UCS-Care-Group/mailcraft v0.10.0

MailCraft v0.10.0

on GitHub

MailCraft 0.10.0 in short: the public beta, for Microsoft accounts (testers welcome; sign up in #11)

• Write more than one message at once, each in a window of its own, or in the reading pane (#286).
• MailCraft's own look, with four accent colours and high contrast (#703), and a new icon.
• Exchange server accounts (your organisation's own Exchange Server, Grommunio or SmarterMail), as a preview (#252).
• Automatic Replies for Microsoft accounts, in File › Info (#692).
• Over twenty more of Outlook's commands: Work Offline, Zoom, Find and Replace, Resend, Reply and Delete, View Source, Email Calendar and more.
• Dutch, as a preview (#254).
• Quicker: the window stays fast over hundreds of thousands of messages (#731).
• Safer: an agent can't touch a message you are writing, and a wrongly named message is refused, never swapped for your selection (#577, #553).
• And more fixes, listed below.

What's new

• Write more than one message at once, each in a window of its own. A draft you double-click opens in a window of its own, with its own Message, Insert, Format Text and Review tabs, and so does a reply or forward you start in a message's window. New Email (Ctrl+N) and a reply or forward started in the main window start in the reading pane: Pop Out, at its top right, moves the message into a window, and File › Options › Mail › Open new messages, replies and forwards in a new window opens them there from the start. Starting another message no longer asks about the one you are writing: it stays open, saved to Drafts first so nothing of it is lost, and each message keeps its own undo. Closing a message's window with changes asks Save, Don't Save or Cancel; closing MailCraft saves every message being written to Drafts without asking; opening another mailbox asks once about every message with changes. Up to 12 windows of their own are open at a time. A message an agent writes for you opens in a window behind yours, without taking the keyboard, and the agent never writes in yours. Each kind of window (a message, a message being written, an appointment) opens where the last one of its kind was, at its size, a step down and to the right of one still open, and on the main monitor when its own is no longer connected. Every message you are writing with changes is saved to Drafts every five minutes, whatever kind of account it is from, not only a Microsoft account's; closing a new message that only these saves, or starting another message, put in Drafts asks first, and Don't Save takes it out again (#286).
• Exchange server accounts, as a preview. Add Account offers Exchange server (your organisation's own), for a mailbox on your organisation's own Exchange Server, Grommunio or SmarterMail. Give your address and password, and MailCraft finds the server, or type its address in Server settings. It signs in with NTLM or with Basic over a secure connection, and if the server's certificate isn't one your system trusts, you see it and decide. This is mail only for now: folders, new mail, flags and moves, drafts and sending. Calendar and contacts come later. So far it has been tried on Grommunio with a password. Exchange Server, SmarterMail and NTLM sign-in have not met a real server yet, so please tell us how it goes on yours. A Microsoft 365 mailbox still signs in on Microsoft's page, as a Microsoft account (#252).
• MailCraft's own look. New colours in light and dark, an unread dot in place of the bar, folder counts as pills, a clearer selection in the list and the folder pane, and MailCraft's mark in the title bar. Four accent colours (blue, teal, violet, graphite) and a high-contrast setting for the light or the dark theme, in File › Options › General. Existing installs change on update (#703).
• File › Info › Automatic Replies, for an account that signs in with Microsoft: turn replies on or off, only during a time range, with one reply for people inside your organisation and another for those outside it (everyone, only your contacts, or nobody). While they go out, the status bar says Automatic Replies. Reading them needs nothing new; the first time you change them, MailCraft asks for your permission to change your mailbox settings, on Microsoft's page and by itself (never when you sign in), and File › Info shows whether it was given, with Ask again. Other accounts have none yet: IMAP has no standard way, and Sieve is for later (#692).
• A new icon. MailCraft's icon is now an envelope that is also a calendar page, on a blue tile: mail and calendar in one mark. It is the same on Windows, macOS, Linux and in the browser, where the tab shows it too.
• Request a Read Receipt (Message › Tags) asks the people you write to to tell you when they have read the message: it goes with the request to your own address, by whichever way your account sends (IMAP and SMTP, Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com, Exchange), and a draft keeps it. MailCraft only ever asks for receipts: it never answers a request in mail you receive. Help › Show Training opens MailCraft's documentation in your browser.
• Insert › Contact Card attaches one of your contacts to the message you're writing, as a vCard (.vcf) file the recipient can add to their address book.
