Commit Graph
6 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
jcoffey-dev 44b676c55d Name the push verification entry absolutely, from both sides
A JMAP push subscription stays silent until the client echoes back a
verification code. When the code arrives with no tab open, the service
worker leaves it in the cache for the next tab to collect.

Both sides named that entry relatively, and a relative key is resolved
against the URL of whoever is asking. The worker lives at <base>/sw.js, so
it wrote under <base>/; a tab at /mail/inbox/abc looked under
/mail/inbox/. They agreed only when the open page happened to be the root,
which is why this survived: the case that works is the one people try
first.

The failure is quiet in the worst way. A subscription that never gets its
code back simply never delivers, which is indistinguishable from push not
working at all -- there is no error anywhere to notice.

Both sides now build the key from the mount: the worker from the BASE it
already derives from its own location, the page through withBase. Found
while adding BASE_PATH, where the two disagree at every route rather than
only at deep ones; left alone then because it was pre-existing and
unrelated to that change.
2026-09-02 01:01:11 -07:00
jcoffey-dev 562cee82ce Renew the push subscription, so it does not lapse in a week
Background notifications were built, verified against a live server, and then
went quiet a few days later on every device that had them. A JMAP push
subscription expires -- seven days is the ceiling -- and re-registering before
it lapses is the client's job. Nothing did: enableWebPush() was reachable only
from the switch in Settings, so the subscription was registered once, expired,
and stayed expired. Nobody reports that as a bug. They report that push does
not really work.

It is renewed on every app start now, which is the only place it can be: the
registration is a JMAP call and the service worker has no session cookie to
make one with. So the guarantee is that push keeps working as long as ihasmail
is opened now and again, and a two-day renewal window against a seven-day
ceiling means once a week is enough. Registering is the same call as turning it
on -- deviceClientId makes a repeat replace rather than accumulate -- so there
is no second path to get wrong.

Two more things in the same area, both of which produce the same silence:

- webPushActive() asked whether the *account* had any subscription, so the
  moment one device had one, every other device showed the switch already on.
  A phone that had never successfully registered, or whose registration had
  since expired, read as on and delivered nothing. It matches on the device now.
- Turning push on reused an existing browser subscription and gave up if there
  was none. A browser drops or rotates one on its own, and there is no tab open
  to hear the pushsubscriptionchange when it does, so that state was permanent.
  Renewal re-subscribes rather than bailing.

Whether this browser has push on is now remembered locally, which is what
renewal keys off. It is per browser rather than per account on purpose: a
subscription is an endpoint and a device, and a phone having push says nothing
about the desktop. It is not kept across sign-out, matching sign-out already
destroying the subscription itself.

The mock is the reason this was invisible in development: it handed back
expires: null, so a client that never renewed worked perfectly against it
forever. It expires a subscription in seven days now, which is what makes
"does this client renew?" a question the mock can answer.

Checked against the mock: a create returns an expiry seven days out that
survives PushSubscription/get and parses, renewing the same deviceClientId
replaces rather than accumulates, and a device with no registration of its own
finds nothing where the old code saw two subscriptions and said yes. What the
live Stalwart sets for expires is not confirmed -- if it sets none, renewal
correctly does nothing and the other two fixes still stand.
2026-08-31 08:03:43 -07:00
jcoffey-dev 0b01956535 Ask whose computer this is, and believe the answer
Sign-out never cleared local storage. It stopped push, flushed settings and
removed the subscription -- that last one reasoned explicitly that a browser
left holding someone's mail becomes somebody else's next -- and then left the
settings cache and the recently-addressed list on disk. That list is other
people's addresses, and nothing ever removed it.

Clearing it on sign-out is now unconditional, because lending a laptop is the
same exposure as a public machine, only quieter. The keep-list is short and
deliberate: lastUser, which only a trusted device writes; the trust flag; and
the random push device id. Everything else goes, so a key added later is
forgotten by default rather than by nobody having thought about it.

"Keep me signed in on this device" defaulted to true, which assumed the answer
most costly to get wrong -- someone on a library machine got a thirty-day
cookie unless they noticed a ticked box. It now asks whose computer this is,
defaults to not yours, and says what each answer does. Untrusted means a
session cookie, nothing written locally, no push subscription, and a five
minute idle sign-out.

The idle timer is there because the alternative does not work: custom
beforeunload text was removed from browsers years ago, and no event fires at
all for walking away from a signed-in screen, which is the case that matters.
A timer needs nobody's cooperation.

Reads are gated as well as writes, since a machine trusted once still has the
residue; an untrusted sign-in purges it outright. The wire keeps calling this
`remember` -- it is persisted in SESSION_FILE, and renaming it would invalidate
every session file on upgrade for a change of vocabulary.

