I could not understand yet what does it do… how it works…?
I still don’t fully understand it, I thought that the downloaded toonel.jar would be an archive that you had to extract and install the program. But no it opens the program interface see image.
So it looks like it is a stand alone that you would have to run on boot, copy shortcut into startup folder, etc. you have to set your browser to use localhost 8080 and add 8080 to the web shield redirects and uncheck the Ignore local communication for it to work with the web shield.
http://www.toonel.net/support.html or http://toonel.net/qa.html are more useful than the main page.
I’m trying to figure out how to get it to work with email and the internet provider, I haven’t started on that aspect yet, just playing with the browser side for now.
Hmmm … this is a program that has not been updated in three years. I wonder what is the business model that allows it to run the servers needed by its users completely for free.
It does mean that everything you do is going through their servers controlled by who knows.
It does not appear to be very different from any other of the “Web accelerators” previously encountered except that it requires you to set up the proxies manually rather than the transparent intercepts we have seen in other similar products.
In today’s increasingly more graphic intense Web sites it would probably require that the optional degrading of non-compressible images be used (as in other Web accelerators) to obtain really good reduction in bandwidth consumption. I look forward to David’s findings.
Seems a hoax…
@ Alan
There are settings under Web tab that allow you to degrade images by default there is no degradation. I have changed just changed the jpeg to 80% as the as they are by comparison bigger than gif images (which you will notice is what I post) and on-line there is negligible difference.
Whilst the seem to show better compression on outbound (handy ion dial-up) and the inbound compression 5 shown appears reasonable the physical difference I’m seeing isn’t huge, but so far that has been limited to the forums. So I wouldn’t expect to see much change, but we will see over time.
Whilst it hasn’t seen any update since Jan 2006, I guess it is one of those things that there isn’t much to change once you have the compression algorithm and linkage to JAVA runtime there isn’t much else to fiddle with as the above image shows (the GUI is sparse).
@ Tech
Would you care to expand, I see no sign that this is a hoax ???
David,
I was hoping this would catch your eye.
Thanks for taring into it. 
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I’m looking at the email side of it now ant it is very basic almost like the changed needed with old OSes, changing the email account pop3/smtp server to 127.0.0.1, etc. and in this case setting the Toonel Mapping tab to the actual server address.
Now this I’m sure might mean an interaction with the internet mail provider I haven’t tested that bit yet. The other thing is I don’t think it can easily handle multiple email accounts on different servers. But there is an option there for new port mapping so I think it will work but everything is very basic.
I just checked my firewall logs to see what it gets up to and you can see that it uses the javaw.exe (sun java runtime) file and the servers it accesses are on serverloft.com
David,
Are you getting a noticeable benefit out of this program ?
Is it worth the extra work in order to gain the speed benefit this program is supposed to render ?
It really is too early to say one way or the other. The one thing I have done is abandon the attempt to integrate it into email as with that proxy the web shield proxy changing the email account server to localhost, it just seems to be in a loop and nothing getting sent and there is no way I would disable avast email scanning just to get it to work.
there is no way I would disable avast email scanning just to get it to work.Fully agree.
So what, if it doesn’t need to be updated is no indication that it is a hoax. http://www.tfd.com/hoax
Again none of these points Alan mentions means it is a hoax, perhaps your choice of word is incorrect.
Business Model:
We don’t know the business model of many applications that we use, e.g. you use Moxy for free I use photobucket and there are many others that we have an idea what their business model is, for most they are trying to do get you to buy the premium product.
Whilst this is currently free there is a possibility that if they spend some time developing it (not once in a blue moon) into something more user friendly with a cuddly GUI, etc. then they could charge for the service and there is such a clause in their terms of use had you read it, which I did before I used it.
That is also why I monitored my firewall logs to see what servers it used and did the usual google search on the domain name.
So other than Alan’s comments you don’t have any on why you feel it is a hoax.
Continuing the Toonel saga …
Unable to resist a peek I downloaded it.
It looks like it was someone’s project that has not gone much further. That is not intended to be critical … it does what it says. However, as David reported, it does require the user to set up a separate definition and assign a unique localhost port for each email account’s POP/IMAP/SMTP connection. Most users are not going to understand this let alone the need to create manually a startup entry to run a .jar file. It would also require corresponding modifications to the avast Internet Mail provider for those ports to get avast to scan the mail.
Nevertheless, it does work and I just used it as a simple little alternative to STunnel to get my GMail received in Thunderbird and scanned by avast along the way.
I created the Toonel SMTP and POP3 entries in mapping, but left the port at 25 and 110 as they were set by default (which would mean avast would redirect).
I tried modifying the Internet Mail provider, basically in the same way as for the addition of another proxy, by unchecking the, Redirect, Ignore Local Communication option and having set up the Outlook Express account details Server to 127.0.0.1.
Whilst Toonel reported the SMTP and POP3 status as active and x number of open tunnels open, nothing ever came through the tunnels, everything just hung.
So I don’t know if avast redirection on the standard ports is happening before toonel so nothing happens or if I should check the Ignore Local Communication, but that would defeat the object of as the toonel traffic wouldn’t be scanned.
Since I normally pre scan my email on the server (mailwasher pro) and filter spam, etc. at source, very little actually gets downloaded to my system/inbox. So I didn’t expend much time trying other options to get it to work.
As you say there are very few who would be prepared for this amount of manual setup to get it working and that is with the added complication of having other localhost proxies to co-ordinate with.
Version 1.0 has just been released with even more features than before.
http://www.sumopaint.com/web/
http://www.macworld.com/article/138412/2009/01/trojan.html
People should have enough sense not to pirate software. But it will always happen and therefore malware comes included.
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