{"id":41099,"date":"2023-11-17T17:21:44","date_gmt":"2023-11-17T22:21:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=41099"},"modified":"2023-11-17T17:22:05","modified_gmt":"2023-11-17T22:22:05","slug":"mail-extension-postmortem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/17\/mail-extension-postmortem\/","title":{"rendered":"Mail Extension Postmortem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tucky Wong<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

While Daylite, including the Daylite Mail Assistant, is compatible with macOS Sonoma, we strongly recommend that you hold off on upgrading to Sonoma at this time.<\/p>\n

Our recommendation is based on feedback from early adopters, which has highlighted a potential significant interruption in your current email workflows. Additionally, we are actively addressing certain issues in the extension API to ensure a smoother transition.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Apple Mail is crashing<\/a> when using various Mail extensions. Now that no third-party code can run within the Mail process, it’s straightforward to attribute this to a Mail bug. However, unlike with plug-ins, it’s no longer possible to patch Mail to work around such a bug or to try to catch an error or use a different API to avoid triggering it. All we can do is report the bugs to Apple (or<\/a> not<\/a>) and wait.<\/p>\n\n

Fortunately, I have not seen any Mail crashes related to the SpamSieve extension. Perhaps this is because it’s using a different extension point. However, it’s now clear that, despite MailKit being an officially supported API, Mail extensions are far<\/em> less reliable than Mail plug-ins were. Bug reports seem to receive no more attention than before.<\/p>\n

SpamSieve continues to offer a Mail extension, since it’s helpful when it works, but my focus since WWDC has been on reimplementing SpamSieve’s Apple Mail support—again—so that it doesn’t have to rely on the Mail extension at all. With SpamSieve 3.0, you had to manually enable a workaround if Mail stopped communicating with the extension. With 3.0.1, SpamSieve could enable the workaround automatically, but (due to problems with Mail’s AppleScript support) it could be slow or not work at all for mailboxes containing many thousands of messages. With 3.0.2, it’s where I want: fully automatic and fast, even when Mail malfunctions.<\/p>\n\n

Tobias Knobl<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Apple’s recent updates no longer allow us to use the embedded sidebar in Apple Mail. But fear not, because we’ve come up with a solution – the Floating Sidebar.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

With the changes to macOS Sonoma, we can no longer display tracking check marks in the message list. The email tracking information is now accessible in the Mailbutler Sidebar, right next to your email.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

You may have noticed something different in your Apple Mail: a seemingly strange and technical string of characters appearing in each email. This is known as the “Message-ID,” a unique identifier generated for every email message.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I guess they have to read this from another process to know which message Mail is displaying.<\/p>\n\n

Fabian Jäger<\/a>:<\/p>\n

As we are not able to adjust the behavior of Mail itself, we needed to find new ways of still being able to adjust the emails our users send out to include the functionality that they expect when using Mailbutler.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

Mailbutler’s Mail Bridge acts like an additional, local SMTP service that takes care of enriching outgoing messages with features, such as email tracking, and afterwards handing it over to the actual SMTP server for final delivery. Thus, all outgoing emails take another step between Mail as the sending email application and the regular SMTP delivery service.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n