Both `theme` and `lastDarkTheme` sync, so a theme chosen on one machine
-- and the toggle's way back to it -- are the same everywhere. That is
already true, by the rule that DEVICE_KEYS is a list of exceptions and
anything else syncs by default, but nothing said so.
The existing test cannot say it: it derives what should sync from
DEVICE_KEYS, so moving one of these into that list would move the
expectation with it and still pass. These name the two keys outright.
The top-bar toggle went to light from anything dark, and back to plain
"dark" -- which quietly moved an ihasmail user onto a theme they had
never chosen, two clicks and no way to tell what had happened. It did
the same to "match system", which the toggle could not restore at all;
the comment above it conceded as much and sent people to Settings.
There is more than one way to be dark now, so the way back is
remembered: lastDarkTheme holds whichever non-light theme was last
chosen, and the toggle returns to that.
The remembering lives in update(), the single path every way of setting
a theme goes through -- the toggle, Appearance, an imported settings
file -- so a fourth way to choose one cannot forget to record it. Light
never overwrites it, since light is the side being toggled away from.
The button's label follows: "Switch to the ihasmail theme", "Switch to
your system theme", rather than claiming everything dark is "dark mode".
Confirmed in a browser, not only in tests: from a fresh profile the
round trip ihasmail -> light -> ihasmail returns to ihasmail, and
system -> light -> system returns to system, with the label naming the
destination each time.
A dark theme carrying ihasmail.org's palette: a teal-navy ground rather
than the blue-slate of the plain dark theme, with the orange the logo's
cat is drawn in doing the work of the star and the warning colour. The
values are the site's own, read from its stylesheet rather than picked
by eye.
It is a theme rather than an accent because it changes backgrounds,
borders and text as well as the highlight -- an accent could not.
It rides on data-theme="dark" and adds data-palette="ihasmail" on top,
so the eleven dark-only rules further down the stylesheet keep applying
without being duplicated for a second dark theme. Specificity then does
something deliberate: the palette block is 0,2,0 and the accent variants
are 0,3,0, so a chosen accent still wins over it -- and because the
default accent ("teal") has no rule of its own, ihasmail.org's accent is
what shows until someone picks another. Verified both ways in a browser.
It is now what a new account starts on, so the app looks like itself
before anyone has chosen anything. Only a default: a stored theme always
wins, which leaves everyone already using ihasmail where they are, since
the setting is saved whether or not they deliberately picked it.
While here, the theme-color meta tag was fixed. There were two, both
carrying media attributes, and applyTheme looks for
:not([media]) -- so it matched neither and the browser chrome had never
followed the chosen theme at all, only what the OS preferred. One tag
now, updated from JS, starting at the default theme's background so the
first paint is right too.
Contrast measured rather than assumed, against the theme's own
background: text 14.5:1, muted 8.6:1, faint 6.4:1, accent 8.0:1, link
9.8:1, star 7.9:1, accent-on-accent 8.4:1. All AA or better.
The build and where to find it were running together on one line. The
name and version now stand on their own, with the two links beneath:
ihasmail v2.16.61
ihasmail.org · AGPL-3.0 source
"by" is gone with the restructuring. It was doing attribution work that
the line no longer needs -- ihasmail.org is a LINUXexpert.org project
site, so pointing at it says the same thing without the preposition, and
the README badge is where the credit properly lives.
One <p> with a break rather than two paragraphs: .foot carries a 20px
margin-top, which a second one would repeat as a gap under the button.
The link went to linuxexpert.org, which is the organisation rather than
the project. Someone reading a sign-in page and following it wants the
software's own site, not its publisher's.
Checked that https://ihasmail.org answers 200 before putting it in front
of everyone who reaches the instance -- a dead link on a sign-in page is
worse than none.
The README badge still credits LINUXexpert.org, which is the right place
for attribution and was not part of this.
The four things this section still had outstanding were all exercised
against the live 0.16.19 on 2026-08-26:
- read receipts, end to end -- assembled, uploaded, imported, submitted,
landed in Sent, and $mdnsent set so a second look does not offer to
send another. Only the mock had seen this before.
- the rest of the scheduled-send journey: a hold expiring and being
delivered, and the Scheduled folder reconciling on the way in -- a
released message to Sent, a cancelled one back to Drafts. The hold
itself was already confirmed on 2026-08-25.
- Files rename, move and delete on the 0.16 path. What had been
confirmed on 0.15.5 was the older code path, and that no longer
exists, so this closes the entry rather than adding to it.
- the settings file on the deployed instance, rather than only on a
build that had not shipped yet.
