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


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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