• Insert › Item attaches a message from your mailbox to the one you're writing, whole, as an .eml file: find it by subject or sender. Its Bcc and your own marks on it stay behind.
• Tasks › Home › Send Status Report starts a message saying how the selected task stands (its status, dates, importance, categories and notes), for you to address and send.
• People › Home › Meeting opens a new meeting with the selected contact already invited, and Forward Contact starts a message with the contact attached as a vCard (.vcf), for you to address and send.
• Resend Message opens a message you sent as a new one, with its recipients, subject, text and files, to change and send again: from Home › Move, the Message menu, or right-click in Sent Items.
• Direct Replies To (Message › Tags) has replies to the message you're writing go to other addresses; each address is checked, and the Reply to line shows above the subject.
• In the message you are writing: Text Highlight Color puts a highlight behind text (sent in the message's HTML), Format Painter copies the look of one piece of text onto the next one you select, and Insert › Symbol puts in a common symbol, or any character by its code.
• Home › Find › Search Calendar finds appointments with the search box's words: what they are called, who organizes them or is invited, where they are, their notes, their categories and their days.
• Home › Share › Email Calendar starts a message with some days of your calendar in it (when you are free or busy, or with the titles, or with where and the notes too) and an iCalendar file of the same, for you to address and send; Insert › Calendar puts the same into the message you are writing. An appointment marked private shows only that you are busy, and nobody invited is named.
• With a meeting selected, Contact Attendees starts a message to everyone in it, Tracking shows who has answered and how, and (for somebody else's meeting) Reply by Email starts a message to its organizer without answering it. Nothing is sent until you press Send.
• View Source shows a message's header lines and the source of its body as plain text, to read and copy: nothing in it runs, opens or is downloaded, and characters that would hide or turn text are shown by their codes.
• Save All Attachments (right-click an attachment) saves every file of a message into a folder you pick, each under a safe name; a file already in the folder is never written over: the new one is numbered, report (2).pdf.
• Reply and Delete: answer a message and move it to Deleted Items in one step, from Home › Respond, the message's right-click menu or the Message menu.
• Find and Replace in the message you are writing (Message › Editing): look for plain text, with or without matching letter case, and replace one place at a time or every place at once, which one Undo takes back.
• Work Offline. Send / Receive › Work Offline stops MailCraft from asking any server for anything by itself or for your mail: no Send/Receive, by hand or by itself, no message fetched, no pictures, no sender images, no look-ups, no update check by itself. Mail you send waits in the Outbox and goes with the first Send/Receive once you turn it off; the status bar says Working Offline for as long as it is on, and a click on it connects again. It is kept between runs, and Undo never turns it on or off.
• Send / Receive › Cancel All calls off every Send/Receive under way; what has arrived stays.
• The Help tab has Help, Get Support, Feedback and What's New: Help, Get Support and What's New open MailCraft's own pages on GitHub (the read-me, the issues, this version's release notes) in your browser, with nothing about you in the address, and Feedback opens Report a Problem. Account, found with Search Commands, opens File › About with the version and updates.
• Zoom the message you are reading. View › Zoom makes the text of the message in the reading pane, or in a window of its own, larger or smaller, from 50% to 300%: Ctrl+Plus and Ctrl+Minus step it (⌘ on a Mac), Ctrl+0 puts it back to 100%, and Ctrl with the mouse wheel over the message does the same. The rest of the window keeps its size (File › Options › Interface size changes that); pictures in the message keep theirs. The zoom is kept between runs (view.zoom).
• Recent searches. The last ten searches you ran are offered under the search box when it is empty, and in View › Recent Searches, to run again with one click; Clear Recent Searches there forgets them. The list is kept only in MailCraft's settings on this computer and is never sent anywhere (view.recentSearches).
• Tighter Spacing. View › Tighter Spacing puts the rows of the message list closer together, so more messages fit on the screen; it is kept between runs (view.density).
• Change View. View › Change View switches the message list between three ready-made views in one click: Compact (two-line rows with a line of the message's text, reading pane on the right), Single Line (one line a message, reading pane on the right) and Preview (three lines of each message's text, no reading pane). Scripts and agents use view.changeView.
• Dutch, as a preview. File › Options offers Nederlands (voorbeeld). The whole window is translated, and the name says a native speaker has not reviewed it yet. Automatic follows a Dutch system. The clock is 24-hour, the week starts on Monday, and a date is written day then month (#254).

