The first language, and the first one where the honest thing to say is not
flattering: no native speaker has read it. That is stated in the app rather
than in a commit nobody reads, because it is the fact a reader needs to judge
what they are looking at. Somebody told a translation is unchecked forgives an
odd sentence and reports it; somebody told it was reviewed reasonably concludes
the product is sloppy. The setting carries a link straight to a report, which
is the whole review process here.
`beta` is a property of the language, not of the catalogue's completeness. A
file can be word-for-word finished and still read like a machine wrote it, and
that is what the flag marks. Removing it is a person's decision.
Register is "Sie", consistently, and written down in the file so the next
language and the next contributor inherit the decision rather than re-take it.
Thunderbird and Outlook use it; ihasmail is as often a company's mail as
somebody's own, where "du" from software the workplace deployed reads as
presumptuous. Where a string can dodge the question it does, which is ordinary
good German UI. The glossary at the top of the file fixes the vocabulary once
-- Posteingang, Papierkorb, Entwürfe, archivieren -- because inconsistency
reads as amateur far more than an imperfect word choice does. "Label" and
"Spam" stay English, since translating them would name things no German mail
client calls that.
766 of 781 strings. The fifteen left are product names, bare URLs and example
addresses, which should stay English and now do.
Two things this turned up that the earlier work had hidden:
Labels defined as module-level constants -- the entire settings navigation,
the theme cards, the swipe choices, the date formats, the sharing permissions
-- are evaluated once, before any catalogue loads, so they could only ever be
English. Nothing failed; the German build simply had an English sidebar. They
are translated where they render now, which keeps the constant as data and
makes its English text the key.
And the codemod's narrowed rule, which let it take 73 more strings last time,
was too broad after all: text stranded after an inline <a> or <strong> came
through as sentence fragments -- ", and what a new account starts on." Eight
of them, rebuilt with tNode so the sentence stays whole and the element is a
named hole a translator can move.
scripts/i18n-catalog-check.mjs is new and earned itself immediately: it found
three keys invented that the code never asks for, which is the silent failure
in a catalogue -- a translation that looks right, is never looked up, and
renders English for ever. It also had to be taught about t(variable), because
it cried wolf 33 times over the constants above, and a check that cries wolf
gets switched off.
Verified in the browser rather than only in tests, which is where the settings
sidebar being English was visible and nowhere else.
The 143 the codemod refused turned out to be two different things, and only
one of them needed a person.
A third were phrases sitting next to an icon -- `<Plus /> New rule`. The
refusal rule was "has siblings", which is broader than the danger: what breaks
a translation is a sibling that renders *text*, splitting a sentence into
fragments no one can reorder. An element beside a phrase does not. Narrowing
the rule to text-producing siblings let the codemod take 73 more.
The rest were real sentences with values in the middle, rebuilt by hand as
named placeholders -- "Your active script “{name}” was written by hand",
"Waiting on the server — goes out {when}." Named rather than positional
because a translator moves the parts around; counted things go through
plural() so Russian and Ukrainian get their three forms rather than English's
two.
Sentences with an element inside them needed something new. `Open <code>mailto:
</code> links in ihasmail` has two obvious treatments and both are wrong:
splitting it into two t() calls hands over fragments that cannot be reordered,
and dropping the <code> keeps the sentence whole but loses the monospace that
said "this is a literal". tNode() keeps the sentence whole and makes the
element a named hole in it, so a translator sees one sentence and can put the
hole where their language wants it. The German test asserts exactly that: the
same call renders the code first when the catalogue says so.
The coverage number was also lying, and it is worth saying how. It counted
text inside <code> and inside translate="no" as untranslated work, and
placeholders like "123456" and "+1 555 0100" -- a one-time code and a phone
format. None of those will ever be translated, so the report sat at 21 with 6
real items left. A number with an unreachable floor is something to argue with
rather than act on, so the tool now applies the same rules the codemod does.
596 wrapped, nothing remaining. Verified in the browser across 15 views, which
is where the last bulk pass hid a bug the tests could not see: no entities, no
unfilled placeholders, no raw t( in rendered text, and the toggle switches that
looked like emptied labels are text-free by design.
Wrapping ~1,000 strings by hand is a thousand chances to mistype the copy
itself, and a parser does not get bored. scripts/i18n-extract.mjs does the
mechanical part -- JSX text and the attributes a person actually reads -- and
refuses the rest rather than guessing. 78% now: 515 wrapped, 143 left.
What it refuses matters as much as what it does. Text split around an
interpolation arrives as separate fragments, and wrapping each on its own
produces "Move " and " messages", which no translator can do anything with;
those are listed for a person to rebuild as sentences. So is anything
containing a double quote, which would end the literal.
Three things it had to be taught, each found by running it:
- <code>, <kbd> and <pre> are not prose. The first run wrapped `label:name`
inside <code> -- a search operator, where translating it breaks the thing it
documents. Subtrees marked translate="no" are skipped for the same reason.
