What's coming in 6.0 (take 2)

[avatar1024]

@girish quick question in the mailbox sharing feature. If you make it so that a single inbox can have multiple owners (great feature btw), do you think it would then be possible to have the option to set a group as the owner so the mailbox ownership gets dynamically updated with changes in group membership? Thanks

[girish]

@avatar1024 Yes, that's the idea. The ownership will be dynamic.

That said, the initial outlook for the feature is not looking so good. There are two issues that need to be sorted out (suggestions/ideas welcome):

• Apps like SOGo show the "display name" of the user in the main UI. With a shared mailbox, it's not clear where this name should come from. With a single user, we give SOGo, the user's name. With multiple users, it's not clear what this should be.

• The authentication (from a user's point of view) is a bit confusing. Or maybe it's not, I would welcome some feedback here. You have to authenticate with the user's username/password but use the shared mailbox as the mailbox name. In some ways, this is the case already, when you use a different mailbox name with a different username.

[avatar1024]

@girish thanks for the reply.

Perhaps there are a few things I do not understand about the technical implementation of such a feature but I will still try to give my opinion. As you describe in the first post on this thread the idea is, rather that a "shared mailbox" as such, to have a single mailbox with multiple owners, so:

• for point 1) I suppose you mean that the name of the "owner" is fed to the app when the owner is assigned to the mailbox rather than when the user logs in? If so, would it possible to feed the name of the user that logs in into that (which will be recognised through its unique pair of credential: mailbox name + its unique password). If not then I'd say, as a first implementation of this feature (which could be improved later), then the name of the mailbox (as in the prefix before the @) should be fed to the app as the Display Name, when more than one owner are set to that mailbox

• for point 2, then yes, as you say the username (for login) should just remain the full mailbox email address (just that in the case of a shared one, one username will but associated to multiple passwords as valid login credentials).

[avatar1024]

@girish Or as I suggested in my previous post, if we could assign a "group" as the owner of a mailbox, then group name could be fed as the Display Name (for point 1) and you potentially use the group name for the login username (for point 2).

@avatar1024 said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

...be possible to have the option to set a group as the owner...

[girish]

@avatar1024 said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

@girish Or as I suggested in my previous post, if we could assign a "group" as the owner of a mailbox, then group name could be fed as the Display Name (for point 1) and you potentially use the group name for the login username (for point 2).

Making shared mailbox feature work only with groups is an excellent idea! I have to try this out and get back on how well this works.

[Lonkle]

@moocloud_matt said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

@jimcavoli
i think that's possible with nginx too, the ldap backend for auth.
Custom Template for nginx config, will be the best i think, especially for performance optimization.

But this Kong proxy is interesting i will ask to my team, if they have use it.

Should we branch this topic off into its own thread about centralized authentication? It seems like an important aspect to discuss but this thread is about 6.0, which this couldn't be a part of, right? This would be further down the road? @girish @nebulon

[avatar1024]

@girish Glad it was at least a useful suggestion. Let's see if it works in practice

[girish]

@avatar1024 That worked out quite nicely. You can now select a group as owner of a mailbox. founders and sales-team are groups in the screenshot below.

[marcusquinn]

@girish Will each person's password work for IMAP/SMTP? (users in the group)

[girish]

@marcusquinn Yes, that's the idea. Each user can use their own password for sending/receiving with same mailbox.

[A Former User]

@girish Just a suggestion, but IMO it should have two dropdowns like the access section for apps. One for users and one for groups. Unsure of the implementation details but that just stood out to me.

[girish]

@atrilahiji Currently, one can only choose a user or a group. This was just the initial UI anyway for testing the backend. I think we probably need select box with groups like

[marcusquinn]

@girish makes sense. Be good as an input-select box, so you can partial-type what you're looking for in the case of long lists.

[girish]

@atrilahiji That was easy.

