2.6 KiB
+++ title="Aerogramme 0.2.2: predictability & user testing" date=2024-02-22 +++
Let's review how Aerogramme performances became more predictable, why it's important, and showcase how user testing helped surface bugs.
This minor version of Aerogramme put the focus on 2 aspects of the software: predictable performances & collecting user feedbacks. In the following, I describe both aspect in details.
More predictable performances
TODO AWS SDK
Users feedbacks
Dovecot AUTH continuation inlining - When a username + password is short, the Dovecot SASL Auth protocol allows the client (here Postfix) to send the base64 inlined, without having to wait for the continuation. It was not supported by Aerogramme and was preventing some users from authenticating.
Pipelining limits (reported by Nicolas) - Pipeling limit set to 3. Avoiding DoS resources. But failing some honest clients like Mutt. Bumped to 64, will be watched in the next months.
SASL Auth subtleties (reported by Nicolas) - Authorization can be empty, or can be set to the same value as Authentication. Second case not handled but required by Fair Email (thx Nicolas)
Thunderbird Autodiscovery issues (reported by LX & Nicolas) - K9 stable does not support %EMAILLOCALPART%.
K9 beta (6.714) does not support some values marked as obsolete in the authentication field: plain is not supported anymore, password-cleartext must be used instead.
Content-Type is important also, if a wrong one is sent, content is silently ignored by some clients.
Broken LITERAL+ (reported by Maxime) - It was not possible to copy more than one email at once to an Aerogramme mailbox. It was due to the fact we were using an old version of imap-flow that was not correctly supporting LITERAL+. Upgrading imap-flow to the latest version fixed the problem.
Broken IDLE (reported by Maxime) - After updating imap-flow, we started noticing some timeouts in Thunderbird due to IDLE bugs. When IDLE was implemented in Aerogramme, the code was not ready in imap-flow, and thus I used some hacks. But upgrading the library broke my hacks for the best: now imap-flow supports IDLE out of the box, and thus Aerogramme code is now cleaner and more maintainable.
Some others quality of life feedbacks not reported here have been made by MrFlos & Nicolas, thanks to all the people that took part in this debugging adventure.
Download and test the new version
docker run registry.deuxfleurs.org/aerogramme:0.2.2