Mat's Hideout rants, raves, rhymes, reviews

I’d like to consider myself a child of the modern world, but … email. I’m a slave to it. I have a number of different enterprises that I run and look after, I administer 7 of my own Google Apps Domains not to mention looking after a few more for my clients (schools) who have typically many hundreds of email accounts per domain.

For a small business owner, customer communications are absolutely critical to my livelihood, and so choosing the right email client is important for me.

Back in the earlier days of Windows, there were really only two products for Windows users. Outlook and Outlook Express. The latter was laughable, and so I was a great lover of Outlook with its enterprise features like Public Folders, shared resources, meeting requests, etc. I loved Outlook XP when they introduced “Outlook Today” – somehow this was the pinnacle of technological progress being able to see my calendar and my emails and my task list all in a friendly view.

Then came Gmail and I never looked back. In comparison, Outlook felt bloated and slow – probably because email demands have increased over the years and we expect to keep mailboxes of 15GB and more, with everything instantly accessible.

But webmail was lacking in some ways. Firstly the hassle of multiple sign-ins, and the fact that I couldn’t keep multiple calendars from different accounts (yes I know this is a bizarre thing to need…)

For years now I’ve been using the Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 Mail client and in the most part I’ve found it excellent. But… lacking.

There’s no native access to Gmail contacts or Calendar (although it is possible to view your Gmail calendar now). It’s a very well designed interface, but it lacks configurability, such as using different views, specifying exactly how much of the last 15 years of email I’d like to download, advanced email signatures, and I always need to revert back to Gmail web interface to search my email archive. For years I’ve kept my eyes out for a new mail client.

Enter… Mailbird 2.0. The feature set was attractive:

• A “coming of age” email client
• All the obvious things like multiple account support
• A really nice integration with Google Calendar and contacts
• Unified email inbox (this has become important to me)
• Quick, batch archiving of emails in multiple accounts (Outlook 2016 is missing this!)
• Touchscreen support
• Some other great integrations: a Whatsapp sidebar, Moo.do, and loads of other apps
• Identity support, i.e. advanced multiple email signatures

As soon as I downloaded it, I loved it so I purchased it within a few hours and I’ve been running it for a couple of weeks now.

Here’s my review.

Speed

First things first. It’s fast. Searching is fast, the UI doesn’t hang randomly as I’ve come to expect from Outlook, and I love the keyboard shortcut support. I really like multiple selecting emails in the unified view and hitting E to archive them into their respective archive folders. Getting to “inbox zero” is a big thing for me, as I feel like I am sinking under email sometimes, so this is good.

Reliability

An email client must not crash. Ever. Having put Mailbird 2.0 through its paces with my 10 email accounts ranging from Gmail to Office 365, each with gigabytes of mail, attachments, folders, tags, etc., I’m pretty happy on the reliability aspect.

Configurability

The application supports two view styles: the traditional Outlook style reading pane at the bottom right with email list above it, and the newer style email list on the left:

I’m a configurability nerd, and I like a little more control. Whilst I can drag panes to make them bigger and smaller, it’s not amazing in this respect. But – life is too short, and it does what I need so I’m happy here.

Email signatures

Excellent support for advanced signatures. With one exception, which you may consider minor but to some it’s very important. It doesn’t allow attaching images to the signature. You can link to images online, but not attach.

Some email purists might consider this a good thing: attaching a file to every email you send makes email bigger, and takes up more storage space, increases bandwidth use, etc. For me it’s a small price to pay to ensure the signature appears correctly on the screen, as most clients block linked images by default.

I raised this with Mailbird support, their first response was that attaching images to a signature could create a security flaw as a trojan might inject a virus into the signature. I responded by saying that they should probably consider disallowing email attachments altogether in that case, not just to signatures. They responded well and said they would consider this for future developments.

Core reading and writing functionality

The main look and feel of the interface is similar to Outlook in that you can double-click on an email in the inbox list and a new window will open.

However Mailbird has this quick “in-line” email compose view:

This is the default way of responding to an email, if you hit R for reply or use the button over the email in the preview pane:

This inline view is the biggest problem with Mailbird.

