UCS-Care-Group/mailcraft v0.8.0

MailCraft v0.8.0

on GitHub

MailCraft 0.8.0 in short: the first public beta, for Microsoft accounts (testers welcome; sign up in #11)

• Shared mailboxes' calendars, and a colleague's calendar opened by address (#70).
• Sender images in the message list, off unless you turn them on (#363).
• Mail, People and Tasks arranged by Categories (#327).
• Folder Properties, with each folder's size (#314).
• Safer: a mailbox file from elsewhere connects to nothing until you confirm its servers, a remembered sign-in only goes to the servers it was given for, and a saved attachment is marked as from the Internet.
• Sturdier: a hostile invitation, a huge message or an endless server answer no longer freezes MailCraft or runs it out of memory.
• And many more fixes, listed below.

What's new

• A shared mailbox's calendars. Each shared mailbox you have opened now has its calendar in the calendar's folder list, under My Calendars, with its address. Tick it and MailCraft asks, once, for your permission to read shared mailboxes' calendars (on Microsoft's page, by itself, never with a sign-in; File › Info shows where it stands, with Ask again), then shows them: the calendars you may read, and as blocks marked Busy, Tentative, Out of Office or Working Elsewhere, with no subject, a calendar its owner shared for free and busy times only. They never raise a reminder. Where you may edit one, you change it from here as you do your own: new items, changes and deletes go to the shared mailbox's own calendar, and a meeting request that arrives in its Inbox is accepted, tentatively accepted, declined or answered with another time, from its address (the first answer asks, once and by itself, for your permission to send from shared mailboxes, with the question its mail asks; until you allow it the answer waits on your computer). A calendar you may only read says so when you try to change it; a change the server refuses is put back and the window says why; and if your rights on a calendar shrink, what you changed and hadn't sent is held and named, not dropped. Removing the shared mailbox removes them from your computer (#70).
• Sender images (File › Options, off unless you turn it on): the people you know, your contacts and whoever you have written to, and the senders whose pictures you download (for all mail, a sender or a domain), have their picture in the message list and over the message you read: their Gravatar (told a hash of the address), else their domain's icon from favicon.im or Google (told the domain). Asking tells those services whose pictures you look at, so nobody else's picture is asked for, and none for mail in Junk E-mail; a sender's picture is shown only for mail your mail server says really came from them, so a forged sender keeps their initials. Turning it off stops the asking before the next request (#363).

