Mail.app & IMAP Process Update

Joe Streno — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 06:13:03 +0000

In my previous post “A process to a kill” I outlined an issue with Apple’s Mail.app creating too many IMPA processes on the web hosting server it was connecting to. Read the previous post for the details. With the help of a senior tech at blueHOST.com I have found a temporary fix, until Apple addresses the issue.
For those with access to the cPanel for their hosting account, you will need to create a Cron Job. At blueHOST.com I have access to this feature. Using the blueHOST GUI interface for the UNIX crontab program, I created a cron job via the cPanel to run every two minutes (because I have so many users running mail at the same time.) And the command is “killall imap” (without the quotes). This will do as advertised, kill all imap processes, old and new, every two minutes. You can set the amount of minutes to anything you want.

It may be strong-arming the situation, but it gives you back use of your blog or website.

In my previous post, I said I sent this to MacFixIt. They never published or followed up on the eMail I sent. But I’ve also formally sent this as an issue via Apple Support. With any luck it will be fixed with the 10.5.7 update when it comes out.

If you have not made a formal report to Apple I strongly suggest you go to the Mac OS X Feedback page & file a detailed report of the issue you are having with IMAP processes & Mail.app. Reporting in the Apple support forums may not be enough to get the full attention of Apple.

Compass Point Yachts Site

Joe Streno — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 08:03:30 +0000

Just completed a new website for my client Compass Point Yachts. This was a huge project. My first undertaking was to try to eliminate as much if not all Adobe Flash from the website as possible. I chose to work with MooTools javascript framework. This way I could do slide shows, as well as nice sliding menus, and other visually interesting elements. Nice eye candy without all the Flash baggage. The most difficult part was getting all the CSS & javascript to play nicely in MS Internet Explorer 7. But in the end … it came off swimmingly!

My second task was to try to break away from making “yet another black website”. The last website, and gee … the website before that were all black backgrounds. Very dark and brooding … but colorful and exciting in their own way. So we went for the polar opposite, white. I also tried to keep the color pallet to green, blue & gray. I think this really made the boat images pop.

For the individual yacht information pages, I kept things sparse and clean. All photos, videos, etc were triggered by sliding menu items and shown in a shadow box. Nice effect, keeping the focus on what is being shown. Also one of the ways I like to see photos these days. A victim of the times? Maybe. But I still like it.

I also reworked their WordPress blog, so it looked more integrated with the rest of the website. I of course chose the WordPress Christmas v1.1 theme from the creative folks at InstantShift.com again. I really like how clean it looks. Once I stripped everything down to white with 1 px green outlines, and shrunk its width to the same size as the rest of the site … you wouldn’t know it was the same theme. It’s clean and slick, and really displays images well too with the articles (again after some CSS tweeking).

I realy like the end result, and so does the client. That is certainly a win win!

eMac Consulting » Client Work

Mail.app & IMAP Process Update

Compass Point Yachts Site