Carl Hutzler’s Blog

Back in June, I sent a note to Ted Leonsis asking if he could hook me up with someone in the Washington Capitals front office to get a Press Pass to a pre-season Capitals game. Ted responded within a few hours and included some folks from the Press Relations office. Within a day I had passes to two pre-season games. Thank you, Ted!

So Friday evening came. I had to be downtown one hour before game time to meet with the Capital’s Head Photographer in the “dark room”.

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A big cold front pushed in late yesterday and ushered in 50 degree temps and a nice NW breeze. I set out for 15 miles but felt great and pushed it to 20. I could have gone 26.2 today without an issue. My heart rate stayed down pretty much in the 80% range throughout until I pushed my pace at the end. 20 Miles, 4 hours and 4 minutes.

Now I have to run some maintenance runs during the week with some slightly longer weekend runs until the Marathon on October 29th.

Alan Keister (AOL’s Director of AIM Development) showed me AIM Buddy Feed today. Basically, it is an RSS feed “aggregator”.

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Last year, Margot Koschier and I taped some interviews in AOL’s Reston operations facility for an upcoming film, Spam: The Documentary. The film was produced by Scott Dobson and directed by David Manning for Canada’s CBC station (similar to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the US)

Anyway, looks like it airs on both Tuesday October 17 and Saturday October 21 at 10pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld. Set your TIVO!!

We heard from the director that they got some great footage when they literally ran after some well known spammers and tried to interview them in Las Vegas. Should be fun.

PS: If anyone does actually TIVO it, I would love to see the show. I just can’t wait until it comes to the States on Court TV sometime in the future :-)

Our new personal domains product is starting to kick some butt! A little email marketing to a few folks, some blog postings, and I think we might start to see some of that viral marketing kick in.

Having worked at AOL for a long time, it is also great to see some positive feedback from our customers in light of all the negatives that we seem to face each day. Thank you “Chip Chick” whoever you are :-)

http://www.chipchick.com/2006/09/aols_my_eaddres.html

Graph: Adoption Rate “Hockey Stick”

AOL has been experimenting with Top Coder of late. We asked them to create a couple of Thunderbird client plugins which extend some of the features of the AOL Mail system to Thunderbird users. The features are bundled into two plugins:

AOL_Extended_IMAP
- REPORT SPAM (obvious)
- STATUS (to see if someone has read or deleted a mail)
- UNSEND (to unsend a message if no one has read it)

AOL_SMTP_Authentication
- Force the SMTP password to be the same as the IMAP password
this mostly helps users who have passwords that change once/min - like AOL employees who use securID

So far, I have been pleased with Top Coder’s efforts. They did what they said they would, produced a product that works, and did it on-time. Not bad!

They have asked us to beta test the products. Below are the applications for your downloading pleasure.

AOL_Extended_IMAP.XPI

AOL_SMTP_Authentication Linux
AOL_SMTP_Authentication Mac/Apple Universal
AOL_SMTP_Authentication Windows32

Enjoy and let me know how it works for you, bugs, suggestions for improvements, etc.

UPDATE: January 20th, 2007

John Snow created a “patch” for Thunderbird on Windows which basically removes the legacy feature whereby Thunderbird tries to detect whether it is talking to an AOL IMAP server versus another generic IMAP server. Why would you want to remove this functionality? Well, Thunderbird behaves differently if it thinks it is talking to AOL. For example, some of the rules for filing mail (filtering) do not work right. In addition we have noticed that some of the ways TB displays things like the SENDER of an email work differently as well - instead of displaying FROM: Carl Hutzler, TB displays FROM: cdhutzler@aol.com when it is talking to AOL. When it talks to other mail systems, it displays the display name if that is available. I am sure there are more differences, but these are the ones we know about right now.

Just so everyone is understanding why this happens, I want to be clear this has nothing to do with AOL’s email/IMAP server implementation. It has more to do with how the original Mozilla client email code (created by AOL) worked from a product standpoint. The product folks wanted to be sure that spammers/hackers/phishers could not spoof their “display name” like “George W Bush”. Not that spammers could not already pretend to be george.w.bush@whitehouse.gov anyway, but that’s not the point :-).

Anyway, long story short, this is a link to the TBIRD Patch that will change the application (fool it) into thinking it is always talking to non-AOL servers and hence cause it to act just like it does with any other mail server.

If you apply the patch and use the AOL_IMAP.XPI extension, you will also want to download a slightly updated Tbird plugin for the AOL_IMAP.XPI as well. Otherwise the extension won’t work with the patched TB. Thanks to John for updating this as well!

Jeremy Collins just created a neat little plugin which is similar to the Thunderbird plugin I posted about last week. This plugin for Apple’s Mail.app also allows AOL employees (or anyone) to use the same password they use for SMTP as they do for IMAP. Really helps with SecurID protected accounts for employees.

Check it out on Jeremy’s internal AOL site (must be behind the firewall):

http://doodlebug.office.aol.com/ReuseSMTPPlugin/

On July 13th our executives told us they wanted free domains for everyone. They wanted these domains to be able to be used on any AOL property including email and AIM (IM). They gave us just 7 weeks to make it all happen including:

- Become a public registrar for COM and NET top level domains
- Create a web GUI to allow registration of domains and creation of identities within a domain (invites)
- Make changes to the AOL Mail system, IMAP/SMTP, and Webmail to fully support this new identity type
- Create a DNS and WHOIS system to handle DNS records (MX records) to fully enable these domains on the Internet
- Make major changes to AOL’s authentication and authorization systems to support this new GUID based identity

Oh, and fully test it and deploy it!

And what happened next was truly a demonstration of how efficiently and quickly AOL can build technology and systems. We delivered a functioning system within a day of our deadline. The system has launched and the masses are coming.

Congratulations to everyone in EAI Technologies, Tech Dev, Operations, QA, and Product that had a major hand in seeing this through. I would not have wanted to go through it with any other team. We worked our a**es off on this :-)

To everyone else, go get your free domain in 3 easy steps at http://domains.aol.com/

And be sure to comment on what things you think we are missing. We have our own ideas, but hearing back from people is always a great source of information.