Emaily 0.7.1: Simplified email delivery, more stability (#emaily #googlewave)

Emaily 0.7 was announced last week, and it turned out that there are some cases where it still does not behave the way like it should. Today I'm happy to announce the fruits of some hard fixing and planning work, Emaily 0.7.1. The changes are the following:

Incoming emails are not distributed

In earlier versions, when a wave received a reply from an email user, and it has more than one email users and the incoming email did not have all email recipients listed in Cc: or the To: fields, then Emaily decided to deliver the email to the missing recipients. This was intended to be a feature, but it is very annoying in some cases, so we decided to disable the incoming email-distribution entirely. If a reply comes to a wave from email, it is not sent to any other email recipient (unless it is edited by a wave participant, in that case, it behaves like a new and edited blip).

This is not a problem if the communication is between one wave user and one email user, and less disturbing in some cases when there are more email users, especially when one participant is a mailing list.

Emails are sent out to every participant at once

Previously we sent out emails to each recipient separately, so that email participants did not see the participants of the conversation. The spirit of the wave is that every participant is visible for the others, so now we've changed this behavior. Every outgoing email now has all email and wave participants in their To: field.

An advantage of this is that combined with the previous feature is that if email participants use the "reply all" feature of their email client, then everyone will get every part of the conversation in a multi-participant conversation without the need of control from Emaily.

Manual send is disabled

Manual send will require some rework, and is more confusing than helpful, so we removed it temporarily. Now every message you finish in a wave will get delivered automatically after about 30 seconds.

Redirecting emails, mailing lists

With these changes, it is now safe to redirect your emails to wave: you don't need to worry that your nice wave robot sends out emails when you did not want to.

You can even subscribe to a mailing list with your emaily email address. If some other Emaily user is a member of the same mailing list, then you'll have a common wave created from the emails coming from the mailing list, so you can even discuss things faster (realtime), than members of the mailing list.

Enjoy the newest version of Emaily!

Emaily release: 0.7: Stability improvements (#emaily)

Emaily has reached its new milestone today: 0.7. We've been working on Emaily for a long time with no announced release, so I thought an update would be due.

Recently our efforts was split into developing and extending Emaily as a robot and working with the Wave team on some other cool thing which I cannot tell right now. But yes, it is related to emails. ;)

Stabilization

On the Robot side, we managed to finally stabilize it, so that we feel it is now reliable and usable with basic functionality. We think that we fixed all the errors we saw recently in our console and for now, you have a reliable email to Wave and Wave to email gateway. We do expect standard emails to arrive properly (normal means not too big, not specially crafted, etc.) and that wave updates are sent out reliably.

Email recipient handling vs. Wave participants

Email is different than Wave on how it deals with recipients/participants. Thus, any integration effort between these systems has to have tradeoffs. We figured out our way of handling email recipients, and we think that this approach handles some very common cases, though definitely not all.

One of the goals of the robot is to be as transparent as possible without being confusing. Starting from this release, when someone answers to an email which was sent out from Emaily and adds more email recipients to the reply email, then the robot will add these people to the conversation. Starting from that point, these people will get all updates on that wave and they can even reply. There is no current way of unsubscribing from a wave from email, but wave participants can remove any email participant, so you just need to ask someone.

The same works if this is a new email which arrives to your Wave. If there were more recipients, you will see them as wave participants, so when you answer, everyone will get the answer.

Future

There has been a lot of work done recently on the most requested features also: rich text emails and attachments. Actually they are almost ready.

Two weeks ago, we had a 4-day hackaton, where a team of 6 people worked on Emaily, and the biggest achievement was the development of these features. They require some polishing before release, but they are definitely around the corner!

The Emaily Team in the Hackathon

Class::Date 1.1.10

Class::Date 1.1.10 is released. This is a new release after a long time. (You don't need to change something which is perfect do you? :) )

Project link: http://code.google.com/p/perl-class-date

Changelog entry:

1.1.10  Sun Jul 18 13:27:39 CEST 2010
 - Remove the deprecated UNIVERSAL::import (Vladimir Timofeev)

RITMO 2010, a Google Wave based conference, Email integration panel

Recently there was a Google Wave based conference called RITMO 2010. You can imagine it like a virtual conference, where people are not gathered in crowded rooms, but sit in their comfortable chair in their home or workplace and discuss the conference topics through Google Wave.

This conference had a panel about Wave-Email integration. Mr. Ray and Emaily was invited. Here is the wave, you have to scroll down to 75% if you are interested in the past, present and future of Emaily:

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!