What's coming in 4.5

[girish]

For the coming weeks, our focus is simply to get more of the apps out. bitwardern/jitsi/matrix etc are in various states and we want to get those out asap.

We are working on some ideas on the Cloudron side:

• Mail fts search - This will be optional since the dovecot+solr integration takes a lot of memory.
• Mail server queue and reports - This is just a UI to get an insight into what emails are incoming and outgoing on the mail server
• Mail spam controls - This will tackle the popular "Spams are still getting through" reports
• CPU resource allocation - Currently, you can control memory per app. This will allow you to control the CPU allocation as well.
• Firewall API
  • This will allow setting up basic application firewall rules. This is not clear yet but we will build on top of modsecurity/fail2ban potentially.
  • For email, this will have whitelist/blacklist
• Backup - listing, download and remove API and UI (for box and the apps).
• Per-app backup format.
• Group admins - The idea here is to create "sub admins" who can invite users but cannot control server level settings like backups.
• Whitelabel the footer/404
• App specific passwords

BTW, if you have comments/suggestions, feel free to open a thread in the Discuss section or comment here for any clarification

[jdaviescoates]

Spam is the reason I ended up moving to Google apps in the first place, so great to this being addressed - with Cloudron I'm beginning to be able to envisage the day when I stop handing Google so much data.

Shame none of the existing open source webmail clients are really up to scratch yet...

[girish]

Roundcube got a facelift recently, check it out!

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in What's coming in 4.5:

Roundcube got a facelift recently, check it out!

I have. Nice, but I can't live without virtual folders/ label based folders/ saved searches/ whatever you want to call them.

I note, however, that "Virtual folders (aka saved searches)" are one of their planned features, so hopefully they'll be available sooner rather than later!

Edit: I'd also really miss being able to search my Email like I can search Gmail, e.g. in:sent has:attachment etc - so I guess Mail fts search would be big a step in that direction?

[yusf]

@girish said in What's coming in 4.5:

Firewall API - This will allow setting up basic application firewall rules.

How will this work in together with the fixed app port settings?

[nebulon]

Since we already know the app requirements and custom settings, and already setup the rules in such a case, we have all the information in the backend to merge those two value sources for consistent firewall rules.

[yusf]

Okay, cool!

Is this somehow moving closer to this goal of mine?

[NCKNE]

@girish said in What's coming in 4.5:

Mail fts search - This will be optional since the dovecot+solr integration takes a lot of memory.

Mail fulltext search for dovecot with solr would be awesome. I would love to see solr being integrated in a way that other apps can use it, eg. for implementing a Nextcloud fulltext search.

[iamthefij]

@jdaviescoates Mailpile has both those features: https://www.mailpile.is/

Might be a good app request.

[jdaviescoates]

@iamthefij thanks, yes, it's already been requested, and as I've said in the relevant thread I'd love it if it were available on Cloudron for exactly these reasons but I note "it still doesn't work very well in their demo so I guess it's not yet ready for prime time"

[mehdi]

I'm intrigued with "Per-app backup format." I have no idea what it could mean ^^

Also, I'm not very clear on the firewall thing.. I thought all ports except those explicitly opened were already blocked ?

[fbartels]

@iamthefij said in What's coming in 4.5:

Mailpile has both those features

so does Kopano: https://kopano.com/

[girish]

@mehdi said in What's coming in 4.5:

I'm intrigued with "Per-app backup format." I have no idea what it could mean ^^

We are trying to figure a solution on how to backup & restore the large amounts of data people store in nextcloud style apps. For most other apps, tgz format works just fine. But for nextcloud, people are storing upwards of 100G and we get a support request every 3-4 days about some backup/restore issue. This usually happens whenever we do a nextcloud update. One idea was maybe to let people choose rsync just for nextcloud (so per-app backup format). I prefer not to add options like this, it's too complex to explain. If others have a better suggestions, would be good to hear them. We considered only backing up db and not the files but I am not sure what the value of this is. It's really hard to 'restore' from a partial backup.

Also, I'm not very clear on the firewall thing

Yes, all ports unless explicitly opened are blocked. A common feature request is to whitelist/blacklist IP/geoip blocks on apps. Another is to block specific pages from being (ab)used too quickly - like login pages. For example, maybe we can add hints in CloudronManifest.json to say /login.php is the URL or something. So, this is more an application firewall.

[iamthefij]

@girish using something like Restic for backups instead would offer encrypted block based backups. It's great for things like this where you would have lots of potentially duplicate backup data.

I know I suggested this on another thread, but using an existing backup engine would allow you to offload the complexities of efficient backups, integrity checks, and restoration as well as add support for loads more backup destinations (like B2).

[jdaviescoates]

@fbartels said in What's coming in 4.5:

so does Kopano: https://kopano.com/

Does it?!? I had a quick look at the demo a while ago, specifically to see if this was the case but the impression I got was that the email client was very basic and didn't have these features.... I shall have to go back and investigate further...

[jdaviescoates]

@fbartels I had another little play with the Kopano demo (which looked different from how I remembered it, so maybe I was thinking about some other demo I used recently) but nevertheless couldn't see any way of organising mail using virtual folders/ labels/ whatever you want to call them (the demo was that useful as a demo as so little mail there to try anything with - nothing in the inbox - and email doesn't actually seem to get sent - but I clicked on and/ or hovered over everything and didn't appear to have these features as far as I could tell)

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in What's coming in 4.5:

One idea was maybe to let people choose rsync just for nextcloud (so per-app backup format). I prefer not to add options like this, it's too complex to explain.

I like this idea and don't find it particularly complex either

I'd use rsync for Nexcloud and Surfer and tgz for everything else.

[yusf]

@girish said in What's coming in 4.5:

But for nextcloud, people are storing upwards of 100G

Even if a more suitable backup format is found for this usecase, working with those apps in terms of cloning for staging etc will be a pain.

I’m currently looking into external object storage for content, offloading it compleyely from Cloudron.

[girish]

@yusf Doesn't nextcloud already support external object storage (SFTP/S3/Dropbox etc)? What do you need from Cloudron ? Or do you want to mount an external disk into nextcloud with the external storage app ? That is indeed not possible today.

[yusf]

@girish Yes, exactly. It would come down to each app’s ability to support external storage. Which is fine by me. That way I can move and manipulate the then lightweight app, but I have to solve content backup in some other way.