Carl Hutzler’s Blog

So I looked into why my blog was slow to load the last few weeks or so. It turned out the header background graphic (fall leaves) was a 340KB PNG file and it was adding 300+ KB of extra data that was not needed. So I changed it to a JPG with a lot of compression and its now just 16KB. Granted I still have some big graphics in a few of my recent posts which still yields 1MB initial load. But other than going through a lot of extra steps in my image posting process, this is just life. At least it is down from 1.4 MB which is a 30% savings.

But I started to wonder why the Wordpress theme I am using (or perhaps its Wordpress’s default?) uses a PNG instead of a JPG? The only time I think to use PNG is when I need an image with transparency so that the background shows through. Sometimes I use GIF but more and more I use PNG as it has transparency and I believe PNG can show more colors.

But as far as I can see, this banner/background image has no need for transparency. And since PNG is a lossless compression, it yields fairly large file sizes compared to JPG. Am I missing something? Are there other considerations?

My career at AOL started in May of 1997 as a project manager in our 24×7 Operations team. I was hired by Karl Smith and worked for Scott Gries. At first I was working on Tandem Login/Masterfile and some AIM instant messaging projects. But about 6 months into the job, the PjM who worked on AOL Mail quit. When the lead for Host Mail Development, Jay Levitt, sent a mail to the PjM team and asked who was going to run mail projects in operations, I jumped at the opportunity. AOL Mail is so well known and impacts so many people. “You’ve Got Mail” after all!

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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.

http://journals.aol.com/godwinbabu/tech/#Entry613

The above plugin for the Thunderbird email client (Windows or Mac or Linux) will let you specify that the client use the SAME password for SMTP as it does for IMAP. This is great for AOL employees as we use SecurID devices which mean that our password changes once per minute.

By using this plugin, the Thunderbird client will just use the IMAP client for the SMTP password. So as long as your IMAP session remains active (and it should if your imap client stays online), you will no longer have to enter your SMTP password to send mail constantly during the day. (if you are working >12 hours….many of us are these days!…you will have to re-auth for IMAP as the timeout for IMAP credentials is set to 12 hours)

And if you need help setting up Thunderbird and are internal, just visit the Wiki

One of my teammates (Stu Brandt) was doing some testing/exploration with RSS the other day in preparation for a project we have going to expose some mail transactions in a “web 2.0″ kind of way. The idea is to allow people access to their mailbox from a web world….like maybe their myaol page or their myyahoo page, their flickr home page, or AIM pages, etc. You get the idea. But you could also imagine people writing desktop apps like an Apple Widget to have the feed or a new browser toolbar, blah, blah.

Anyway, people kind of think of their mailbox as private, so a simple RSS syndication of everyone’s mailbox (while interesting) might piss off some folks. Some people just don’t like other people reading their mail (who would have guessed!). So we have to authenticate these feeds.

Stu was playing with Gmail’s feed for his gmail account (the feed is actually ATOM based just for correctness). During his testing of the gmail feed, he went to a website called Bloglines which is essentially a feed aggregator which allows people to aggregate a bunch of RSS feeds from blogs, news sites, etc into a single page much like MyAOL does. He entered the Gmail URL into the site and found something interesting. The bloglines site displayed someone else’s gmail inbox!

Screenshot

Its not completely obvious what is happening here, but this is what we thought was going on:

Likely the other gmail user (Chavescesures@gmail.com) added their inbox Atom feed to their bloglines screen at some point in time. Bloglines likely has a very well architected and efficient caching system to prevent them from hammering feeds for popular sites and maybe this caching was the issue? But the interesting thing is that their system somehow did not take into account that the same feed URL (in this case it is https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom) might result in different results due to authentication and not be something they want to cache. Usually an https would signify that, so I have to admit being a bit confused how bloglines could be broken like this. Or perhaps it is just a big nasty bug in the bloglines system?

Either way, it does give oneself pause as to whether you should ever give your name/password to a third party site for things like this or related. If that site is not secure, neither are you.

Just a few pictures from the day…
http://carlhutzler.com/family/

(click on independence day 2006)

I like the PDF. Download it, it is not a long thing.

From Shawn’s Blog
(Thanks, Shawn!)