NOTIFY is like IDLE, but where IDLE watches just the selected mailbox, NOTIFY
can watch all mailboxes. With NOTIFY, a client can also ask a server to
immediately return configurable fetch attributes for new messages, e.g. a
message preview, certain header fields, or simply the entire message.
Mild testing with evolution and fairemail.
MIME returns the part headers. If 1 is a message, i.e. a message/rfc822 or
message/global, for example when top-level is a multipart/mixed, we were
returning the MIME headers from the message, not from the part.
We also shouldn't be returning a MIME-Version header or the separating newline
for MIME. Those are for MIME headers of a message, but the "MIME" fetch body
part is always about the part.
Found after looking into FETCH BODY handling for issue #327.
The gmail iOS/Android app were showing mime image parts as (garbled) text
instead of rendering them as image. By returning all the optional fields in the
bodystructure fetch attribute, the gmail app renders the image as expected by
the user. So we now add all fields. We didn't before, because we weren't
keeping track of Content-MD5, Content-Language and Content-Location header
fields, since they aren't that useful.
Messages in mailboxes have to be reparsed:
./mox reparse
Without reparsing, imap responses will claim the extra fields
(content-disposition) are absent for existing messages, instead of not claiming
anything at all, which is what we did before.
Accounts and all/some mailboxes can get their "uid validity" bumped ("./mox
bumpuidvalidity $account [$mailbox]"), which should trigger clients to load all
messages from scratch, but gmail doesn't appear to notice, so it would be
better to remove & add the account in gmail.
For issue #327, also relevant to issue #217.
We were already generating previews of plain text parts for the webmail
interface, but we didn't store them, so were generating the previews each time
messages were listed.
Now we store previews in the database for faster handling. And we also generate
previews for html parts if needed. We use the first part that has textual
content.
For IMAP, the previews can be requested by an IMAP client. When we get the
"LAZY" variant, which doesn't require us to generate a preview, we generate it
anyway, because it should be fast enough. So don't make clients first ask for
"PREVIEW (LAZY)" and then again a request for "PREVIEW".
We now also generate a preview when a message is added to the account. Except
for imports. It would slow us down, the previews aren't urgent, and they will
be generated on-demand at first-request.
Keeping the message files around, and the message details in the database, is
useful for IMAP sessions that haven't seen/processed the removal of a message
yet and try to fetch it. Before, we would return errors. Similarly, a session
that has a mailbox selected that is removed can (at least in theory) still read
messages.
The mechanics to do this need keeping removed mailboxes around too. JMAP needs
that anyway, so we now keep modseq/createseq/expunged history for mailboxes
too. And while we're at it, for annotations as well.
For future JMAP support, we now also keep the mailbox parent id around for a
mailbox, with an upgrade step to set the field for existing mailboxes and
fixing up potential missing parents (which could possibly have happened in an
obscure corner case that I doubt anyone ran into).
We effectively held the account write-locked by using a writable transaction
while processing the FETCH command. We did this because we may have to update
\Seen flags, for non-PEEK attribute fetches. This meant other FETCHes would
block, and other write access to the account too.
We now read the messages in a read-only transaction. We gather messages that
need marking as \Seen, and make that change in one (much shorter) database
transaction at the end of the FETCH command.
In practice, it doesn't seem too sensible to mark messages as seen
automatically. Most clients probably use the PEEK-variant of attribute fetches.
Related to issue #128.
i added the metadata extension to the imapserver recently. then i wondered how
a client would efficiently find changed metadata. turns out the qresync rfc
mentions that metadata changes should set a new modseq on the mailbox.
shouldn't be hard, except that we were not explicitly keeping track of modseqs
per mailbox. we only kept them for messages, and we were just looking up the
latest message modseq when we needed the modseq (we keep db entries for
expunged messages, so this worked out fine). that approach isn't enough
anymore. so know we keep track of modseq & createseq for mailboxes, just as for
messages. and we also track modseq/createseq for annotations. there's a good
chance jmap is going to need it.
