Mailbox 0.6.0

What's New

The theme engine release. Mailbox has always shipped four Office style themes; 0.6.0 makes theming a place to live.

Mailbox Backgrounds. The title bar takes a texture or an image: six shipped patterns drawn in the caption's own ink in every theme, or a picture of your own — dragged into alignment by hand, with each release keeping exactly where you put it.

Palettes. Build a theme from a colour scheme: fourteen curated base16 schemes (vendored under the MIT licence with their authors named), your desktop's own colours, or a scheme sampled from your background image. A palette recolours the chrome and never the content — the accent keeps the scheme's hue and is moved until it reads on the message list.

A point-at-it editor. Customize… gains "Pick an area…": the shell dims, the region under the pointer lifts with its name, and a click scopes the editor to the tokens that paint it — grounds, inks, washes, lines.

Import a browser theme. An .xpi, a zip, or a bare manifest.json: the caption strip, the left panes and the header image arrive; everything else a browser says that a mail client cannot use is listed honestly rather than guessed at. Archives are size-limited and traversal-checked, and every image is re-encoded through a real decoder before it touches disk.

Browse half a million community themes from inside the application — searched by words, popularity, rating, trending, colour or category, each one previewed as Mailbox would wear it: the preview is drawn from the same mapping an install produces, with the theme's licence named while declining is still a button. Installing asks first, in plain words: these are community files; install only what you trust. The browser is the one place theming touches a network — only addons.mozilla.org, only while it is open.

Animated themes animate. GIF and APNG headers keep their animation, every frame decoded, composited and freshly re-encoded, played on the title bar at each frame's own timing — and reaching through the tab strip, the band those images were drawn for, with a Reach option to rein any theme back.

Sharing. A theme is one file; a theme with images travels as a pack (--export-theme-pack), installed through the same import door with the same checks.

The rule underneath it all: choosing a built-in theme is always a complete return to stock. No import, palette, edit or background can leave residue on Colorful, White, Dark Gray or Black — an invariant the test suite enforces.

Also in this release: the window's edge hairline now traces the rounded corners it rounds, on every window and dialog.

Install: the tarball, the .deb, or mailbox-bin from the AUR. See the wiki's Themes page for the community-theme posture in full.