@marcusquinn Yes, it's searchable like the one in user's/group's view. The search only appears with more than 5 users.

[ei8fdb]

@girish said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

There is a section overload in the app configure view We are looking to reducing the list of sections in the left pane. It's making things hard to find.

Hi @girish I'd like to help with this if you're interested.

[ei8fdb]

@girish said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

We haven't decided on the naming yet, but maybe Volumes can be instead renamed to External Media or something, if it clarifies things. Open to other suggestions as well.

External media makes sense to me. Until the point Cloudron is able to backup these up (if that's something that will happen), I'd also have a tooltip saying 'External media is not included in Cloudron backups'.

[ei8fdb]

This post is deleted!

[girish]

@ei8fdb said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

Hi @girish I'd like to help with this if you're interested.

Thanks for opening that gitlab issue! We won't do it for the current release atleast since there is massive UI surgery going on already for translations. Let's pick this one up after Cloudron 6 release in a separate thread.

[girish]

An update on this. The i18n is going along well, I think @nebulon is ~80% done. Once we are almost there, we will let you guys know in the translations thread. There is a large number of strings to be translated. We plan to ship Cloudron 6 with the code being translatable while the actual translations will be made available whenever they get ready.

Email container now has solr integration! While search is fast and I can search body (and maybe in future release attachments as well), there is something strange about how IMAP searches work. It seems it will search only under INBOX without the mail client having support for ESEARCH IMAP extension. I am also trying to figure how various mail clients behave here. Hopefully, should get sorted out this week.

Other features are done.

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

An update on this. The i18n is going along well, I think @nebulon is ~80% done.

Excellent and important work!

Once we are almost there, we will let you guys know in the translations thread. There is a large number of strings to be translated. We plan to ship Cloudron 6 with the code being translatable while the actual translations will be made available whenever they get ready.

Good plan

Email container now has solr integration!

Amazing!

While search is fast and I can search body (and maybe in future release attachments as well),

Attachments too would be excellent!

there is something strange about how IMAP searches work. It seems it will search only under INBOX without the mail client having support for ESEARCH IMAP extension. I am also trying to figure how various mail clients behave here. Hopefully, should get sorted out this week.

I could be way off mark here, but I've noticed in the past that lots of IMAP providers seem to put Sent and other folders as effectively subfolders of the inbox. Perhaps something to do with that?

Other features are done.

You're underselling yourself (tbf, that's always a good look).

Personally I am very exciting about these "other features"!

• Volumes!
• Mailbox sharing!
• Faster Nextcloud and WordPress!
• Ubuntu 20.04 support! (Edit: tbh not particularly excited by this, because I'm more excited about having BBB on Cloudron and that isnt' even compatible with 18.04 yet!)

These are all fantastic new features!

[MooCloud_Matt]

@jdaviescoates said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

Faster Nextcloud and WordPress!

We have some test image with Nginx + WP, that i have already shared with @girish, in the next few day we will work with him on some special feature to make the manifest compatible with OLS base image that we have pretty much ready, and later we will work on WP and NextCloud performance boost.

Probably next week, we will post some performance benchmarks of the new WP image, for both Nginx and OLS base image.

[robi]

@moocloud_matt oh you beat me to it.. was going to do Nginx based stack then add other webservers to the mix.

Can't wait for your testing.. godspeed.

[avatar1024]

@jdaviescoates said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

Edit: tbh not particularly excited by this, because I'm more excited about having BBB on Cloudron and that isnt' even compatible with 18.04 yet!

And the worst is, they're explicitly putting all of the work in making BBB compatible with 18.04 first and they have no plans for 20.04.

[jdaviescoates]

@avatar1024 I'm not too bothered by that but yeah it's a bit mad they are still on 16.04

[ei8fdb]

@girish Absolutely. I wasn't suggesting to implement it "now-now". More the case of suggesting to gather data earlier (could be done at any time really), so that when it came to thinking about implementation, you had some data to base decisions on.