this also adds consistency checks for modseq/createseq on mailboxes and
annotations to the account storage. it helped spot cases i missed where the
values need to be updated.
it makes a new field available on stored messages. not when they they were
received (over smtp) or appended to the mailbox (over imap), but when they were
last "saved" in the mailbox. copy/move of a message (eg to the trash) resets
the "savedate" value. this helps implement "remove messages from trash after X
days".
this allows setting per-mailbox and per-server annotations (metadata). we have
a fixed maximum for total number of annotations (1000) and their total size
(1000000 bytes). this size isn't held against the regular quota for simplicity.
we send unsolicited metadata responses when a connection is in the idle
command and a change to a metadata item is made.
we currently only implement the /private/ namespace. we should implement the
/shared/ namespace, for mox-global metadata annotations. only the admin should
be able to configure those, probably through the config file, cli, or admin web
interface.
for issue #290
"bodystructure" is like "body", but bodystructure allows returning more
information. we chose not to do that, initially because it was easier to
implement, and more recently because we can't easily return the additional
content-md5 field for leaf parts (since we don't have it in parsed form). but
now we just return the extended form for multiparts, and non-extended form for
leaf parts. likely no one would be looking for any content-md5-value for leaf
parts anyway. knowing the boundary is much more likely to be useful.
for issue #217 by danieleggert, thanks for reporting!
so a single user cannot fill up the disk.
by default, there is (still) no limit. a default can be set in the config file
for all accounts, and a per-account max size can be set that would override any
global setting.
this does not take into account disk usage of the index database. and also not
of any file system overhead.
- prometheus is now behind an interface, they aren't dependencies for the
reusable components anymore.
- some dependencies have been inverted: instead of packages importing a main
package to get configuration, the main package now sets configuration in
these packages. that means fewer internals are pulled in.
- some functions now have new parameters for values that were retrieved from
package "mox-".
we don't want external software to include internal details like mlog.
slog.Logger is/will be the standard.
we still have mlog for its helper functions, and its handler that logs in
concise logfmt used by mox.
packages that are not meant for reuse still pass around mlog.Log for
convenience.
we use golang.org/x/exp/slog because we also support the previous Go toolchain
version. with the next Go release, we'll switch to the builtin slog.
it was far down on the roadmap, but implemented earlier, because it's
interesting, and to help prepare for a jmap implementation. for jmap we need to
implement more client-like functionality than with just imap. internal data
structures need to change. jmap has lots of other requirements, so it's already
a big project. by implementing a webmail now, some of the required data
structure changes become clear and can be made now, so the later jmap
implementation can do things similarly to the webmail code. the webmail
frontend and webmail are written together, making their interface/api much
smaller and simpler than jmap.
one of the internal changes is that we now keep track of per-mailbox
total/unread/unseen/deleted message counts and mailbox sizes. keeping this
data consistent after any change to the stored messages (through the code base)
is tricky, so mox now has a consistency check that verifies the counts are
correct, which runs only during tests, each time an internal account reference
is closed. we have a few more internal "changes" that are propagated for the
webmail frontend (that imap doesn't have a way to propagate on a connection),
like changes to the special-use flags on mailboxes, and used keywords in a
mailbox. more changes that will be required have revealed themselves while
implementing the webmail, and will be implemented next.
