IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett Webmail: The new WING Tony Brett Oxford University Computing Services

IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett Agenda History Why the change? What the users wanted – the ‘competition’ Early mock-ups and the final result What it runs on Major changes Gotchas Future Developments Resources Questions

IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett History Herald came into existence in 1998 WING – Web IMAP News Gateway Never intended to be used as heavily as it is now. Meant as a backup, with most people using IMAP clients with a few POP3 WING predates ethernet in all student rooms

IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett Why the Change? WING considered outdated Clumsy interface Hard to act on multiple messages Volume of , especially SPAM has increased dramatically –Better tools needed to handle this Needed a more intuitive and modern feel to web interface Chose an interim fix rather than a complete rewrite

IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett What the users wanted Consistent visual appearance Easier message selection and sorting –Operations on multiple messages Word wrap on read and compose More powerful search tools More flexible filtering Improved attachment/browser handling Easier-to-use address book –Including import from WING

IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett The Competition

IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett Some early mock-ups

IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett The final result Where you are in the folder Folder name Folder heirarchy Sort columns Move around the folder Message select checkboxes

IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett What it runs on 8 PCs running Debian Stable (Woody) –2.66Ghz P4 –1GB RAM each –Load-balanced cluster Apache & mod_perl 800 concurrent users as of 11am today, have seen 10,000 different people already! WING ran (runs) on 8 Machines, PII MB RAM

IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett Major Changes (1) Consistent and clearer visual appearance Checkbox selection of messages –Operate on multiple messages Sorting in the folder view Wrapping – read and compose Filtering –Blacklist & Whitelist –Junk-mail spam assassin threshold –Trash (do not deliver) spam assasin threshold SSL-only. Globalsign certificate –webmail.ox.ac.uk and *.herald.ox.ac.uk so browsers shouldn’t moan now

IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett Major Changes (2) No longer supporting the SPAM filtering on X- Oxmail-Warning: header. –SPAM scores give user much more control Attachments work better for users –We’ve worked round the IE bug that causes corrupted filenames and [1] on the end of extensions Manage and Options screens merged and made consistent Status Page –Bar display for mailbox usage –Last login details –Completion date Context-sensitive help

IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett Gotchas Netscape 4 Lynx Auto-forward forwards after the filters now. –WING sent everything Vacation, forward and filtering have no effect on WING once they’ve been modified on Webmail WING address book migration –Finding the button! –Multiple WING address books –Groups

IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett Future Developments Remote access to address book (LDAP) by mail clients Import from other address book formats Flexible server-side filtering Rewrite in XML Forward with attachment

IT Support Staff Seminar 2 March 2004 Tony Brett Resources