The section keeps saying what was checked and when, and now says why:
it has been wrong before, when the 0.16 registry path was recorded as
verified live while a capability looked for in the wrong place meant it
had never run at all. What is left here is no longer a list of unknowns
but of things worth knowing -- where Stalwart departs from a spec, where
a setting has to be on for a feature to work, and what ihasmail
deliberately does not do.
Moving the deploy script into the repo put it inside the checkout it
resets, and bash does not read a script all at once -- it reads as it
goes, by byte offset. `git reset --hard` replacing the file underneath a
running shell makes it stop wherever it had reached.
Silently, and with exit status 0. A three-line demonstration:
echo "line A"
cat > "$0" <<'NEW'
echo "REWRITTEN"
NEW
echo "line B"
prints "line A" and nothing else, and exits 0. In a deploy that means
building the image, then stopping before the container is replaced, and
reporting success -- so the old container keeps serving while everything
says the new one shipped.
It only bites when a deploy carries a change to the deploy script
itself, which is rare enough to be baffling when it happens and exactly
the sort of quiet failure this project keeps paying for.
The script now re-execs from a copy outside the tree before touching
git, so the file being run cannot change while it runs, and removes the
copy on exit. Running it from outside the checkout -- as the host did
before this moved into the repo -- skips all of that.
The trap is an `if` rather than `[ -n ... ] && trap`, which would leave
the not-re-exec'd path resting on errexit ignoring a failed left operand
of &&. It does ignore it, but a deploy script is a poor place to depend
on knowing that.
Verified: with the guard, a script that overwrites itself mid-run
completes every later line and cleans up its copy; without it, the lines
after the rewrite never run.
The live deploy script has never been under version control, which makes
it the one part of the pipeline that can silently fall out of step with
the repo -- as it just did: it builds without --build-arg
IHASMAIL_VERSION, so every deployment would report 2.16.0 no matter what
was actually built.
This is that script with the host taken out of it. Every path, name,
port and volume is a variable with a default that describes the shape of
a deployment rather than any particular one, so what is published is the
logic and none of the topology. It follows Caddyfile.example and
nginx.example.conf, which are here for the same reason.
Nothing sensitive was in the original either -- it never reads the
environment file, only hands the path to docker run --env-file -- but
the absolute paths named a user and a directory layout, and there is no
reason for those to be public to buy version control over the guards.
Two things it does that the original did not:
- passes the version to the build, which is the whole reason this came
up. A Docker tag may not contain "+", which a version for a commit
that arrived outside a pull request does (2.16.57+g1fa6578), so the
tag turns it into "-" while the build is told the real form. About
and /api/health still report it correctly.
- tags each build with its own version as well as :current, so rolling
back is running the previous tag rather than rebuilding it. The
failure path lists what is there to go back to.
Exercised against a throwaway clone, container, volume and image:
the hold guard refuses a held commit that production does not already
carry and lets one through that it does; the confirmation guard refuses
to run over a pipe without --yes; a dry run stops before building; and a
full run built, replaced the container and reported healthy at
2.16.57+g0549a09 -- from an image tagged 2.16.57-g0549a09, which is the
sanitising working.
It was only on the About page, which is behind a sign-in -- so the one
place a version is most often wanted, when something is wrong and nobody
can get in, was the one place it could not be read.
It sits next to the AGPL source link deliberately. Section 13's offer is
for the source of *this* build, and naming the build is what turns that
into something a person can act on rather than a link to whatever main
happens to be. A bug report can name the build without signing in, too.
Worth being deliberate about: this is pre-authentication, so anyone who
can reach the instance can read it. That is a real disclosure -- it tells
an unauthenticated visitor exactly which build to look up. It is being
accepted rather than overlooked: ihasmail is AGPL with its source already
linked from that same line, so the version narrows nothing that reading
the source would not, and the sign-in page already names the software.
ihasmail called itself "2.0" on the About page and "2.0.0" from
/api/health, both hardcoded, in four places that had drifted from each
other and from anything meaningful. A build now says what it is:
ihasmail v2.16.57
| | |
| | the pull request the commit came from
| the Stalwart generation this build targets -- 0.16
ihasmail's own major
The first two are the version in the root package.json, so there is a
single place to bump them, and 16 becomes 17 when ihasmail moves to
Stalwart 0.17. Dropping 0.15 is what makes that middle number honest:
while two generations were supported it could not have been either.
The pull request number comes from git at build time and is never
written back into the tree. It cannot be: it does not exist until the
pull request has merged, so a committed version would always describe a
merge that had not happened yet, and every open branch would collide on
the same line. A commit that did not come through a pull request carries
the last number plus its own short SHA -- 2.16.57+g1fa6578 -- which says
it is past that pull request rather than quietly claiming to be it.