- `t` is a natural name for a callback parameter and several files already use
it, so an import called `t` is shadowed inside those callbacks -- silently,
wherever the local happens to be callable. The name is checked per file now
and aliased to `translate` where it is taken.
- JSX decodes HTML entities and a JS string literal does not, so
`Language & region` moved into t("...") and rendered the entity on screen.
That last one is the one worth remembering. Typecheck passed, 443 tests
passed, and the page said "Language & region" in plain sight. It took
looking at a screenshot, and then a sweep of ten views to find the second
occurrence in a sentence I had written by hand earlier the same day. Nothing
in the toolchain was ever going to catch it: it is valid TypeScript rendering
valid text that happens to be wrong.
The codemod decodes entities now, and checks for a quote after decoding rather
than before.
JMAP has an extension for this -- RFC 9007's MDN/send -- and Stalwart does
not implement it, so ihasmail assembles the RFC 8098 multipart/report itself
and sends it the long way round: raw MIME uploaded as a blob, imported,
submitted. That is also why the receipt lands in Sent, which is where it
honestly belongs.
The plumbing is the easy half. A receipt tells whoever asked that the address
is live and when the message was read, to an address the sender chose, so the
refusals are the feature: nothing marked Auto-Submitted (RFC 3834, or two
servers answer each other forever), nothing carrying Precedence bulk/list/junk
or a List-Id, nothing already acknowledged, nothing that never arrived. A
receipt aimed anywhere other than the sender is offered, but says so first.
There is no "always send" setting, only ask or never.
Sending is recorded with RFC 3503's $mdnsent keyword on the original rather
than remembered locally, so a second look -- or another client entirely --
knows not to ask again. Non-ASCII parts go base64 rather than 8bit, so
nothing rests on 8BITMIME surviving every hop.
Verified against the mock end to end: the blob uploads, the receipt imports
and submits, and the original reads back marked. Not yet exercised against
the live server.
Settings > General gains a "Default mail app" section that calls
registerProtocolHandler so mail links anywhere in the browser open ihasmail.
The browser owns the decision and there is no API to read it back, so the UI
says what it can: it records that we asked, offers "Ask again", shows a
Remove button where unregisterProtocolHandler exists, and points at the
browser's own settings. Unsupported browsers (Safari) and insecure contexts
get an explanation instead of a dead button.
The manifest now declares protocol_handlers for mailto, which is the route by
which an *installed* app can be offered by the operating system itself; the
UI says so and links the two ideas rather than promising a system-wide
default the page cannot grant.
Mailto parsing is now one function (parseMailto in lib/address.ts) instead of
three hand-rolled copies in AppShell and MessageView. It follows RFC 6068:
recipients from the path, the to= header or both, case-insensitive headers,
"+" as space, and tolerant of malformed escapes. That fixes Cc and Bcc being
silently dropped, and draftFromMailto escapes the body so a mailto: URL from
an untrusted page reaches the composer as text rather than markup.
Every user-visible date now goes through web/src/lib/datetime.ts, driven by
three settings (Settings > General > Locale):
- Language & region: automatic, or any of the 618 locales CLDR has data for,
each named in its own language and script (web/src/lib/locales.ts, generated
by probing Intl over the subtag space).
- Date format: automatic (locale order), 22.11.2025, 22/11/2025, 11/22/2025,
or ISO 8601 2025-11-22.
- Time format: automatic (locale), 24-hour, or 12-hour.
Automatic takes the locale Stalwart has for the account, read best-effort at
login via x:Account/get (urn:stalwart:jmap) and passed to the client in the
session; servers without the capability, or that deny sysAccountGet to a
regular user, fall back to the browser locale. POSIX forms are normalised
(de_DE.UTF-8 -> de-DE) and script modifiers kept (sr_RS@latin -> sr-Latn-RS,
uz_UZ@cyrillic -> uz-Cyrl-UZ), while dialect/variant/currency modifiers are
dropped and a script the locale already implies is not appended.
Numerals follow the locale (22.11.2025 renders as Arabic-Indic digits under
ar-EG); ISO 8601 is the exception and pins date and clock to Latin digits so
one line never mixes digit systems.
Rewired: message list and headers, quoted reply headers, calendar (titles,
weekday and hour gutters, mini calendar, agenda, popovers, invite cards,
free/busy), contacts, files, sessions. No raw toLocale*String date calls are
left in web/src.
Native <input type="datetime-local"> pickers always follow the browser locale
and cannot be restyled by a page, so the out-of-office fields echo the entered
instant in the chosen format underneath.
Also: month-grid day labels no longer wrap when they hold a date, and the mock
server serves x:Account/get (MOCK_LOCALE, default en_US).
Closes#1
jcoffey-dev