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| Hirokatsu Hibino, President, Orangesoft |
Winbiff - a popular Windows mail client
Winbiff is a popular Windows-based mail client software in Japan first released in 1994. Current version is Winbiff V2, which is used at many companies and schools especially with the support of IMAP4 in 1996. Winbiff has many other functions such as Multi host suport for IMAP4 and POP3, S/MIME support using an add-on software S/Goma, and the Japanese-enabled LDAP support.
It All Started Inside
Orangesoft was very quick in supporting IPv6. With the release of Microsoft IPv6 Technology Preview for Windows 2000 in December 2000, the company made its own internal network IPv6-capable. But they didn't have a special ambition to make money in IPv6 market at that time. They just thought that it wouldn't hurt to build IPv6-enabled network because all networks would move to IPv6 sooner or later.
But they found that IPv6-enabling its corporate network was not enough, without software to use. That's why Hibino thought of IPv6-enabling Winbiff. So it wasn't really user demand, but he just wanted to try it.
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| Orangesoft http://www.orangesoft.co.jp/ |
It Took Only One Month
He quickly moved to prepare for his little project. The first thing Hibino needed was an IPv6-capable mail server, in order to develop and test IPv6 support of Winbiff. But his friend developed IPv6 patch for cyrus-imapd and cyrus-sasl. This helped the project a great deal. Orangesoft was able to release beta version of Winbiff in January 2001, only one month later, followed by the formal release of IPv6 version in April 2001.
"Giving Winbiff IPv6 support was not difficult," says Hibino. He used Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. As reported in "EdMax gets IPv6 ready", he rewrote MFC source codes to enable IPv6 support. He also built "virtual socket" class as the interface for socket calls, in order to make his life easier in working with SSL support of Winbiff (this will be expained in Part 2).
It only took one month because they had testing environment internally, says Hibino. Winbiff is a mail client software. A mail server is required for testing. For testing IPv6 behavior of Winbiff, he required a mail server with IPv6 support. But the company already had IPv6 environment. He could easily confirm the behavior of Winbiff at the mail server by examining access logs. It lead to quick diagnosis and solution of problems occured during development.
Hibino says he didn't experience any difficulty in IPv6-enabling Winbiff. It was partly due to that fact that Winbiff was designed to have socket-related functions in a modular fashion. Hibino was experienced with socket programming, too. Without these factors, things must have been harder for him.
"You need to have some experience of building programs which directly call APIs. Windows development environment these days, such as Visual Studio and Visual Basic, offer sockets and other functions as components or classes. Windows programmers using these tools need some study to do first. But I don't worry about those seasoned programmers with lots of experience."
Winbiff IPv6 version (Japanese Only)
ftp://ftp.orangesoft.co.jp/pub/Winbiff20/
http://www.orangesoft.co.jp/Winbiff20/Winbiffv6.html
You need to install IPv6 Technology Preview for Windows 2000 before you use Winbiff IPv6 on Windows 2000.
IPv6 Technology Preview for Windows 2000
http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/sdks/platform/tpipv6.asp
IMAP server software used by Orangesoft
cyrus-imapd & cyrus-sasl
http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/
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