.dockerignore excludes .git on purpose, so an image build cannot work
any of this out. It takes --build-arg IHASMAIL_VERSION instead, which
the build stage bakes into the bundle and the runtime stage keeps as an
environment variable for the server. Left out, it falls back to the base
version from package.json rather than failing -- so a version with no PR
number on it means whoever built the image did not pass one.
scripts/ is copied into the runtime image because the server resolves
its version through it. There is no git in there to ask, which is the
fallback's whole purpose.
Verified: 2.16.57 in the bundle and from /api/health on a dev checkout;
the same after a real docker build --build-arg, from inside the
container; and 2.16.0 rather than a crash when the arg is left off.
Note for deploying: ihasmail-deploy.sh on the host builds without the
argument and will produce 2.16.0 until it passes
--build-arg IHASMAIL_VERSION="$(node scripts/version.mjs)".
ihasmail spoke to two generations of Stalwart that are less alike than
their version numbers suggest: 0.16 replaced the REST management API with
JMAP registry objects, changed the shape of FileNode, split its rights
up, and moved configuration into the store. Carrying both meant 34 branch
points across nine files, a 92-line compatibility shim whose only job was
telling them apart, a parallel REST implementation of every credential
operation, and a mock that had to model both.
The branches were not the real cost. The cost was that a wrong answer
about which generation had answered always had somewhere to fall back to,
so it failed quietly rather than loudly: one capability looked for in the
wrong place downgraded every real 0.16 server onto the 0.15 path, which
posted the current password to an endpoint 0.16 had removed, reported the
wrong generation on About, and ran Files on the older code. It reached
production and was recorded as verified when it was not. The mock
mirrored the same wrong placement, which is why the tests agreed.
Removed: the filenode compatibility shim, the dual "registry" | "legacy"
backend in account.ts, the pre-0.16 generation in AccountInfo and
everything that read it, the mock's LEGACY mode and dev:mock:legacy, and
the three test files that existed only to pin 0.15 behaviour.
Sign-in now refuses an older server by name, once, rather than letting
Files, the account locale and credentials each fail in their own way with
nothing connecting them. It says the credentials were fine -- someone
hitting this has typed a correct password, and telling them otherwise
sends them round in circles -- and names the tag to build from. Four
tests cover it, including that no session cookie is minted and that bad
credentials on such a server are still a plain 401.
Two fallbacks went that were not strictly about 0.15, and both for the
same reason the removal is happening. Files no longer answers a refused
filter or sort by fetching every node in the account, which would hide a
real fault behind a performance cliff nobody would notice. And the app
folder lookups now filter on parentId/isTopLevel alone and match names
client-side, since `name` is not a filter Stalwart is known to implement
and one it does not know fails the whole query rather than being ignored.
The last release that runs on 0.15 is tagged stalwart-0.15-support.
Verified against the mock end to end: sign-in, the Files tree on the 0.16
path with the app folder hidden, and self-service credentials over the
registry. 226 web + 75 server tests pass; typecheck and build clean.
CI triggers on a push to main and on pull requests, and on nothing else.
That left no way to put a check on 7a1e5ee -- the commit production is
running -- after GitHub's Actions outage on 2026-08-26 orphaned every run
created during it.
Those runs are not merely slow. GitHub accepted them, allocated zero
jobs, and left them in a state its own API contradicts itself about:
gh run rerun -> "cannot be rerun; This workflow is already running"
gh run cancel -> "Cannot cancel a workflow run that is completed"
gh api -> status=queued, conclusion=null, jobs=0
Neither recoverable nor clearable, and with no manual trigger the only
remaining option would have been an empty commit pushed to main to move
the ref -- which is both a junk commit and against how changes land here.
workflow_dispatch also covers the ordinary case of wanting a check on a
commit that predates a CI change.
Settings moved into the account's JMAP Files in #55, which shipped to the
live 0.16.19 today. The README carried the feature but not what had
actually been checked against a real server, which is the distinction
the Known issues section exists to keep.
Confirmed live on 0.16.19 (2026-08-26): settings set in Chrome came back
on a fresh login in Firefox and in an incognito session. Both start with
an empty localStorage, so each of them read the account's file rather
than anything cached locally -- which is the whole claim.
That incidentally exercised part of the 0.16 Files path the section had
flagged as still wanting a look on its own terms: finding and creating
the folder, creating a node with nodeType, uploading and downloading its
blob, and pointing an existing node at a new one. Rename, move, delete
and the Files view itself are still unchecked there, and the entry now
says so rather than letting the tick spread further than the evidence.
