Happy New Year and state report from the HQ #emaily #googlewave #wave

Happy New Year (well, better late than never) and Hi everyone who is interested in what's up with Emaily recently:

• As you might know, we, the developers of Emaily are Google Employees, we are doing Emaily in our 20% time. (GURU is helping us, he is not :) )
• We are back from Christmas Holidays.
• I am back from Sydney, where I met the Google Wave team, and we established a very good relationship.
• We are now testing an upcoming version of the Wave API in Emaily and because it is not released yet, we cannot share the source code from the point where started using it. This requires a big work, so please don't expect bugfixes in the meantime. Once we ported to the new API, many strange bugs will disappear at once (like phantom people on the wave which is created form an email, receiving email inconsistencies, etc.). So you probably won't see the progress, but there is!
• AppEngine is pretty limited for what we want to achieve, so we are thinking of rearchitecting Emaily into an application, which uses more of the internal Google services. For example if we run on AppEngine, we are not allowed to send and receive emails from your GMail account, just with a strangely encoded email address. We cannot use your GMail profile avatar in waves when you receive an email, etc. The consequence of that is that we once we start doing that, we probably won't continue the open-source version of Emaily. We simply don't have enough people to support the open source version. We prefer using our time to develop new features instead.
• Wave itself is very heavily under development, and we also need to rewrite our code sometimes, which leads to inefficiency in our developmet and that also make the progress slow.
• The good news is that more and more people are interested in the project inside Google, and we now have 4 developers working on the project.

Thanks for everyone who participated in the development by helping us or reporting bugs, or even testing features! We very appreciates that, and we hope that Emaily will deliver a much better user experience that it delivers today!

Cheers,

Balázs

Magyar billentyűzetkiosztás Androidhoz (Nexus One-hoz is)

Sziasztok!

Az AnySoftKeyboard fejlesztői elkészítették nekünk a magyar billentyűzetkiosztást Android telefonokhoz. Egyelőre még csak teszt verzióban létezik, de innen letölthető. Nálam működik.

Emaily stability fixes, ~6000 email per day, Sydney

Since the release of Emaily 0.3, the usage skyrocketed. On the Monday after Thanksgiving, many people started to use it. As I am writing now, it is expected to send out about 6000 emails per day.

When I first reported that Emaily sends out 1500 emails per day that number was wrong, the real number was much lower. The cause of the false report was a software bug, which tried to send an email in every minute, but it failed and it counted as email sending. When I fixed the bug, the daily number fell to ~300. But now, the 6000 seems to be a real number, as no bugs are known which is about resending. :)

In the last days, we made a lot of efforts to stabilize the system. We got many concurrency-related errors, some people complained about duplicated waves from emails, etc. Now it seems that the most severe problems are solved, we got barely a few errors because of the underlying datastore, nothing else.

The focus of the near future is to refine the send and receive logic (how exactly we will add recipients to the blips, wavelets), fix how a new incoming email appears, fix of resending the arrived blip to the sender, etc. Soon you'll see changes for these.

From next week, I'll be in Sydney and work with the Google Wave team to make Emaily and Google Wave better. Are you interested? Just stay tuned!

New #Emaily release: 0.3 - manual send, incoming email threading, new participant icon. #googlewave #wave

Finally, Emaily 0.3 and some long-awaited changes are ready! In the last month, we have improved Emaily by:

• Adding the possibility of manual sending (blip-by-blip, no automatic emails). You just have to uncheck the "Automatic send" checkbox, and in the new or edited blips, a "Send" button will appear. By clicking it, it will initiate the email sending.
• Fixing the bug with accented, cyrillic, chinese, etc. (not plain US) e-mail subject encoding problem. (now you'll see "УРА, работает" instead of "???, ????????").
• Support for threading of incoming emails. Your emails will appear as a new blip if they are answered by the email recipients. They won't always open new waves from now. (Credits for this goes to Christophe!)
• Changing icon for email participants (to make it easier for you to distinguish email recipients from the robot itself). Note, that it is not the final icon, but better than the previous one.
• Reduced the database and CPU usage of emaily when you have multiple email users on a wave.

Please take a look at the open issues page, vote for your favorite feature (or bug), and then they'll be implemented/fixed earlier.

We know that Emaily is still in an early stage, there are some missing features which we would like to address. There are also known issues, especially sometimes strange participants appear in the waves which Emaily creates (vote for this bug here).

