Frequently Asqued Questions

• I forgot my snowmail passphrase !
  bad thing... you have the choice between breaking a 128 bit blowfish key, with all the computational power actually available on earth, you'll not be done before our earth has been burn from our dying sun, in 4 billion years... Or hope to get some Quantum Computer to work... A better alternative is to try hard to remember your passphrase (was it not just "hello", or maybe the name or your cat followed by his birthdate and the random string ç*@é,- ?). Since September 2006, you can try to crack your own password, pressing the crack button in the SnowMail login...

• How can I recover old mails from a Backup ?
  The backup files are in the folder c:/SnowMailBackup (or any other custom place you specify in the File menu). A backup is made every few minutes, but only one per hour for the last day is kept, one per day for the last week, one per week for the last month, ... so the number of backup will not explode. Close any opened instance of Snowmail, open the wanted backup with a zip tool like T-Restorizer and decompress it to the actual snowmail folder (in your root directory, c:/document and settings/your name/). You can decompress single folders, and rename them.

• How can I use another snowmail folder ?
  just give the command line option -homeDir="c:/another location/somewhere/snowmail". This also allows several users to use snowmail on the same machine under the same login. This can also be used to carry your whole Snowmail on a memory stick.

• How can I connect to my account with an SSL connection ?
  Actually, I only tested and used SSL connections with my own mail server (Snowraver.org). If you have an account that supports SSL connections, you must import manually the SSL certificate in the java truststore located in your snowmail user folder. A better support for verifying and importing SSL certificates will be implemented soon (I think before fall 2007).

• Why didn't you implement the PGP protocol yourself ?
  Good question. The response is: lazyness. Another response is: it is a long and not very interestning task, seeing the format description on the net is enough to cause me headeaches. There are lot of low level bit manipulations and fixed length records with a lot of compatibility stuff for old versions support...
  Another response could be: GnuPG is very good and broadly accepted as a standard and trusted PKK suite, that exists for almost every operating system. Don't reinvent the wheel too often...