by explaining (in the titles/hovers) what the concepts and requirements are, by
using selects/dropdowns or datalist suggestions where we have a known list, by
automatically suggesting a good account name, and putting the input fields in a
more sensible order.
based on issue #132 by ally9335
the smtp extension, rfc 4865.
also implement in the webmail.
the queueing/delivery part hardly required changes: we just set the first
delivery time in the future instead of immediately.
still have to find the first client that implements it.
to start composing a message.
the help popup now has a button to register the "mailto:" links with the mox
webmail (typically only works over https, not all browsers support it).
the mailto links are specified in 6068. we support the to/cc/bcc/subject/body
parameters. other parameters should be seen as custom headers, but we don't
support messages with custom headers at all at the moment, so we ignore them.
we now also turn text of the form "mailto:user@host" into a clickable link
(will not be too common). we could be recognizing any "x@x.x" as email address
and make them clickable in the future.
thanks to Hans-Jörg for explaining this functionality.
before, we showed the xn-- ascii names, along with the unicode name. but users
of internationalized email don't want to see any xn-- names. we now put those
in an html title attribute for some cases, so you can still see them if you
really want to, by hovering.
after talking to arnt at fosdem.
the http basic auth we had was very simple to reason about, and to implement.
but it has a major downside:
there is no way to logout, browsers keep sending credentials. ideally, browsers
themselves would show a button to stop sending credentials.
a related downside: the http auth mechanism doesn't indicate for which server
paths the credentials are.
another downside: the original password is sent to the server with each
request. though sending original passwords to web servers seems to be
considered normal.
our new approach uses session cookies, along with csrf values when we can. the
sessions are server-side managed, automatically extended on each use. this
makes it easy to invalidate sessions and keeps the frontend simpler (than with
long- vs short-term sessions and refreshing). the cookies are httponly,
samesite=strict, scoped to the path of the web interface. cookies are set
"secure" when set over https. the cookie is set by a successful call to Login.
a call to Logout invalidates a session. changing a password invalidates all
sessions for a user, but keeps the session with which the password was changed
alive. the csrf value is also random, and associated with the session cookie.
the csrf must be sent as header for api calls, or as parameter for direct form
posts (where we cannot set a custom header). rest-like calls made directly by
the browser, e.g. for images, don't have a csrf protection. the csrf value is
returned by the Login api call and stored in localstorage.
api calls without credentials return code "user:noAuth", and with bad
credentials return "user:badAuth". the api client recognizes this and triggers
a login. after a login, all auth-failed api calls are automatically retried.
only for "user:badAuth" is an error message displayed in the login form (e.g.
session expired).
in an ideal world, browsers would take care of most session management. a
server would indicate authentication is needed (like http basic auth), and the
browsers uses trusted ui to request credentials for the server & path. the
browser could use safer mechanism than sending original passwords to the
server, such as scram, along with a standard way to create sessions. for now,
web developers have to do authentication themselves: from showing the login
prompt, ensuring the right session/csrf cookies/localstorage/headers/etc are
sent with each request.
webauthn is a newer way to do authentication, perhaps we'll implement it in the
future. though hardware tokens aren't an attractive option for many users, and
it may be overkill as long as we still do old-fashioned authentication in smtp
& imap where passwords can be sent to the server.
for issue #58
all ui frontend code is now in typescript. we no longer need jshint, and we
build the frontend code during "make build".
this also changes tlsrpt types for a Report, not encoding field names with
dashes, but to keep them valid identifiers in javascript. this makes it more
conveniently to work with in the frontend, and works around a sherpats
limitation.
i'm not sure this is good enough.
this is based on field MsgFromValidation, but it doesn't hold the full DMARC information.
we also don't know mailing list-status for all historic messages.
so the red underline can occur too often.
we were trying to offset the timezone, but that makes no sense: we already
created a date in the local timezone based on (milli)seconds passed. so we can
just use that date instead of calculating a wrong date.
with requiretls, the tls verification mode/rules for email deliveries can be
changed by the sender/submitter. in two ways:
1. "requiretls" smtp extension to always enforce verified tls (with mta-sts or
dnssec+dane), along the entire delivery path until delivery into the final
destination mailbox (so entire transport is verified-tls-protected).