To get enough data I'd suggest running the research for ~ 2-3 weeks. Analysis would be much quicker ~days. I'll happy to help with both.

[girish]

Another brief update:

• We added auth wall functionality that apps without any notion of login can use
• i18n is mostly done, just lots of testing before we let translators do their work. @nebulon can give some updates on how the language is selected etc.
• We added httpPaths functionality so that @MooCloud_Matt can work on his OLS app. Also, see https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/3755/apache-ols-and-nginx-custom-benchmarks/5
• Reworked a lot of the internal dns stuff, so that we can have apps as dns servers (ad blocker apps)
• solr fts search was merged today.

Looks like we are set for a release next week!

[doodlemania2]

@girish Did the TURN server API auth stuff make it in for Nextcloud high performance backend'ness?

[nebulon]

@doodlemania2 unfortunately not, in fact I forgot about it

I have put it now into milestone for 6.1 so this does not happen again. Sorry about that.

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

solr fts search was merged today.

This is great... but I'm intrigued to how exactly we'll be able to take advantage of it e.g. to search email/ files?

Will Cloudron Roundcube/ Rainloop/ Sogo, Nextcloud Mail somehow automagically take advantage of solr? or what?

I guess the same applies to Nextcloud files too - will search files on there somehow benefit from the power of solr?

Thanks!

[girish]

@jdaviescoates said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

Will Cloudron Roundcube/ Rainloop/ Sogo, Nextcloud Mail somehow automagically take advantage of solr? or what?

That's the idea, yes. To keep excitement in control, from my testing, the fts has real benefits only if you lots of email (like say 2GB and more). You also need a lot of RAM to run solr (like 3GB). The feature is turned off by default for this reason.

I guess the same applies to Nextcloud files too - will search files on there somehow benefit from the power of solr?

Unfortunately, no. I think there was this nextcloud app called nextant back in the day which used solr. That app was however deprecated and they moved to this fulltextsearch app. The fulltextsearch app can have multiple backends but afaik there is only an elastic search backend (someone has to write a solr backend).

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

That's the idea, yes. To keep excitement in control, from my testing, the fts has real benefits only if you lots of email (like say 2GB and more). You also need a lot of RAM to run solr (like 3GB). The feature is turned off by default for this reason.

OK, thanks.

I guess part of what I'm asking is does having solr enabled some allow for using some Gmail-style search operators like from: to: in:sent has:attachment etc?

I'm guessing perhaps not and that such things would need to be built in/ added to the webmail clients themselves? But I'm unclear

[girish]

@jdaviescoates said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

I'm guessing perhaps not and that such things would need to be built in/ added to the webmail clients themselves? But I'm unclear

Right, those features like operators have to come from mail clients themselves. Note that solr is actually not adding anything new to what is already there. It's just making search faster internally by having an index.

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

Unfortunately, no. I think there was this nextcloud app called nextant back in the day which used solr. That app was however deprecated and they moved to this fulltextsearch app. The fulltextsearch app can have multiple backends but afaik there is only an elastic search backend (someone has to write a solr backend).

Looks like someone started to make one, but there hasn't been any updates since Jun 2019

https://github.com/rearden-logic-inc/fulltextsearch_solr

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

Right, those features like operators have to come from mail clients themselves. Note that solr is actually not adding anything new to what is already there. It's just making search faster internally by having an index.

Thanks. I so wish there were better open webmail clients. Mailpile does most of what I want but development has seemingly largely stalled

Roundcube at least has these:

from:
to:
cc:
bcc:
subject:
body:

[marcusquinn]

@jdaviescoates for Roundcube, the others didn't pass my short attention span for acceptable daily-drivers

[marcusquinn]

@marcusquinn Nothing to do with 6.0 but since webmail distracted, I think EspoCRM is worth a mention as a webmail client, which I'm intending to give a whirl soon. Don't know how performant the search will be in that but will share feedback as I do.

