WIP articles

content/blog/2024-fosdem/index.md

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+title="Aerogramme in the modern email track at FOSDEM'24"
+date=2024-02-05
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+
+*FOSDEM is the European conference for FLOSS developpers. It was the first time Aerogramme was discussed publicly.
+If you missed the presentation, a recording and the slides are available.*
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+---
+
+## Recording
+
+<div class="video">
+  <video controls="controls" width="75%">
+    <source src="https://video.fosdem.org/2024/h2213/fosdem-2024-2642--servers-aerogramme-a-multi-region-imap-server.av1.webm" type="video/webm; codecs=&quot;av01.0.08M.08.0.110.01.01.01.0&quot;">
+    <source src="https://video.fosdem.org/2024/h2213/fosdem-2024-2642--servers-aerogramme-a-multi-region-imap-server.mp4" type="video/mp4">
+  </video>
+</div>
+
+## Transcript
+
+*(slide 1)* Aerogramme is a multi-region IMAP server, in this talk we will discuss what a "multi-region IMAP server" means and why it's important.
+
+*(slide 2)*
+Let's start with some context, my name is Quentin. I have a PhD in distributed system,
+and this talk will be a lot about PhD distributed system because something I know.
+I try to work as much as possible for a collective named Deuxfleurs where we try to build a low-tech Internet.
+If you want to know more about our project, check yesterday talk about Garage.
+Aerogramme is part of Deuxfleurs' strategy, and a very nice thing, this project is supported by NLnet.
+
+*(slide 3)*
+First, the problem we want to solve: we want to make other people available when it would be otherwise
+impossible (due to geographical distances for example). We can achieve this goal only if the underlying system is working:
+so we will talk a lot about availability and reliability.
+
+*(slide 4)*
+Today's talk is about 3 main ideas: 1) we should not trust the cloud & hosting providers as they can fail. 2) there is some space to explore alternative IMAP server designs and 3) and finally I will try to convince you that such new designs can work in the real life
+
+*(slide 5)*
+In the title talk, I speak about "multi-region", and so we must define first what is a "region".
+On the slide is depicted the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region in Paris: it's made of 3 datacenters.
+Last april, the whole region, the 3 datacenters were unavailable for 3 weeks.
+The outage lasted for 3 weeks for some services, and it was due to a fire in one datacenter.
+And due to tight connections between the 3 datacenters, the 2 others ones were unusable due to a software problem.
+3 weeks without emails, you imagine it can make your life very hard if you need to do some important stuff, like seeking a new job.
+
+*(rest of the transcript is missing currently)*
+
+## Links
+
+ - [Download Slides](https://fosdem.org/2024/events/attachments/fosdem-2024-2642--servers-aerogramme-a-multi-region-imap-server/slides/22665/aerogramme_vmnrj3Q.pdf)
+ - [Aerogramme Talk Page](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2642--servers-aerogramme-a-multi-region-imap-server/)
+ - [Modern Email Track](https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/modern-email/)
+ - [2024 edition main page](https://fosdem.org/2024/)
+

content/blog/2024-predictability-and-correctness/index.md

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+title="Aerogramme 0.2.2: predictability & user testing"
+date=2024-02-22
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+
+*Let's review how Aerogramme performances became more predictable, why it's important, and showcase how user testing helped surface bugs.*
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+---
+
+This minor version of Aerogramme put the focus on 2 aspects of the software: predictable performances & collecting user feedbacks.
+In the following, I describe both aspect in details.
+
+## More predictable performances
+
+![Fetch resource usage for Aerograme 0.2.1 & 0.2.2](fetch-full.png)
+
+![Search resource usage for Aerograme 0.2.1 & 0.2.2](search-full.png)
+
+*TODO AWS SDK*
+
+## Users feedbacks
+
+*Dovecot AUTH continuation inlining* - When a username + password is short,
+the Dovecot SASL Auth protocol allows the client (here Postfix)
+to send the base64 inlined, without having to wait for the continuation.
+It was not supported by Aerogramme and was preventing some users from authenticating.
+
+*Pipelining limits (reported by Nicolas)* - Pipeling limit set to 3.
+Avoiding DoS resources. But failing some honest clients like Mutt.
+Bumped to 64, will be watched in the next months.
+
+*SASL Auth subtleties (reported by Nicolas)* - Authorization can be empty, or can be set to the same value as Authentication.
+Second case not handled but required by Fair Email (thx Nicolas)
+
+*Thunderbird Autodiscovery issues (reported by LX & Nicolas)* - K9 stable does not support `%EMAILLOCALPART%`.
+K9 beta (6.714) does not support some values marked as obsolete in the `authentication` field: `plain` is not supported anymore, `password-cleartext` must be used instead.
+Content-Type is important also, if a wrong one is sent, content is silently ignored by some clients.
+
+*Broken LITERAL+ (reported by Maxime)* - It was not possible to copy more than one email at once to an Aerogramme mailbox.
+It was due to the fact we were using an old version of imap-flow that was not correctly supporting LITERAL+.
+Upgrading imap-flow to the latest version fixed the problem. 
+
+*Broken IDLE (reported by Maxime)* - After updating imap-flow, we started noticing some timeouts in Thunderbird due to IDLE bugs.
+When IDLE was implemented in Aerogramme, the code was not ready in imap-flow,
+and thus I used some hacks. But upgrading the library broke my hacks for the best: now 
+imap-flow supports IDLE out of the box, and thus Aerogramme code is now cleaner and more maintainable.
+
+Some others quality of life feedbacks not reported here have been made by MrFlos & Nicolas, thanks to all the people that took part in this debugging adventure.
+
+## Download and test the new version
+
+```
+docker run registry.deuxfleurs.org/aerogramme:0.2.2
+```
+
+[Download](/download/) - [Changelog](#)