The Evolution e-mail client has been available for Linux users for ages. It looks very similar to Outlook 2000, it has much the same functionality, and it can connect to MS Exchange servers (and not just for pop3 and IMAP). Novell has now backed a port of the Linux e-mail client to run on Windows. When that happens, many people will probably stop buying Outlook, because Evolution does all the same things and it’s Open Source meaning you can get it for free if you are so inclined. (and lets face it, who wouldn’t be?)

I’m a fan of Thunderbird now, it meets my needs nicely, but before I found Thunderbird I was dismayed to find that Evolution didn’t have a Windows version as it was one of the best OSS e-mail clients on Linux that I had seen. The fact that Evolution can connect to Exchange servers will likely make many enterprise CTO’s take notice as not having to buy licenses to Outlook for several thousand users is not cheap and most of them could potentially save millions of dollars. (At the very least, they could use the threat of swapping to Evolution as a tool to get a better price from Microsoft for LookOut (sorry, Outlook) licenses.

This is also a step to helping users get used to the idea of a Linux desktop, if you’re already using Firefox, Openoffice.org and Evolution on Windows, running them on Linux will require no extra training. And the three applications taken together make up the majority of software most corporate clients would need.

Read more on the subject at ComputerWorld.

I’ve been making a fuss about comment spam for some time now, and we’ve just introduced an image auth (Captcha) method here to stop the vast numbers we were suffering from here at HTMLfixIT. Well Google has introduced support for a new “rel=nofollow” link attribute which results in Google’s PageRank system ignoring the link. The point of this is that the comment spam is used by spammers to increase the PageRank (search engine rankings) for the sites linked in the spam. This new link attribute will make those links worthless to the spammers.

Yahoo and MSN have agreed to follow this move, so the result will be that there is no point comment spamming any more as it won’t count for anything anyway. Apparently many of the blog makers have agreed to add the new link attribute to their various products, but it’s really very trivial to add it yourself. As an added benefit to this, you can link to sites and subjects you don’t support without giving them a search engine boost. Read more at TheRegister or Eweek .

A German court has just ruled that filtering e-mail based on content is illegal. The ruling was on a case unrelated to spamming, but filtering based on content is how most SPAM is blocked, so this foolish judge may just have caused a massive dent in anti-spam operations. It makes you wonder why the people deciding and enforcing on our IT related laws, are the ones least qualified to do so. If they should suddenly find themselves inundated by spamming companies, they will have only themselves to blame.

Read more here.

After Google released their beta of Gmail, most of the other big web mail providers where quick to announce upgrades to their own offerings. Few have thus far shown much commitment to back up their announcements. Hotmail announced for example, that they would be offering 25MB for their free web mail accounts and later upgrading that to 250mb, but as of yet, not very many people are benefiting from these new mailbox sizes.

TheInquirer have an article here, detailing how they were able to trick Hotmail into upgrading their Hotmail account from 2MB up to 25MB, and it’s surprisingly easy to do. It’s certainly worth a read, even if you’re one of the few that already have 25MB Hotmail accounts, because you’re bound to know somebody labouring away with only 2MB. I have my own Hotmail account, but I only use it to give people I think will send me spam, so I’m not particularly fussed.

Mozilla Foundations Thunderbird and Firefox (E-mail and browser applications) are growing popular as RSS readers according to the latest Feedburner stats. Personally I find Thunderbird’s RSS support much better then the live bookmarks feature of Firefox, but it’s to be expected that the live bookmarks is more popular at this time because it’s been out for longer, and because there are over 20 million copies of live bookmarks supporting versions of Firefox in circulation. Give it time though because Thunderbirds RSS support is brilliant and makes RSS as simple as reading email. Together Firefox and Thunderbird account for around 10 percent of RSS readers for Feedburner RSS feeds.

Yet another flaw in IE6 (including SP2) has been found and disclosed and may already be getting used to exploit users. This new flaw involves using an onclick event to initiate a createElement event, which is used to create an iframe to a remote web server which can download anything it likes to your computer, bypassing IE’s protection systems in the process.

The solution at this stage, is to turn off active scripting, unfortunately that renders IE mostly useless as you can’t even use it for WindowsUpdate in that state. Another solution is to avoid untrusted links, but doing that renders most of the Internet as a no go zone. A better solution is to go and get yourself a free copy of Firefox and spend your time browsing instead of worrying about browsing.

According to the statistics on their site, the Firefox web browser has hit the 19 million downloads mark, and will have passed 20 million by the end of this month. That likely makes it one of the most popular Open Source programs ever. There are a ton of people out there that will tell you that Open Source cannot produce applications with the quality of their proprietary cousins. Firefox is an excellent example that not only is it possible to make excellent Open Source apps, more often then not, they end up surpassing their proprietary competitors. (Linux, Apache, OpenOffice and MySQL are other well known examples of well accepted Open Source projects.)

Update:
According to Websidestory, Firefox has now over 5% of the browser market, and has just about pushed IE6 below 90% for the first time in years, not bad for a web browser that was officially released last November. (less then 3 months ago at the time of writing.) 5% doesn’t sound like that much, but if you consider that there are more then a couple of hundred million users on the Internet, 5% is quiet a significant number. (Also keep in mind that Tech people are leading the charge for Firefox, and we don’t download it again each time we give it to someone, so that 20 million number is probably a conservative estimate.)