users should notice faster checking times, especially in the case of folders with many unread emails.

Note that this was a server side fix, no upgrade of FastCheck is required. We do recommend that you ensure you have the latest version of FastCheck, currently 1.0.10.0, available here

Many Mac OS X users have reported a number of compatiability problems between the built in OS X WebDAV client and our WebDAV server. We’ll be looking into these over the next couple of weeks and will let people know when we have ironed out the issues. For now, it’s probably best to avoid using WebDAV with Mac OS X and just use the web interface for now to upload/download files.

Update: I believe it’s fixed now. The issue was with Mac OS X insisting on creating locks on files, and our server not supporting them. I have implemented locks, and have positive responses from users on the forum. Yay.

There are still speed issues with Mac OS X, which we can’t solve - it makes very inefficient use of the DAV protocol with what appears to be a complex temporary file creation mechanism designed for local disks. It makes many tens of requests where a more efficient client could create a single request asking for all the information it wanted at once.

Bron.

There’s a new option in the menu on the ‘Advanced’ screen when viewing messages:

“Edit as New”

This option behaves like editing a Draft message (copies all the details from the source message into a compose screen) except it will not delete the original message when you have finished.

I’ve wanted to write this since I joined FastMail, and here is is. Enjoy,

Bron.

We’ve just made some significant enhancements to our file storage system including:

• WebDAV access to your filestorage (FTP soon)
• a new method for specifying websites
• a cleaner interface to files and directories through the web

Be sure to read the new FAQ pages and the
forum announcements

After successful testing, we’ve put our new frontend IMAP and POP proxy into place. Hopefully for users this will mostly be invisible, apart from a small improvement in latency for accessing POP/IMAP accounts.

Have you ever seen someone’s reply to an email, and instead of seeing something like:

From: Your Friend <theiremail @ emailprovider.com>

It looks like:

Wrom: GMEPYOQKEDOTWFAOBU

Well, if you have, and you were totally stumped about what was causing it, I’ve finally found out. I did some searching and found this mention as well. I emailed that guy, and he got back to me with what he found:

Its unrelated to your application. Its the client.

The client has installed an antivirus program (I think it was norton) and turned on “privacy” option. That option causes the program to scramble any email address it sees before allowing it over the network.

Whoever this is happening to - ask them to look into their computer and check the configuration of their “privacy” software.

So sounds like a anti-virus program issue!

More discussion in this forum thread.

We’re looking for some people to help test out a new frontend IMAP/POP proxy system we’re looking at using. Please see this forum thread for more details.