Every setting lived in localStorage, so none of them travelled between
devices. The sharpest edge is the default identity: with none set the
address that sorts first wins, so mail goes out from an address the
recipient may not recognise -- and someone who sets it at work finds it
unset at home, with nothing to say so. Reported in #54.
They now live in a settings.json in the account's own JMAP Files, beside
the signature images already kept there. ihasmail itself stays stateless:
no volume, no database, nothing to back up separately, and the settings
are covered by whatever backs up the mail store.
localStorage stays as a cache rather than the source of truth, so the
first frame is painted from it and the file corrects it a moment later.
A private window has no cache and shows defaults for that one frame,
which is the trade for not gating the whole app on a network round trip.
Not everything should follow the account. A list-pane width picked on a
27" monitor is wrong on a laptop, and the notification toggles track a
permission the browser grants per-device, so claiming it elsewhere would
be a lie. Those stay local, written as a list of exceptions so that a
setting added later syncs by default -- which is what adding one almost
always means.
Writes are coalesced: update() fires on every frame of a splitter drag,
so a change waits 3s and the newest value wins. A tab going away flushes
first, as does signing out, so a setting changed seconds before either
is not lost.
The ihasmail folder is now hidden from the Files view, contents and all.
Hiding the folder alone would have been worse than showing it: the tree
attaches a node whose parent is missing to the root, so the signature
images would have spilled into the top level as if the user had put them
there. Those images have been visible since signatures shipped.
Requires 0.16 -- FileNode/query cannot see directories before that. On
0.15 settings stay local exactly as they were.
Verified against the mock end to end: folder create, blob upload, node
create, read back, update, re-read. Not yet exercised against the live
0.16.19.
Every screenshot still showed the old mark in the topbar -- squashed,
with an illegible ".com" smudge under it. All seven are retaken against
the mock server at the original framing (1420x703, mobile 500x703).
The four Sieve rules in filters.jpg are not seeded by the mock, so they
are rebuilt through the rule builder to match the previous shot:
Newsletters, From the boss, Receipts, Build failures.
Date format is pinned to the locale default so the list reads "Aug 24"
as it did before, rather than the "24.08." the stored preference had
drifted to.
README: the header logo drops 180 -> 150 wide, since the mark alone is
portrait where the old artwork was landscape, and the note about the
prototype now says the logo has lost its wordmark too.
The logo baked "ihasmail.com" into the artwork, which is the wrong
identity for a project that is not the hosted instance -- and at the
34px the topbar renders it at, the wordmark was an illegible smudge
under a squashed cat.
logo.png, icon-512.png, icon-192.png and apple-touch-icon.png are now
the mark alone. favicon-64.png, icon-maskable.png and favicon.ico
already were, and are untouched.
Cropping needed a threshold: both source files carry a band of
near-invisible pixels (alpha 1-10) roughly 40px wide down the left
side, so a plain getbbox() crop leaves the mark sitting off-centre.
The bounding box is taken at alpha > 8 instead.
The login page had no name of its own -- it relied on the wordmark --
so it gets one as text, styled like the topbar's. Its screenshot is
retaken; the rest still show the old mark in the topbar.
Down to the licence, the Stalwart generations this has been run
against, and a LINUXexpert.org badge linking to the site. The CI, JMAP,
Node, TypeScript and no-IMAP badges are gone.
The Stalwart and LINUXexpert.org links carry target="_blank". Worth
knowing that GitHub itself will ignore it: its README sanitiser strips
target and rewrites rel to nofollow, which was checked against the
markdown API rather than assumed. The attribute still does its job
anywhere else the README is rendered, so it stays.
Seven, each saying something true about this project rather than
decorating the page: CI, the licence, which Stalwart generations it has
actually been run against, the JMAP RFCs it implements, the Node floor
from engines, that both tsconfigs are strict, and the line the README
already uses to describe itself -- no IMAP, no SMTP, no database.
Every claim was checked against the repository: the CI badge is the
workflow's own, the licence matches LICENSE and package.json, the Node
version comes from engines, and strict is set in both tsconfigs. All
seven were fetched and rendered before committing, so none of them is a
broken image.
The standalone licence badge lower down goes, being now the second one
on the page.
The Stalwart badge is the one to remember: it is static, so it needs
changing when the live instance moves, exactly as the prose above it
does.
Three things a licence audit turned up. None of them is a conflict --
every one of the 182 installed packages is permissive, and the relicence
was within the copyright holder's gift -- but all three are ways the
AGPL fails to stick.
