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QuickMail v0.8.37

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@github-actions github-actions released this 04 Aug 19:09
v0.8.37
39d4b23

QuickMail v0.8.37 Release Notes

This is a large release — the most change in a single version since the calendar arrived in v0.8.33.

Adding an account has been rebuilt around three questions instead of a page of server settings. Gmail accounts now need an app password, because Google is no longer granting QuickMail sign-in authorizations to anyone who does not already have one. You can now decide what each row of a message list says out loud, and in what order. You can watch a conversation and have every message in it — including the replies that have not arrived yet — collect in one folder. Mail deleted or filed somewhere else now keeps up while QuickMail is open, instead of waiting for a restart. Microsoft 365 accounts get a run of fixes and can now manage their server-side Inbox rules — the ones Outlook sets up — from inside QuickMail, mail rules change in when they run and which folders they act on, several lists that were unreadable to a screen reader are fixed, and there is a build for ARM PCs.

The last public release was v0.8.36, so if that is what you have been running, everything below is new to you.

Contents

Download

v0.8.37 is the first release built for ARM PCs as well as regular ones, so there are four downloads. Take a regular one unless you know your PC has an ARM processor — to check, open Settings → System → About and read System type.

Download When to use
QuickMail-win.msi — Windows installer Recommended for most users. A standard setup wizard with license agreement; installs per-user with no elevation required, adds the WebView2 Runtime if missing, and enables automatic updates.
QuickMail-win-arm64.msi — Windows installer, ARM The same installer for PCs with an ARM processor, such as the Snapdragon X models of Surface Laptop and Surface Pro.
QuickMail.exe — standalone portable executable No installation required. Copy it anywhere and run.
QuickMail-arm64.exe — standalone portable executable, ARM The portable version for PCs with an ARM processor.

The regular downloads run on every supported PC, ARM ones included — just not as quickly there. The ARM downloads will not start at all on a non-ARM PC, so if you are unsure, the regular one is the safe guess.

All downloads include the .NET 8 runtime — you do not need to install .NET separately.

Accounts and signing in

Setting up a mail account was the hardest thing QuickMail asked anyone to do. That is what changed most in this release.

New: adding an account now asks three questions, not ten

Adding an account used to mean supplying an IMAP host, a port, an SSL setting, and a certificate rule — and then the same four things over again for SMTP. Ten or so fields, every one of them a chance to get something subtly wrong, for values QuickMail already knew perfectly well.

Adding an account now asks three questions:

  1. Which provider? — Gmail, Outlook.com / Microsoft 365, Yahoo Mail, iCloud Mail, or Other (enter settings manually).
  2. What is your email address?
  3. What is your password?

QuickMail works out the rest. Choosing a provider fills in every server setting and tells you what it filled in, and typing an address at a provider it recognizes chooses that provider for you — so most people never touch the list at all. The hosts, ports, and SSL settings have not gone anywhere: they moved behind an Advanced settings expander that stays closed unless you need it, and Tab reaches that expander's heading before its contents, so a single keystroke moves past the whole thing.

The Provider list opens on Other (enter settings manually) rather than ending with it, so Down arrow reaches the rest of the list from wherever the dialog puts you.

The account name is now optional. Leave it blank and the account is labelled with its email address.

An address QuickMail does not recognize is looked up for you when you leave the Email field, so a work address, or one at a domain of your own, usually takes no more typing than a Gmail one. QuickMail checks its own built-in list of providers first — that step is entirely offline, and nothing leaves your computer — and then tries three public sources of mail settings, ending with the records that say where your domain's mail is actually delivered. Only your domain is sent to two of those; the third sends your address to your own provider's server, exactly as Outlook does. That step is what makes ordinary business mail work, because a work mailbox often has no IMAP host to type in the first place — the way in is a sign-in. If nothing is found anywhere, Advanced settings opens with focus in the IMAP host box, and a message names the sign-in route to try for a work or school account. To use the offline built-in list only, set AutoDiscoverOnline = off in config.ini.

Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and iCloud Mail need an app password — a password you generate on the provider's own website for use in a mail program, rather than the one you sign in with. Each of those providers now says so above the password box, and Gmail links straight to the page where you create one. Gmail defaults to this route because Google is not currently granting QuickMail new sign-in authorizations, so an app password is the path that works today. (If your Gmail account already signs in with Google, see the next entry — it keeps working.) (#369)

Work or school Microsoft 365 accounts now connect through Microsoft 365 directly. An address on your organization's own domain moves onto that connection method as you type it, instead of being left on IMAP — where sign-in ended at "your administrator needs to make a change" for a mailbox that signs in perfectly well the other way. Personal Outlook.com, Hotmail, and Live.com accounts are unaffected and stay on IMAP.

