Mail 1.3 introduces mail cache, improved signatures, link shares, mark-all-read and more

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Originally published at: Mail 1.3 introduces mail cache, improved signatures, link shares, mark-all-read and more - Nextcloud



With Nextcloud Hub, the Mail app reached 1.0 and we promised quick improvements going forward. The 1.3 release made available today is quite the mile stone, bringing a database cache for messages underneath which brings better performance right now but also forms the basis for some important updates in the coming months. Besides this important underlying work, a number of other new features is introduced and improved and many bugs were fixed.

Caching

The main feature of this release isn’t immediately visible, but certain noticeable, especially on IMAP servers with poor IMAP capability support. The cache stores your email messages so Mail does not have to retrieve them from your mail server any time you want to read your email. A background job syncs new messages so they are there whenever you need them and things are generally snappier. A tester on github tested this with about 9000 emails, showing that while the client previously would cause CPU load spikes of 40-50% on the server, the cache reduced that to 4%. The cache will also allow some other nice feature improvements, stay tuned for news about that in upcoming releases!

Mark read, signatures and more

Mail 1.3 comes with many feature improvements beyond the cache. You can now:

  • View the source of the message
  • Add message attachments as link shares
  • Mark all as read in the unified inbox
  • Add headings and control alignment in the mail composer

The Mail app also improved the user interface in various ways.

  • We now have a floating attachment button with a popover with details
  • Mail hides folder collapse button if there is only one folder to hide
  • Nicer looking signature settings

And many bugs fixed

Some two dozen bugs were fixed and error handling and recovery itself got better as well. Disconnects during syncing or IMAP issues should not be as disruptive as they perhaps were before. Other improvements were made to style, favorites, translations, html formatting, navigation and more.

We think Mail 1.3 is a great release and we look forward to your feedback. Go try it out and let us know what you think!


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2 Likes
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Hello,

First, thank you for your great work, you make NextCloud better and useful. Your mail application is very appreciable thanks to his simplicity and main available functionalities.

But I notice that BreezeDark and mail app dont harmonize very well. There is a loss of space when I read message.

Dark
Dark1295Ă—635 280 KB
white
white1290Ă—635 261 KB

Secondly, I have some difficulties to add a mail address with a personal domain. I can add this address on Thunderbird with an “exception of security”. So I think that it is the source of my problem on your app. So maybe you can add “exception of security”.

Thank you for reading

Goodbye :wink:

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What do you mean by this?

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I miss that I no longer can send mails to user groups. Had hoped this should be fixed in this update.

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Unfortunately I still cannot use the mail app, because it scans the whole IMAP tree for available messages instead of only using the available list of subscribed folders, as reported here three years ago. So the app runs into a timeout trying to scan/read all available email.

I think it would be huge step forward, if the mail app would access email the same way as many other programs/apps are doing it. Additionally it should boost the whole scan process a lot.

3 Likes
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That will be fixed in version 18.0.12 of the theme, which I’ll release during the weekend.

1 Like
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Hello,

the new mail app is better than the old one, but I don’t understand why you have to develop a new web mail client at all.
I also use Roundcube 1.4.3. This project is also open source and has a lot of sophisticated functions, runs stably and has a nice design. Why doesn’t nextcloud integrate e.g. this web mail? Then it would be much faster to provide a reasonable mail client?

Regards

1 Like
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The question is whether splicing in Nextcloud support into an external project is less work than writing something completely independent that fits in with the rest of the ecosystem (user/email account management, contacts, calendar, files etc). There is also an app that integrates Roundcube into Nextcloud (like Rainloop):

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Yes I understand . But I’m afraid that it will take a long time before we can transfer normal users of e.g. OutlookWebAccess to switch to nextcloud mail.

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That is indeed the case, the Mail app is a very longtime project now and reached 1.0 only a short while ago. But with the introduction of “Nextcloud Hub” it seems like the development pace has accelerated greatly because it is now considered an important part of the whole package.

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Si se puede enviar

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I dont understand spanish, but guess you mean it is possible. I dont think so. But it seems a solution is on the way.

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Works here with Mail 1.3.4

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Halleluja! Now it works after last update to 1.3.4 Very good. Was waiting for that.

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This is such a massive update for this app! Thanks so much for greatly improving it!

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Mail is slow. Very slow and unusable on each attempt at different installs. At least now you can see the subject line and scroll through relatively well., but to see email body takes way to long. I really hope someday this can be an all in one solution, but until this is sorted, it just isn’t. Sorry I can’t be kinder about it as I guess my frustrating is showing.

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What IMAP server are you currently using? I learned that the performance is highly influenced by that component. Right after I’ve switched e.g. to Dovecot-IMAP the app performed well on my server.

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I am not self hosting. I have tried gmail, live, privateemail, among others. I will try again in a year. Maybe then this will get some priority. The ROI prohibits any more time investment in trouble shooting. And all forum threads seem to get closed without any real direction, just redirection making it a bit more difficult. I hope this become a focal point. One can hope.

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Assuming that you’re talking about individual messages I think it’s because those are fetched just on demand. The message cache released just 1y ago made it possible to have at least the mailboxes and envelope locally in the database so we load this really quickly. But the body would be too much from the DB, hence the server still talks to IMAP for this.

I was thinking of maybe pre-fetching in cron and pushing to memcache if one is available. That might do the trick.

1 Like