Verified in a browser against the mock, not only in tests: untrusted sign-in
leaves localStorage empty through a full session including folder expansion;
trusted writes settings, recent and lastUser as before; sign-out clears recent
and settings while keeping lastUser; an untrusted sign-in afterwards clears
even that.
2026-08-28 14:15:15 -07:00
jcoffey-dev e014521fb6 Keep your own settings out of someone else's account
Switching to an account somebody shared pointed the whole app at it. The
rule was "use the selected account if it can do this", and a shared file
account can, by definition, do files.

ihasmail keeps its settings in the account's Files -- that is what makes
them follow you between devices -- so changing any setting while looking
at somebody's shared folder wrote `settings.json` into *their* storage,
creating the `ihasmail` folder there to do it. Signature images went the
same way, and push registration would have gone to whichever account was
on screen. Reading someone else's data by mistake is bad; writing yours
into theirs is worse, and one line was doing both.

There are two questions, and they had one answer:

  - what am I looking at -- follows the switcher, because switching to a
    shared account is how you read what was shared
  - what is mine -- never does

So `accountFor` keeps the first meaning and `ownAccountFor` is the
second, used by settings sync, signature images and push. A `??
accountId` fallback in `loadStoredSignature` went with it: the reader's
own signature, reached through whoever happened to be selected.

A third rule was hiding in the first. A capability the selected account
does not advertise fell back to the selected account anyway, so a session
naming no primary for something aimed it at whoever was selected --
somebody else. It now answers with nothing, which is honest: the feature
is unavailable, rather than pointed at a stranger.

What this does not settle is whether the mail, calendar and contacts the
switcher appeared to offer were ever really reachable, or only asked for
and refused. That depends on what Stalwart advertises on a shared
account, which needs a look at a sharee's session; if it advertises
capabilities nobody shared, more is needed here than routing.
2026-08-27 09:59:00 -07:00
jcoffey-dev 2263aa494f Send a filter the server can read
Enabling background notifications failed with "Invalid filter". The
subscription asked to be notified about mail matching:

    filter: { inMailbox: null, notKeyword: "$seen" }

`inMailbox: null` meant "the inbox" in my head and nothing at all to
Stalwart, which needs a mailbox id there. It refused the whole
subscription, so the feature did not work at all for anyone who tried
it.

The Inbox's id is now passed in and used. Where it is not known the
condition is left out rather than sent empty: notifying more widely is a
worse default than filtering to the Inbox, but it is a working one, and
sending a malformed filter is not a fallback.

Two reasons this got out, both worth fixing rather than just the bug:

  - The tests checked the properties list and its ordering, and never
    looked at the filter. There is now one that walks every condition
    and fails on a null or undefined value, for both the known-inbox and
    unknown-inbox cases.

  - The mock accepted it happily, so nothing local disagreed with the
    code. It now refuses a filter condition with a null value and
    answers "Invalid filter.", which is what the live server said.
    Reproduced: the old payload is rejected, the new one accepted.
2026-08-26 14:01:56 -07:00
jcoffey-dev 96bc7b53d7 Notifications that arrive when ihasmail is closed
ihasmail's notifications came from EventSource, which lives exactly as
long as a tab does -- so "desktop notifications" has always quietly
meant "while you are looking". That switch is now labelled as much, and
a second one does the thing people assumed the first one did.

Stalwart 0.16 signs Web Push with VAPID (RFC 9749) and can put the
message itself in the payload (draft-ietf-jmap-emailpush). The server
pushes straight to the browser's own push service: ihasmail's server is
not in the delivery path, there is no relay to run, and nothing beyond
the browser vendor's endpoint that Web Push requires of everyone.

Checked against the live 0.16.19 before any of this was written, because
an advertised capability is not a configured one:

  - the session publishes a real applicationServerKey, so no key
    generation or server configuration is needed
  - PushSubscription/get answers an ordinary user rather than refusing
  - emailpush is advertised, and its draft defines a filter, an ordered
    properties list and an urgency -- so the payload can carry sender and
    subject, and the server drops properties from the end when it will
    not fit rather than failing the notification

Three things this gets right that are easy to get wrong:

  - The verification handshake. A JMAP subscription delivers nothing
    until the client echoes back a code the server pushed, and the
    service worker cannot answer it -- no credentials in that context.
    It forwards the code to a tab, or leaves it in the cache when no tab
    was open to forward it to.

  - Key encoding. The W3C Push API produces unpadded base64url and
    Stalwart 0.16 was fixed to accept exactly that, so nothing here pads
    on the way out. The VAPID key needs padding on the way *in* for
    atob; getting that backwards fails at subscribe() with an opaque
    error, so it lives in one named function with tests.

  - Sign-out. A subscription belongs to the account, not the session.
    Without tearing it down, a shared machine keeps notifying for a
    mailbox nobody is signed into -- which is somebody else's mail.

The mock models the JMAP half, including refusing padded keys and
non-https endpoints, and creating subscriptions *unverified*. Delivery
cannot be mocked -- it runs through the browser vendor's real push
service -- but a mock that marked a subscription verified on creation
would let a client ship without the handshake, and the symptom in
production is "registered, and silent".

Not verified end to end: an actual notification arriving. That needs a
real browser, a real push service and real delivery, so it is live
testing or nothing.
2026-08-26 13:51:09 -07:00