To date I’ve lost a few emails, and been confounded by what to press and where, when you need to change the recipients, subject, or anything else.

Here are the problems:

• If you “reply to all”, it only shows the primary recipient at the top, i.e. the person who sent the email. That’s fine, because at the bottom it lists all recipients

• Now what if I want to change the recipients? You would click on the little double arrow at the bottom, wouldn’t you? No. That switches between “reply” and “reply to all”
• So you’d click on the names at the bottom, right? No. That does nothing.
• So you’d click on the same line as the green name at the top, right? No. That collapses the inline view and the whole email and you have to start again.
• So you’d click on the little arrow on the right at the top? No, that brings up a context menu for the original email, which is completely useless when you want to do something with the email you are writing.
• Ok so you click on the green name at the top. That shows what I need:

• Let’s say you’ve gone ahead and spent 30 minutes writing a response to your email. Can you see where I’m going with this…
• You click on a name at the top to remove it (you don’t need to CC yourself in do you?)
• Right-click – no option to remove recipient
• Click and press delete – woah. You just lost the email you wrote. There’s an option to “UNDO” that pops up at the bottom, but when you press it, it just un-deletes the original email, it doesn’t restore your draft!

Conclusion

There are a few other things that bug me about the inline view, which make it very difficult to use in my opinion. This aspect lacks polish.

Most importantly, I should never lose a draft. Ever. This is a big problem for me.

Searching is fast but I can’t do powerful searches (date ranges, field searches).

The client uses screen space very efficiently.

I’m unable to specify views. For example I can’t show unread emails. If you need to get to Inbox Zero, this makes it hard work as you’d have to search through hundreds of emails to find that one unread email to mark it as read!

I can click quickly between huge mailboxes without any lag. This is excellent.

After noip.com and dyndns.org shut their doors to all but non-paying customers, I spent many years without being able to reliably access my home network from outside. Of course, it was always possible to do without dynamic DNS by making a note of the current IP address and use this for as long as the address stayed the same, but sods law I would *really* need to access home the day that the router was upgraded remotely or the address expired or whatever.

Over these years I looked at various options, and almost settled on installing BIND9 and using nsupdate on a remote machine and writing a script on the local network to check-in periodically.

This seemed like a good option because I already pay monthly for a linux VPS so there was no extra outlay. Deep down, though, I knew it was overly complicated and would probably break someday because I don’t have the time to maintain my VPS in a “mission critical” way, or I’d rebuild the server and forget it took me 4 hours to setup the solution, thus ending up not having it for another 6 months because I couldn’t be bothered to go through the effort again.

Turns out there was much more of a tidy solution for me. I use Linode.com to host my VPS, and I also use its excellent DNS manager control panel for all of my domains. Sure, you can use the DNS manager of your domain registrar and create A records and the like to point to your Linode’s IP, but it’s so much nicer pointing your NS servers to Linode and managing all your DNS settings from Linode. The interface is designed beautifully, the account security is top-notch, not to mention there’s a very sweet iPhone app that makes creating records / cloning zones a breeze.

I digress. My solution involves creating a Linode API key, pulling-out the domain and resource IDs from Linode, then having a powershell script which runs on a local Windows box update these when it detects a change of address.

I won’t bother going in to the former as you can work that out, but the latter is certainly something worth sharing here.

After nicking the IPChangeNotify powershell script from somewhere on the web, I discovered a whole load of reliability weaknesses, which I’ve pretty much accounted for. Without further ado, here’s the spec of my updated script and solution as a whole

• relies on Windows task scheduler
• (ironically) uses dyndns IP address checker at http://checkip.dyndns.com/
• if for some reason the above doesn’t respond in a timely manner, it waits, tries again, waits, etc.
• updates are of course made securely, over https
• email notifications telling you a whole load of useful info such as:
  • how many attempts it took to discover the ip address
  • number of milliseconds it took to discover the address (for fun / to help diagnose problems)
  • old ip address
  • new ip address if changed
  • response from Linode API to confirm that the A record was updated
  • email subject based on change / success / failure to allow for sensible rules in Gmail
• write-out the IP address to Dropbox (added bonus – you get a little Windows notification when this text file is changed) – just in case something goes wrong and you can’t be bothered to sift through notification emails

All you need to make this work is:

• a Linode account
• Windows machine on your local network that stays on all the time
• the below script

(Apologies for the godawful formatting, but it should copy/paste okay!)

