Call for testing: Mailspring

@d0od has listed many bugs on his article:

  • Doesn’t use system theme (as I said)
  • Slow to launch - I find this is true for all snaps, idk why, they just take longer to launch than traditionally-packaged apps. Not unbearably longer but noticeably. Ideally someone should measure this difference
  • Notifications don’t work (I think they did for me but maybe Thunderbird wasn’t closed properly or something)
  • The tray icon doesn’t appear without TopIcons Plus (problem with Ubuntu’s AppIndicator/KStatusNotifierItem support for GNOME Shell?)
  • No fancy unread count on the dock item (feature of Dash to Dock/Ubuntu Dock)

Hey folks! Thanks for the feedback - this is really helpful.

@popey - yep, both of those are required. The app.asar.unpacked directory contains files we can’t include in the .asar file because they need to be accessible to the external filesystem. The app.asar file essentially “links” out to them in the unpacked directory.

@atse47 - I’ll look into the desktop notifications. We’ll probably need to add a post-installation note about any libraries you need to have installed for them to work.

@Ads20000 / @d0od - I think the system theme is something they’re working on in snapd. (Would actually be curious to know what the plan is for that…) I’ve also noticed that the app is suuuper slow to launch, especially the first time it’s run. I think it must be doing some sort of on-the-fly unpacking or setup? I’ll look into that tray icon issue—we definitely need that resolved.

I think the fancy unread count on the dock icon is still a work-in-progress, though we should support the Unity dock badge. Will see what’s going on there as well.

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Works for me. I am on Ubuntu 17.10 and just ran snap install.

Seems to work really well. The only issues that I have found so far are that the mouse pointer doesn’t scale on high DPI displays and the menu tabs don’t seem to use the theme.

I set up my Gmail account. I was correctly warned at the beginning that the All email box was not enabled in IMAP, so I enabled it and everything now looks fine.

I think this topic in particular is in need of some research. It’s notable that some desktop apps have a lengthy startup time. I suspect there some work needed in the desktop launchers which seem to do a bit of scurrying around before actually launching the app.

Perhaps we can loop @kenvandine to help us understand the bottlenecks here?

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I bet that the desktop part could setup a hook, maybe install, to do the compilation of schemas at installation time instead of first launch.

I am running KDE Neon. When testing the Mailspring snap I get the Password Management Error message. In the message dialog there was a reference to a support article that suggested to install the package libgnome-keyring-dev, but that didn’t help. I also tried to install libsecret, another support page mentioned that package, but with the same result.

Probably doesn’t help because such dependencies may need to be provided in the snap? Or there needs to be a way for the snap to use the traditional deps on the system? Idk.

Other issues with the snap:

  • When saving an attachment, the /run/user/1000/snap.mailspring folder is opened by default, really it should be ~/Downloads
  • Window > Zoom and Window > Message Viewer buttons do nothing

One thing I’ve noticed is that I don’t see a mail count for email in labels, is that just me or thought out that way?

I have the snap, and the deb installed side by side. The icon is different (maybe on purpose?). Circle vs square. But I like that as I know which I am launching.

I have not had some of the other issues people have described. (i.e. - slow launch, etc)

I’m not sure if it is helpful to echo “me too” on the same issues that others have reported (theming, etc.). But I can add them in if needed.

Things that I noticed that are different between the two:

  • on the deb, super+arrow (or dragging to screen edge to move a window to left/right does not work (gnome 3.26 - under budgie), but the snap it does work!
  • slightly different build numbers between deb/snap (deb 1.0.8-5a387d0e, snap 1.0.8-b72efe94) - but may either be not relevant, or explain the minor differences)
  • Some settings differences - but I attribute that to the variance in build number.

I’ll continue to test, but I’m sure my info thus far is just an echo of the others in here.

Tiling to half the screen doesn’t work for me with the snap.

Tiling to half the screen doesn’t work for me with the snap.

Which DT environment are you running?

Ubuntu’s default GNOME session in Ubuntu 17.10. Tiling works fine with other applications.

Works fine here on 17.10 with Super+Left and Super+Right (and Super+Up and Super+Down for maximise and restore)

I’m trying here with Super+Left and Super+Right but no luck, have you tried the Wayland session (that may be the issue here, not sure)?

I’m getting this denial CC @jdstrand

lis 20 16:33:58 fyke dbus[2598]: apparmor="DENIED" operation="dbus_signal"  bus="session" path="/org/freedesktop/Notifications" interface="org.freedesktop.Notifications" member="ActionInvoked" name=":1.17" mask="receive" pid=12601 label="snap.mailspring.mailspring" peer_pid=2667 peer_label="unconfined"

Is this something that we should have the desktop interface provide?

Works under wayland and x here.

One of desktop or desktop-legacy, yes. I’ve taken a TODO to add this as part of the next policy updates PR.

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