the webmail user interface is modeled after the mail clients i use or have
used: thunderbird, macos mail, mutt; and webmails i normally only use for
testing: gmail, proton, yahoo, outlook. a somewhat technical user is assumed,
but still the goal is to make this webmail client easy to use for everyone. the
user interface looks like most other mail clients: a list of mailboxes, a
search bar, a message list view, and message details. there is a top/bottom and
a left/right layout for the list/message view, default is automatic based on
screen size. the panes can be resized by the user. buttons for actions are just
text, not icons. clicking a button briefly shows the shortcut for the action in
the bottom right, helping with learning to operate quickly. any text that is
underdotted has a title attribute that causes more information to be displayed,
e.g. what a button does or a field is about. to highlight potential phishing
attempts, any text (anywhere in the webclient) that switches unicode "blocks"
(a rough approximation to (language) scripts) within a word is underlined
orange. multiple messages can be selected with familiar ui interaction:
clicking while holding control and/or shift keys. keyboard navigation works
with arrows/page up/down and home/end keys, and also with a few basic vi-like
keys for list/message navigation. we prefer showing the text instead of
html (with inlined images only) version of a message. html messages are shown
in an iframe served from an endpoint with CSP headers to prevent dangerous
resources (scripts, external images) from being loaded. the html is also
sanitized, with javascript removed. a user can choose to load external
resources (e.g. images for tracking purposes).
the frontend is just (strict) typescript, no external frameworks. all
incoming/outgoing data is typechecked, both the api request parameters and
response types, and the data coming in over SSE. the types and checking code
are generated with sherpats, which uses the api definitions generated by
sherpadoc based on the Go code. so types from the backend are automatically
propagated to the frontend. since there is no framework to automatically
propagate properties and rerender components, changes coming in over the SSE
connection are propagated explicitly with regular function calls. the ui is
separated into "views", each with a "root" dom element that is added to the
visible document. these views have additional functions for getting changes
propagated, often resulting in the view updating its (internal) ui state (dom).
we keep the frontend compilation simple, it's just a few typescript files that
get compiled (combined and types stripped) into a single js file, no additional
runtime code needed or complicated build processes used. the webmail is served
is served from a compressed, cachable html file that includes style and the
javascript, currently just over 225kb uncompressed, under 60kb compressed (not
minified, including comments). we include the generated js files in the
repository, to keep Go's easily buildable self-contained binaries.
authentication is basic http, as with the account and admin pages. most data
comes in over one long-term SSE connection to the backend. api requests signal
which mailbox/search/messages are requested over the SSE connection. fetching
individual messages, and making changes, are done through api calls. the
operations are similar to imap, so some code has been moved from package
imapserver to package store. the future jmap implementation will benefit from
these changes too. more functionality will probably be moved to the store
package in the future.
the quickstart enables webmail on the internal listener by default (for new
installs). users can enable it on the public listener if they want to. mox
localserve enables it too. to enable webmail on existing installs, add settings
like the following to the listeners in mox.conf, similar to AccountHTTP(S):
WebmailHTTP:
Enabled: true
WebmailHTTPS:
Enabled: true
special thanks to liesbeth, gerben, andrii for early user feedback.
there is plenty still to do, see the list at the top of webmail/webmail.ts.
feedback welcome as always.
for conditional storing and quick resynchronisation (not sure if mail clients are actually using it that).
each message now has a "modseq". it is increased for each change. with
condstore, imap clients can request changes since a certain modseq. that
already allows quickly finding changes since a previous connection. condstore
also allows storing (e.g. setting new message flags) only when the modseq of a
message hasn't changed.
qresync should make it fast for clients to get a full list of changed messages
for a mailbox, including removals.
we now also keep basic metadata of messages that have been removed (expunged).
just enough (uid, modseq) to tell client that the messages have been removed.
this does mean we have to be careful when querying messages from the database.
we must now often filter the expunged messages out.
we also keep "createseq", the modseq when a message was created. this will be
useful for the jmap implementation.
the mailbox select/examine responses now return all flags used in a mailbox in
the FLAGS response. and indicate in the PERMANENTFLAGS response that clients
can set new keywords. we store these values on the new Message.Keywords field.
system/well-known flags are still in Message.Flags, so we're recognizing those
and handling them separately.
the imap store command handles the new flags. as does the append command, and
the search command.
we store keywords in a mailbox when a message in that mailbox gets the keyword.
we don't automatically remove the keywords from a mailbox. there is currently
no way at all to remove a keyword from a mailbox.
the import commands now handle non-system/well-known keywords too, when
importing from mbox/maildir.
jmap requires keyword support, so best to get it out of the way now.