Fixes

• On Linux and FreeBSD, the panel and the menu show the new app icon after an update: a copy installed by hand, whose launcher and icons are in your own data folder (~/.local/share), has those icons brought up to the new version's when it starts, and the desktop's icon cache is told (#732).
• Delete for Good is now called Delete Permanently, on the ribbon, in command search and in the question asked before a message is gone (#286).
• The window stays quick over a large mailbox: with hundreds of thousands of messages in a few accounts, the folder pane, the status bar, the reading pane and a search no longer walk every message at every frame (a frame over 326,000 messages took 59 ms, and takes under 1 ms); the message list is built from the folder's own messages; opening an unread message no longer builds the list again; and changing the view, the folder or the search no longer copies the whole mailbox first (#731).
• MailCraft no longer opens off screen after the monitor it was last on is unplugged: if no connected monitor shows enough of the window's top to take hold of it, the window opens in the middle of the main monitor. This now works with two monitors of the same size, a monitor to the left of the main one, and a change of display scale (#719).
• A message from another account or from this computer, moved or copied into an IMAP account's Outbox and sent with Send Again, is filed in Sent Items once: the next Send/Receive no longer also puts it on the server as a message moved in. Mail moved into a Microsoft account that its server doesn't have yet can't go on into that account's Outbox, and a copy can't go into a Microsoft or Exchange server account's Outbox, where the next Send/Receive would have sent it without Send (#704).
• Search commands no longer covers the ribbon's last tabs in a narrow window or at a large interface size: when the tab row is too narrow for both, it becomes the magnifier alone, with its name in the tooltip, and the tabs stay readable and clickable (#712).
• The classic ribbon no longer runs off the right of a narrower window: the tab's note goes first, then each group shrinks (small buttons, then icons only), then folds into one button that opens it; the less used groups, such as Find and Send/Receive, give way first, and in a very narrow window the last go behind … (#709).
• Rename Folder from the ribbon (and F2) asks for the folder's new name, instead of opening New Folder inside it (#693).
• Undo after a command that read a message's text from disk while it changed the message no longer leaves a Microsoft or Exchange account's message with an empty body, nor saves it that way (#688).
• Opening another mailbox file in a window (File › Open, a recent mailbox, a file dropped on the window or handed over by a second start), or saving to one, no longer lets two windows have the same mailbox open: a mailbox another MailCraft window has open is refused with a plain message and the one open stays as it was, and once the other file is open, a second start on it comes to this window while the mailbox left behind can be opened again (#517).
• An agent can no longer change, empty or undo what you are writing in a message once you have typed in it, nor save that over its draft: the message is yours until you close it (#577).
• File › New, File › Open, a recent mailbox and a mailbox file dropped on the window no longer close the message being written without a word: when it has changes that aren't saved, MailCraft asks first (Save Draft, Discard or Cancel), as closing it does; File › Open asks once the file is chosen, and a mailbox read in the background asks once it is read. A script saves the message to Drafts first (#470).
• Reply, Reply All, Open Draft, Send Again, the answers to meeting requests, and forwarding, changing, copying or deleting a meeting no longer act on the selected message or appointment when an agent or script names one wrongly (null, an id as text, zero, a fraction, or ids naming more than one message for a command that takes one): the call is refused and says what is wrong. Leaving id out still takes the selection (#553).
• Every other command that names messages, contacts, tasks, folders or appointments by id or ids (marking read, flags, categories, pins, Block Sender, Save Message As, the attachment and export commands, Add to Contacts, Add to Tasks, Reply with Meeting and the rest) now refuses one named wrongly, as Reply does, instead of acting on what is selected or the folder in view (#553).
• A message moved into an IMAP account's Outbox can be moved or copied into another account, where it used to be refused as a draft. If that account refuses a message that left an Outbox, even one queued with Send, it is no longer sent: it goes back to its original or, if no server has one, into its Outbox, held until Send Again. An agent's question about an IMAP account's Outbox now says that the mail is held there, names that account and says whether it's a move or a copy; its question about an import no longer says mail is sent. A message no longer stays marked as held after its move into that Outbox is undone or its account is removed (#451).
• An HTML signature is now shown in a message being written as it goes out, with its tables and dividers, read-only under the text (its pictures on the web are not fetched there); Edit signature as text brings back the simpler copy to edit, and that copy is then what is sent. A border written with no style (border-bottom: medium) no longer draws a thick line in mail (#614).

Public beta. For Microsoft accounts (personal, or work or school) MailCraft is a working mail, calendar and contacts program, kept in step with Outlook on the web; keep Outlook to hand while you try it, and tell us in an issue if anything is lost or out of step. Much of what a daily mail program needs is still to come, and other kinds of account are welcome but not part of the beta. What works is in the README.

MailCraft for Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD and the web. Every file is listed with its SHA-256 in SHA256SUMS.txt.

MailCraft keeps your mailbox in its settings folder and saves as you go; one window per mailbox. With a Microsoft 365 or Outlook.com account you sign in on Microsoft's page, and the sign-in is kept by the system's credential store (Windows, macOS, and the Secret Service of GNOME Keyring or KWallet on Linux). What works, and how far each part is from Outlook, is in the README and in docs/gaps.md.

The builds are not signed with a publisher certificate yet: Windows SmartScreen and macOS Gatekeeper will ask before running them.