Besides these, we have plans for improvements, too:

• Adding the possibility to autocomplete email addresses from the user's addressbook. This is not that easy that it seems (vote for this here).
• Add HTML email support for receiving and for sending also (vote for this here).
• Add attachment sending/receiving (vote for this here).

If you did not find your favorite feature or you encountered a bug, please open a new issue.

We express our deeeeeeep gratitude to all who helped us in finding bugs and using Emaily. Guys, without you we would not have had such progress! Thanks all of you and keep going!

Enjoy using Emaily!

Best regards,

Guru & Balázs

representing the Emaily team.

Emaily short news: version 0.2.2: bugfix release; publicity, community; in the works #emaily #googlewave #wave

I'm happy to announce the new version of Emaily: 0.2.2, the new homepage, some community news, and what are in the works.

Emaily 0.2.2:

There are not too many user visible changes in this release, it is mainly about bugfixing. If you are interested about the technical details, here they are:

• We did not store the wave-id to the wavelets, just the wavelet-id. I assumed it is unique, but it turned out that there are many wavelet ids that are the same, so we actually ended up an almost unusable database. Now in this release, we will start storing the wave-id, so each wavelet is actually unique.
• Some cleanup happened in the email-receiving code.
• The datastore tricked me a little: I assumed that if I set a field to null, then it won't match a given numeric query (less than a number), but I was wrong. The result of this mistake was that every time the robot checked for emails to send, it looked through the whole database. Over time, one call consumed more and more CPU, and became slower and slower. The fix was easy, and now it works well.
• There was a bug in the robot API, which made the robot fail and forget to record the changes in its state when a blip is deleted. This was probably caused by some recent change, because earlier we did not have this problem. I made a workaround for that, so this is also working fine.
• Added an empty robot page in http://emaily-wave.appspot.com, which redirects to the homepage (http://emaily.dlux.hu).

I hope this release will be much more stable than before.

New homepage

Well, not actually new, but the informations are updated. I hope the usage is easy enough now for most people to use it.

Publicity, community

I opened a wave for questions and feature requests. If you did not know about that yet, check the new homepage for the link. (I don't want to write the link here, because it might change in the future. The reason is that it is getting pretty slow to load: 132 blips currently). Feel free to contribute!

Arpit wrote a nice review about Emaily, you can check it here! Thank you very much!

l3reak has a step by step description of Making Google Wave work with E-mail & facebook. Very extensive description on how to use Emaily! Good work, thank you!

In the works

We are working on two major things, and I hope we can get it done soon:

Manual sending:

Emaily currently sends unedited blips after about one minute, but some people prefer pressing the "Send" button instead.

Maybe you want to write a very important email to your love, your landlord or your boss: you don't want Emaily to rush you, do you?

Threading:

Now Emaily creates a new wave from all your incoming messages, but a conversation-like user experience would be much better: We'll create a new blip instead of a new wave when a reply comes from an email user.

If you are interested in the updates about emaily, subscribe to my twitter (dluxhu) or to the "emaily" label in my blog.

Emaily 0.2.1: Easier to use email sending in Wave #emaily #googlewave #wave

This weekend was pretty busy in the Emaily world!

Christophe and me also worked on things, and we incorporated the first change from Karan, too. Some of them you can see already, some of them are coming in the next week(s)!

The biggest news is that you don't need to manually encode the email address anymore if you want to send an email to someone with Emaily.

Here is how to use Emaily now:

• Add emaily-wave@appspot.com to your contact list.
• Click on the contact entry, select "New Wave".
• It will create a new wave with you and Emaily in it.
• The robot will add a blip at the end of the Wave, and an input box where you can add email participants with their email address. It will do the hard work for you to convert their email address to Wave participants. No more manual work. You will see that the new recipients will show up in the recipients list.
• After you finished, you can leave the blip as is, or you can even remove it.

Features to come in the next releases:

• Make Emaily an extension: how about a "New Email" button to make things even easier?
• Threading: do you want the answers in the same wave as you sent the first email from? We want that, too!

Enjoy!

Emaily release: 0.1.1: Bugfix. ~1500 emails are sent out daily. #wave #googlewave

New weekend, new Emaily release. Not too much visible change in version 0.1.1, just a small bugfix, which made emails queue up. If you just got your email which you sent a couple of days ago, then this is why it happened. :)

About ~1500 emails are sent out daily with Emaily now. This is a big number given that it is just a very early version!

Spread the word, use this robot!

In the next weeks we're going to work on more usability features. If you have a feature request, feel free to send it!