$scriptpath = $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Definition
[string]$dir = Split-Path $scriptpath
set-location $dir

$oldip = gc .\ip.txt
Write-Host “IP stored in Dropbox: $oldip”
Write-Host “Getting current IP…”

$firststartTime = get-date
$webpage = (New-Object net.webclient).downloadstring(“http://checkip.dyndns.com”)
$firstendTime = get-date
$timetogetpage = ($firstendTime – $firststartTime).TotalSeconds
$currentip = $webpage -replace “[^\d\.]”
Write-Host $currentip
Write-Host “That took” $timetogetpage “seconds”

if ($timetogetpage -le 2) {
$triestext = “(on first attempt)”
} else {
$triestext = “, not on the first attempt:`n`nTry 1 ($currentip) = $timetogetpage`n”
}
$tries = 1
while ($timetogetpage -gt 2) {
Write-Host “Let’s try again”
$subsequentstartTime = get-date
$webpage = (New-Object net.webclient).downloadstring(“http://checkip.dyndns.com”)
$subsequentendTime = get-date
$timetogetpage = ($subsequentendTime – $subsequentstartTime).TotalSeconds
$currentip = $webpage -replace “[^\d\.]”
$tries++
$triestext = $triestext + “Try $tries ($currentip) = $timetogetpage `n”
Write-Host “Try $tries ($currentip) = $timetogetpage”
}

$smtpServer = “smtp.gmail.com”
$sender = “sender-email@gmail.com”
$users = “recipient-email@gmail.com”, “anotheruser@gmail.com”
$subject = “”

# change the below to match the ID of the given record
$resourceid=’1234567′
# change api_key and domainid below to match your Linode.com API key and ID of the domain
$updateurl=”https://api.linode.com/?api_key=abcdefg&api_action=domain.resource.update&domainid=123456&resourceid=$resourceid&target=$currentip”

if ($timetogetpage -lt 3) {
if ($oldip -eq $currentip) {
# Discovery success – IP stayed the same (ideal case)
$subject = $subject + “IP address found: $currentip. No change! (discovery took $timetogetpage seconds)”
$body = “Old IP = $oldip`nNew IP = $currentip`n`nNo change!`n`nDiscovery took $timetogetpage seconds $triestext”
Write-Host “Not updating the file” -ForegroundColor Gray

} else {
# Discovery success – IP changed (important case)
$subject = $subject + “IP change detected: $currentip. Discovery took $timetogetpage seconds”
$body = “Old IP = $oldip`nNew IP = $currentip`n`nWe updated the DNS!`n`nDiscovery took $timetogetpage seconds $triestext”
$currentip | Out-File .\ip.txt -Force
Write-Host “New IP saved in file is: $currentip” -ForegroundColor Green
}

Write-Host “Updating DNS…”
$updatewebpage = (New-Object net.webclient).downloadstring($updateurl)
$body = $body + “`n`nOutput of the DNS Update service:`n`n$updatewebpage”
if ($updatewebpage -like “*Invalid*”) {
$body = $body + “`n`nLinode response: DID NOT UPDATE. Check Linode.com.”
} else {
$body = $body + “`n`nLinode response: UPDATED”
}
Write-Host “Output of the DNS update service: $updatewebpage”

} else {
# Discovery failed
$subject = $subject + “IP address kept as $currentip (discovery failed and took $timetogetpage seconds)”
$body = “Old IP = $oldip`nNew IP = $currentip`n`nI’m suspicious, discovery took $timetogetpage seconds $triestext”
Write-Host “IP address supposedly found, but it took $timetogetpage seconds” -ForegroundColor Red
Write-Host “Keeping the current IP: $currentip” -ForegroundColor Red
}

# Finally send the email
Write-Host “Sending an email now…” -ForegroundColor Green
foreach ($user in $users) {
Write-Host “Sending email notification to $user” -ForegroundColor Green
$smtp = New-Object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($smtpServer, 587)
$smtp.EnableSsl = $true
$smtp.Credentials = New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential(“sender-email@gmail.com”, “email-password”);
$smtp.Send($sender, $user, $subject, $body)
}

Here’s a quick hookup guide and sketch to get the ER-OLEDM032-1W display to work with Arduino. We are going to use the u8g library to drive the OLED.