The offer was hard-coded to this repository. Section 13 asks whoever
runs a modified version to offer *that* version's source, so every
deployment with a patch in it was pointing at the wrong tree, and would
have gone on doing so unless its operator noticed and edited the About
page. SOURCE_URL now sets it, alongside APP_NAME, and both the sign-in
page and About read it.
The offer was also only visible after signing in. Whoever is looking at
the sign-in form is interacting with the program over a network too, so
the footer carries it now.
And the two workspace packages declared no licence at all. Private, so
npm never minded, but anything reading the tree saw a blank where the
rest of the project says AGPL-3.0-or-later.
Checked both ways round: with SOURCE_URL set to a fork, the sign-in page
and About both point at the fork; with it unset, both fall back to this
repository.
Two cosmetics.
Picking a folder colour left the menu open, which every other action in
it does not. It closes now, the way the calendar's colour menu already
did.
The live-updates indicator was an 8px flat speck in --fg-faint, near
invisible in either theme, and it had two states where the code has
three. The push client only ever said connected or not, which cannot
tell "retrying with a backoff" from "stopped": it now reports
connecting, connected or disconnected, and the retry path says
connecting rather than going dark. pushConnected stays for the callers
that only want the boolean.
The dot is 12px and raised -- a white highlight over a solid colour with
a soft halo, so one bead reads on light and dark alike without a
per-theme variant. Green connected, amber reconnecting with a slow
pulse, red disconnected. The pulse respects prefers-reduced-motion, and
the indicator is labelled for a screen reader rather than hidden from
it, since it carries real information.
A tinted outline barely registered against the sidebar. The icon is now
filled with the colour, which is what makes it findable at a glance in a
list of a dozen folders.
Two details it needed. The fill has to come from CSS, because lucide
writes fill="none" as a presentation attribute on the svg and a rule
beats one. And the strokes are drawn in --bg rather than the colour: a
solid fill in one colour swallowed the detail inside icons that have any
-- Archive lost the lid and handle of its box and became an orange blob.
Knocked out against the background they read again, in either theme,
since --bg follows the theme rather than being pinned to one.
Checked by pixels and by eye in both themes: the coloured area of the
icon went from an outline to 55% of its box, and Archive, Newsletters
and Work are all still recognisably themselves.
Right-click a folder and pick one of the twelve colours the calendar
already uses, or clear it again. The colour tints the folder's icon; the
label keeps the sidebar's own contrast, which a dozen arbitrary colours
would not reliably give it.
Kept by mailbox id rather than by name, so a folder renamed or dragged
somewhere else keeps its colour. Stored in settings, which live in this
browser -- JMAP has nowhere on a Mailbox to put a colour, and every other
colour in the app, labels and event categories included, already works
this way. Worth knowing it does not follow you to another device.
The cascade needed care: .nav-item svg sets the colour on the icon
itself, so a colour inherited from a wrapper does nothing. Checking
getComputedStyle on the wrapper said the icon was purple while the pixels
stayed grey; the rule now targets the svg, and the check now reads the
pixels.
Reparenting a folder meant the Folders settings page, or nothing at all.
The tree already accepted messages dropped onto a folder, so folders now
travel the same way: drag one onto another to nest it, or onto the
Folders heading to bring it back to the top level.
The heading says "Drop here for the top level" while a folder is in
flight, because an unlabelled strip of heading is not a discoverable
target. The row being dragged fades, the row under the pointer is
outlined, and only rows that would accept the drop light up.
Four drops are refused: a folder onto itself, into its own subtree,
onto the parent it already has, and any folder the server gave a role,
which is not draggable in the first place. The subtree case is the one
that matters -- it would orphan the branch -- and it checks the whole
subtree rather than the immediate children.
Whether a drop is legal has to be known during dragover, when
dataTransfer.getData is blocked, so the tree remembers what is being
dragged rather than asking the drag.
The move goes through updateMailbox, so the filter rules pointing at the
folder follow it, and the target folder is expanded afterwards so the
folder can be seen where it landed.
Deleting a folder removed every rule that filed into it, along with
whatever else those rules did. A rule that filed into Work, marked read
and stopped processing lost the marking and the stopping too, and
deleting a folder says nothing about whether those were still wanted.
Only the fileinto action goes now. A rule left with nothing to do is
still removed, because it has nothing to do; a rule filing into two
folders keeps the one that still exists. The toast says which happened.
Verified against the running app with two rules aimed at the same
folder, one filing only and one filing and marking read: the first was
removed, the second kept its markread, and the script stored on the
server agrees.
jcoffey-dev
LINUXexpert.org