2. "tls-required: no" message header, to ignore any tls and tls verification
errors even if the recipient domain has a policy that requires tls verification
(mta-sts and/or dnssec+dane), allowing delivery of non-sensitive messages in
case of misconfiguration/interoperability issues (at least useful for sending
tls reports).
we enable requiretls by default (only when tls is active), for smtp and
submission. it can be disabled through the config.
for each delivery attempt, we now store (per recipient domain, in the account
of the sender) whether the smtp server supports starttls and requiretls. this
support is shown (after having sent a first message) in the webmail when
sending a message (the previous 3 bars under the address input field are now 5
bars, the first for starttls support, the last for requiretls support). when
all recipient domains for a message are known to implement requiretls,
requiretls is automatically selected for sending (instead of "default" tls
behaviour). users can also select the "fallback to insecure" to add the
"tls-required: no" header.
new metrics are added for insight into requiretls errors and (some, not yet
all) cases where tls-required-no ignored a tls/verification error.
the admin can change the requiretls status for messages in the queue. so with
default delivery attempts, when verified tls is required by failing, an admin
could potentially change the field to "tls-required: no"-behaviour.
messages received (over smtp) with the requiretls option, get a comment added
to their Received header line, just before "id", after "with".
the bar is currently showing 3 properties:
1. mta-sts enforced;
2. mx lookup returned dnssec-signed response;
3. first delivery destination host has dane records
the colors are: red for not-implemented, green for implemented, gray for error,
nothing for unknown/irrelevant.
the plan is to implement "requiretls" soon and start caching per domain whether
delivery can be done with starttls and whether the domain supports requiretls.
and show that in two new parts of the bar.
thanks to damian poddebniak for pointing out that security indicators should
always be visible, not only for positive/negative result. otherwise users won't
notice their absence.
by using a String object as the textarea child. instead of a regular js string
that would be unicode-block-switch-highlighted, which would cause it to be
split into parts, with odd or even parts added as span elements, which the
textarea would then ignore.
we match messages to their parents based on the "references" and "in-reply-to"
headers (requiring the same base subject), and in absense of those headers we
also by only base subject (against messages received max 4 weeks ago).
we store a threadid with messages. all messages in a thread have the same
threadid. messages also have a "thread parent ids", which holds all id's of
parent messages up to the thread root. then there is "thread missing link",
which is set when a referenced immediate parent wasn't found (but possibly
earlier ancestors can still be found and will be in thread parent ids".
threads can be muted: newly delivered messages are automatically marked as
read/seen. threads can be marked as collapsed: if set, the webmail collapses
the thread to a single item in the basic threading view (default is to expand
threads). the muted and collapsed fields are copied from their parent on
message delivery.
the threading is implemented in the webmail. the non-threading mode still works
as before. the new default threading mode "unread" automatically expands only
the threads with at least one unread (not seen) meessage. the basic threading
mode "on" expands all threads except when explicitly collapsed (as saved in the
thread collapsed field). new shortcuts for navigation/interaction threads have
been added, e.g. go to previous/next thread root, toggle collapse/expand of
thread (or double click), toggle mute of thread. some previous shortcuts have
changed, see the help for details.
the message threading are added with an explicit account upgrade step,
automatically started when an account is opened. the upgrade is done in the
background because it will take too long for large mailboxes to block account
operations. the upgrade takes two steps: 1. updating all message records in the
database to add a normalized message-id and thread base subject (with "re:",
"fwd:" and several other schemes stripped). 2. going through all messages in
the database again, reading the "references" and "in-reply-to" headers from
disk, and matching against their parents. this second step is also done at the
end of each import of mbox/maildir mailboxes. new deliveries are matched
immediately against other existing messages, currently no attempt is made to
rematch previously delivered messages (which could be useful for related
messages being delivered out of order).
the threading is not yet exposed over imap.
soon, we can have multiple rejects mailboxes. and checking against the
configured rejects mailbox name wasn't foolproof to begin with, because it may
have changed between delivery to the rejects mailbox and the message being
moved.
after upgrading, messages currently in rejects mailboxes don't have IsReject
set, so they don't get the special rejecs treatment when being moved. they are
removed from the rejects mailbox after some time though, and newly added
rejects will be treated correctly. so this means some existing messages wrongly
delivered to the rejects mailbox, and moved out, aren't used (for a positive
signal) for future deliveries. saves a bit of complexity in the
implementation. i think the tradeoff is worth it.
related to discussion in issue #50
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.