[jdaviescoates]

@marcusquinn said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

@jdaviescoates for Roundcube, the others didn't pass my short attention span for acceptable daily-drivers

It does seem the best of bad bunch (it's the second most popular after Mailpile on https://selfhosted.libhunt.com/categories/1665-webmail-clients ), but frustrating that e.g. it seemingly can't be used to set-up filters and so need to use Rainloop for that. The state of open source webmail really is bad

[girish]

@jdaviescoates I think roundcube is the best of the lot. But also, the desktop and mobile clients are quite great though.

[A Former User]

I use rainloop as I use nextcloud contacts and calendars and it made sense for my users to have their webmail in the same app. But also not have to deal with the absolute garbage that is Nextcloud Mail.

[jdaviescoates]

@atrilahiji said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

the absolute garbage that is Nextcloud Mail.

To be fair, it is pretty new and getting better. One day it might even be the best! (but not today).

I can't really remember properly, but I think it recently added a way to have multiple identities and to easily switch between them, something which is missing from some of the others (I forget which).

[A Former User]

@jdaviescoates True. One thing that was frustrating was 1) the lack of filters and 2) no way to integrate with cloudron mail like the Rainloop app in Nextcloud.

Also there was a point where new emails just stopped coming through on there. Got mad and switched.

[jimcavoli]

@atrilahiji said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

2. no way to integrate with cloudron mail like the Rainloop app in Nextcloud.

On that specific point, Nextcloud Mail does fine in my experience if the users have their cloudron email as their primary email, then you can do similar to the following (my.demo.com used in place of mail server name):

So it can depend a lot on your setup, but I'll freely give you that no sieve support is incredibly frustrating, plus I constantly can't find features that I feel like should be there, and even when it's "working" the visual design is so weird to me that things still feel wrong. I mean, I'd give it like a 4/10 and "would not recommend to a friend" but for some users/clients...it's evidently good enough?

The rolling average in my experience is definitely hot garbage, but sometimes it's acceptable garbage.

[girish]

This release got delayed a bit because we have been trying to narrow down a crash in the LDAP code. We finally found it and have submitted a PR upstream - https://github.com/ldapjs/node-ldapjs/pull/686 . Now we can move forward

[marcusquinn]

@jimcavoli Great tip!!

@girish Worth making these Mail app settings default on all Nextcloud instances? My understanding is they wouldn't take effect unless "Apply and create/update for all users" was clicked, so should be safe for existing installs.

Also, worth adding to the docs given it's a Sys Admin time-saver for onboarding the Mail app, albeit as mostly useful just inside Nextcloud usage.

[A Former User]

Loving 6.0! One thing I’d like to suggest for a minor release is adding a start/stop and restart button along the top when looking at an apps settings. Like the new ones you added for logs and terminal. Also a file browser for the new volumes feature would be nice.

Loving volumes!!! Honestly it’s a lifesaver. My fiancé prefers Emby while I prefer jellyfin, and we use Emby on our smart TV while there’s no Jellyfin web OS app. Thanks @nebulon @girish

[girish]

@atrilahiji said in What's coming in 6.0 (take 2):

Also a file browser for the new volumes feature would be nice.

There's a button right next to each Volume, btw. For next release, we plan to put volumes also into the app's file manager as well for convenience.

[A Former User]

@girish hahah you know I found the other issues and totally thought of the volumes one without checking. Whoops...

[Lonkle]

@girish Did the adminPath manifest argument get removed in V6.0? I just updated and they're gone from my custom apps?

[mehdi]

@lonk https://docs.cloudron.io/custom-apps/manifest/#configurepath Looks like it's still there. Maybe the name changed ?

[Lonkle]

@mehdi Maybe the update removed it, I'll do a full re-install and see if it brings back the admin url button.

[robi]

@lonk you likely have to clear your browser cache