The ER-OLEDM032-1W is a 256×64 graphic OLED module costing $26.56. White on black. I bought mine from eBay although the Chinese brand BuyDisplay.com sells them directly.

There are two versions of the display, one including the integrated PCB (above) and one without. We want the above one, with integrated PCB. Make sure you purchase the one with the M in the part number.

Here’s a link to the data sheet.

About the part number:

• ER stands for “East Rising” the manufacturer
• OLED stands for OLED: “organic light emitting diode”
• The M stands for “module”. I think. They do two versions, the one with driver board (adapter board) which is this one, and one without the driver board which doesn’t have that M. Confusingly they call the one without a driver board module an OLED module as well. Either I’m wrong or their naming convention is confusing. Or both. Either way you probably want the one with the M, it has an integrated PCB.
• The 032 stands for 3.2 inch, corner to corner
• Not sure what the 1 stands for, they all seem to have it
• The W stands for white, they have other colours (yellow, green blue)

To use the display with u8g library and Arduino you must swap the tiny resistor on the back in position R18 to the position R19. Do this with a steady hand, some really good tweezers and a soldering iron.

ER-OLEDM032-1W Display hookup
swap 0 ohm resistor from R18 to R19 on rear of display
1> gnd
2> 3.3 OR 5 ok
4> level conv – arduino 4 (clock)
5> level conv – arduino 5 (data)
7-13> gnd
14> level conv – arduino 7 (command data select i.e. D/S)
15> reset – this needs to be connected to +5v
16> level conv – arduino 6 (chip select)

For the level converter I used this very cheap module, a clone of something by Adafruit: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Pop-IIC-I2C-Logic-Level-Converter-Bi-Directional-Module-5V-to-3-3V-For-Arduino-/381311755120?hash=item58c7f3a370

And here’s a sketch. I ripped this from a larger sketch I have been working on and haven’t tested it, but it should all be about right.

#include "U8glib.h"

#define oledClock 4 // OLED
#define oledData 5 // OLED
#define chipSelect 6 // OLED
#define commandDataSelect 7 // OLED

U8GLIB_NHD31OLED_2X_GR u8g(oledClock, oledData, chipSelect, commandDataSelect);

void setup()
{
// Setup U8G
if ( u8g.getMode() == U8G_MODE_R3G3B2 ) u8g.setColorIndex(255); // white
else if ( u8g.getMode() == U8G_MODE_GRAY2BIT ) u8g.setColorIndex(3); // max intensity
else if ( u8g.getMode() == U8G_MODE_BW ) u8g.setColorIndex(1); // pixel on
else if ( u8g.getMode() == U8G_MODE_HICOLOR ) u8g.setHiColorByRGB(255,255,255);

....

}

/******************************************/
/* CONTROL DRAWING */
/* --------------- */
/******************************************/
void drawControl(void) {

** insert logic to draw different things here, e.g. as follows **

// Draw current room light level
if (showlightlevel == 1) {
u8g.setFont(u8g_font_6x10);
u8g.drawStr(178, 30, "Currently");
if (lux < 20) {
sprintf (buff, "%i%s", lux, " (dark)");
} else if (lux < 100) {
sprintf (buff, "%i%s", lux, " (med dark)");
} else if (lux < 400) {
sprintf (buff, "%i%s", lux, " (med bright)");
} else if (lux < 10000) {
sprintf (buff, "%i%s", lux, " (bright)");
}
u8g.drawStr(178, 40, buff);
}
}

void loop()
{
u8g.firstPage(); // START U8G
do { // START U8G
drawControl(); // START U8G

** insert the rest of your sketch that does stuff **

} // END U8G
while( u8g.nextPage() ); // END U8G
}