What's wrong with Ability ?

[HVGS]

We use Ability in a K-12 school environment and have since been since Dec 2005.
We have 1000 student accounts and 150 staff accounts
Overall we have been happy with the product.

However I am becoming frustrated with the lack of progress of the vapourware V3 of Ability.

My main issues with 2.63 of Ability are

1. The throttling of IMAP and Webmail connections to around 70kb/s to 100 kb/s max even on local network

I reported this issue to Rob. These days these speeds are not even good enough for internet connections given the size of mails these days

2. Account lockout works on IP not account name

This is a real issue in a school environment. If a student gets his password wrong too many times (or tries to guess another's password) then the account lockout will lockout the IP address of the computer. If another student uses that PC within the lockout period they are denied access.

3. Windows Authentication is still not available

This is not good enough for an "Enterprise" product

We are investigated doing our own Windows login wrapper for Ability but we shouldn't have too.

4. The IMAP4 services hangs at random intervals......can crash twice a day or not for a week.

We have had to write our own service watcher / restarter to work around this

5. Mailing lists don't have option to send each message separately.

We use the mailing lists to send bulk mail outs to parents. A lot of ISP's will not take a message with too many local recipients.
Thankfully Ability has a lot of flexibility in the filtering engine and we are able to integrate a separate mailer to individually email each list recipient.
(Febooti is the mailer we script because it can "re-email" eml files in correct format)

6. Webmail is looking dated

Don't get me wrong, I love Ability and it is very hassle free and robust.
I don't want to change mail servers but especially the throttling issues are causing a lot of annoyed users.


Regards,
Phil

[rob]

Please let me assure Ability Mail Server is still alive and well and version 3 is still in developement. Unfortunately, due to the size of the task we set ourselves, it has taken much longer to develop than we originally anticipated. Basically we have had to rewrite the entire mail server and work from the ground up. I will also be honest in that we have had to rework the design a couple of times along the way to get it just right for what we plan. Now presently we are trying to avoid forecasting when the release date is as the version 3 project does indeed seem to enjoy forcing us to change these.

1. Of course this won't be a problem in version 3. However, because of the delays to version 3, we are looking at enhancing version 2.xx in its current form, and removing the throttle is at the top of our list.

2. I will make a recommendation for a new antihammering option on a per account basis. Of course the IP antihammering feature is ideal for internet based mail servers and does offer the same level of security.

3. This is a key feature of version 3 and something we are keen to see in all our products.

4. If you could send me your IMAP4 logs and note times that the mail server had to be restarted I will certainly investigate this. Please send the logs to rob@code-crafters.com.

5. Mails per address is something we have looked into. However, our current system is of course designed to speed up and use as little resources as possible. However, this is still on the cards for version 3.

[HVGS]

Thanks,

Good news particularly about throttling issue. I see you are running 2.65 on your mail server already. Will throttling be addressed in 2.65 release version or if not is there any time frame you could give ?

Phil

[rob]

After speaking with a colleague it would seem that the next patch 'should' be getting a fix to the throttle problem (due hopefully later this week). However, I have personally been working on efficiency idea we came across a few weeks back. These changes are now of course live on our own server (2.65) and so far the software has shown it is several times faster in processing large activity spikes.

[rob]

We have just released 2.70 which has fixed the throttling issue (along with many other things).

[mcknet]

As far as #6 goes, I would like to see themes with the ability to update or change them easily after the software's release. Maybe people can customize them and upload them here for others to download? It looks to me like you're almost there after having gone through the files in the webmailenhanced folder. I would love to see an interface like Outlook Web Access, but I'm sure that's a lot of work. I'd rather see V3 be released sooner.

[rob]

The built in WebMail system is intended for complete customization, but of course we do hope to add new templates in the future. However as our WebMail system is unique in how the pages are formed (our own scripting method), few customers have delved much further than the swapping out images and changing some text or colours. In our old system, we did used to receive regular templates from customers but presently the few we have for the enhanced template do miss out alot of the more recently added features. If we do add any templates, an outlook style template is something we would probably do first due to popular request, however, we of course are dedicating most of our resources to getting the next generation of AMS and AFS out.