Fixes

• One press of Escape or Enter no longer does two things at once. With an agent's question on screen, it only answers the question (before, it could also close the message you were writing, a dialog, File or Send/Receive Progress). With a menu open, Escape only closes the menu; with a dialog open in File, only the dialog. Holding a key down counts as one press there, and a key you were already holding when an agent's question appears doesn't answer it (#393, thanks to @kartas39).
• Signing in with a password now works with mail servers that turn away the older LOGIN command: MailCraft uses the server's PLAIN sign-in when it offers one (#375).
• Escape in the search box clears the search and no longer closes a message you are writing (#365, thanks to @kartas39).
• In Calendar, an appointment can be moved between your calendar and a shared mailbox's, or one you opened by address, where you may edit both: it is made in the other calendar first and taken out of the old one only once the copy is there. A meeting is not moved to another mailbox's calendar (it would send everyone invited a cancellation); forward it or create it again there (#70).
• In Calendar, Open Shared Calendar (File › Open & Export, Home › Manage Calendars) opens a colleague's calendar by address with your work or school sign-in; it is kept on this computer only, and a sharing invitation has an Open this calendar button (#70).
• In Calendar, calendars that colleagues have shared with you are listed under Shared Calendars, apart from your own, and a calendar you may only read has a lock and says so when you try to add to it (#70).
• "Always download pictures" from a sender or a domain now holds only for mail your mail server says really came from that domain (its dmarc=pass), the address is compared as plain ASCII, and mail in a subfolder of Junk E-mail counts as Junk; other mail from a remembered sender asks first, and says why. Your lists are kept.
• A meeting invitation that carries the ID of a meeting already on your calendar, but names another organizer, no longer replaces or removes it; the invitation bar and its question show the organizer's address and say when the message came from another one.
• The question about checking for updates says that Yes also downloads and installs them when you quit.
• MailCraft's log no longer holds subjects, addresses or folder names from Send/Receive problems (they are still in the problems report), and a long sender name no longer hides the address in the reading pane.
• A mailbox opened from a file (File › Open, a double-click, a drop) no longer connects to any server until you have seen where its accounts connect to and pressed Confirm servers: nothing in it is sent, received or run before that. Your own mailbox is not asked about, and neither is a file you confirmed while its accounts stay the same (C1 PR-c).
• A password or sign-in the system remembers for an account is now tied to the mail servers it was given for: an account set to other servers asks again instead of being handed it, and changing an account's server asks again. Entries kept by earlier versions move once, so a downgrade asks once more (C1 PR-b).
• A saved attachment is marked as from the Internet (a zone mark on Windows, quarantine on the Mac), so Office and Gatekeeper treat it with the care they give a download; more kinds that launch when opened (add-in libraries, provisioning packages, connection files) are only saved, and old Office files (.doc, .xls, .ppt and the like) ask before they open; a web link that cannot be read as an address is no longer handed to the browser; an agent given a folder is refused the same kinds of file (batch 5).
• An agent is asked before it deletes a contact, task, event or category, or undoes a change to rules, signatures or accounts; its questions show everything it asked for, and a calendar question names the event and the people invited; no rule moves mail into an Outbox (which would send it); Copy Diagnostics is not available to agents (batch 4).
• A .mailcraft file received as an attachment is only saved, never opened from the message; opening another mailbox forgets the passwords and sign-ins held in memory; an agent that asks to add or change an account, or to open a mailbox file, is asked about with the mail servers named (C1 PR-a).
• A calendar invitation or .ics file built to be slow (a time zone with hundreds of parts, thousands of excluded days, or a series counting from 1970) no longer freezes the window: the work a file may cost is bounded, the card still shows, and a note says when a file's time zones were only partly used (PR-d).
• A message with tens of thousands of recipients or categories, a mailbox file of millions of empty messages, an mbox of a very large number of tiny messages or a mailbox file with thousands of accounts and folders no longer exhausts memory or freezes the window: the lists are cut (the reading pane says "and N more"), an import stops at 200,000 messages and says so, and a file with more than the computer can hold is refused (PR-e).
• A mail server that answers one request with an endless stream of mail lists or folders can no longer make MailCraft run out of memory or keep working for hours: an answer is read up to a limit in size, count and time, and past it the request fails and nothing of it is taken in.
• A Microsoft account's first Send/Receive of a large mailbox no longer slows down as it goes: Send/Receive Progress counts the messages kept in full at most once a second, not after every batch.
• The message list can be arranged by Categories (View › Arrange By, or the menu at the top of the list). As in Outlook, a message with two categories is listed under both, and still counts once (#327, thanks to @kartas39 for suggesting it in #308).
• In a list arranged by Categories, Shift-click and Delete act on the row you clicked when a message is listed under several categories, "No category" is translated, a category named like a heading ("Today", "Pinned") is shown as you wrote it, names that differ only in capitals share one heading, and Find Related counts a message once (#327).
• People and Tasks can be arranged by Categories too (View › Arrange By), a contact or task under each of its categories; Tasks can go back to Due Date and People to Name, and each keeps its arrangement between runs (#327).
• The settings of an account kept in step through Microsoft Graph no longer show a user name or IMAP and SMTP servers it doesn't use; they say its mail comes through Microsoft Graph instead (#312, thanks to @kartas39).
• Messages from Sender, in a message's context menu and Home › Find, finds the sender's mail in every mailbox; a search for a whole address (from:ada@example.org) finds that address alone (#301). Inside double quotes in a search, \" is now a quote and \\ a backslash, so a quoted search that ends in a backslash needs it written twice (subject:"C:\\").
• Arranged by size, a message that is only partly here says, and sorts by, its whole size: a Microsoft account's message kept as its preview the size it had when it was downloaded, and a message too large to download from a mail server the size that server gave (#300).
• The only account can now be removed in File › Info; before, it couldn't be (#313, thanks to @kartas39).
• Properties… in a folder's or an account's right-click menu shows what it is, where it is and how many messages it holds; its Folder Size… button lists each folder's messages and the space they take (#314, thanks to @kartas39).
• A horizontal line in a message (<hr>) is drawn again, in the reading pane and above the original in a reply or forward (#349).

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.