Test Connection checks both halves of your mail. Incoming and outgoing are probed separately and reported separately — "IMAP: OK. SMTP: OK." A working inbox with a misconfigured send server used to pass this test and then fail on your first message. Microsoft 365 accounts can be tested now as well.

Manage Accounts was simplified in the same way. It has the same Advanced settings expander, so reaching the settings people actually change no longer means moving past hosts and ports on an account that is working perfectly. Each account now shows which provider it belongs to, and Test Connection is on this window too — which is where you want it when an account has stopped working, rather than only when you are setting one up.

The Accounts section of the User Guide covers the whole lifecycle — choosing a provider, adding an account, entering settings by hand, testing, editing, and removing.

Changed: Gmail needs an app password — Google sign-in is no longer available to new accounts

Google is no longer granting QuickMail authorizations, so signing in with Google is not available to you unless your account was authorized before that happened. For everyone else — which is nearly everyone — a Gmail account is added with an app password: a password you generate on Google's own website for use in a mail program, rather than the one you sign in to Google with. QuickMail says so above the password box when you choose Gmail, and links straight to the page where you create one. The User Guide's Accounts section has the steps.

This is not a limit QuickMail chose and it is not one any QuickMail setting can lift. An attempt to sign in with Google on an account that was not authorized earlier ends in "This app has been blocked" — Google refusing the application, not your account being wrong. If you see that, an app password is the way in.

A small number of accounts were authorized before this happened, and they keep working. If your Gmail account already uses Google sign-in, nothing changes and you need do nothing: it keeps signing in, keeps syncing mail, contacts, and calendar, and Manage Accounts still shows it as a Google account. This release exists in part to make sure those accounts keep their route in — only the offer of Google sign-in to a new account is withdrawn.

If you are one of those people and want to add another Gmail account over Google sign-in, the offer is still there to turn on:

  1. Tools → Settings → Advanced, check Sign in with Google for Gmail accounts, and select Save.
  2. Restart QuickMail — the setting is read at startup.

The Provider list then has a Gmail (sign in with Google) entry directly below plain Gmail. Choose it and there is no password box at all: Gmail's servers fill in as usual and a Sign in with Google button stands where the password would be. Contact and calendar sync are offered too, granted as part of the same sign-in. The Google choice also returns to Advanced settings → Authentication. (The same switch is available as GoogleAuth = true under [features] in config.ini, or --feature GoogleAuth at launch.)

Why the offer is off unless you ask for it. It used to be on for everyone, which meant the one path Google refuses was the one QuickMail put in front of you — and a sign-in that ends in "This app has been blocked" tells you nothing about what to do instead. Off by default, a new Gmail account gets the app-password route that works, and the few people the sign-in still works for have a supported way to ask for it.

Microsoft 365 accounts

Four fixes for accounts that connect through Microsoft 365 — work and school accounts, and Outlook.com accounts added with a Microsoft sign-in. Accounts that connect over IMAP are untouched by everything in this section.

Fixed: deleted and moved mail no longer comes back

Deleting or moving a message on a Microsoft 365 account removed it from the list, and then the next sync brought it back about a minute later, often with a "Delete may not have completed — refreshing." message. The cause was that Microsoft 365 changes a message's identifier whenever the message moves between folders — which happens on any move, from QuickMail, from Outlook, or from a server-side rule. QuickMail's stored identifier then pointed at nothing, so the delete or move was refused, and the message came back.

QuickMail now asks Microsoft 365 for identifiers that do not change, so a stored identifier stays valid for the life of the message. Delete, move, mark as read, and flag all act on the message you meant. As a second line of defence, an action against a message the server says is already gone is treated as success rather than as a failure to report. (#416, #419)

This brings a one-time re-sync on your first launch after updating. The identifiers already in QuickMail's local cache are the old, changeable kind, so they are cleared for Microsoft 365 accounts and re-fetched from the server. What that means for you:

  • You need do nothing. It happens by itself during the normal startup sync. QuickMail announces "Microsoft 365 mail is doing a one-time re-sync — this may take a few minutes."
  • Your Microsoft 365 message list starts empty and refills over the next few minutes, going back as far as your View → Sync Range setting (Last 30 Days by default). Larger mailboxes take longer.
  • Nothing is deleted from the server, and nothing else on your computer is touched — accounts, settings, rules, flags, drafts, contacts, and calendar events all survive.
  • Your rules will not re-run over the mail that comes back, so nothing gets moved or deleted a second time.
  • If you happen to be offline for that first launch, Microsoft 365 mail is unavailable until you reconnect. It resumes by itself.
  • Accounts that are not Microsoft 365 are not touched at all. If you have no Microsoft 365 accounts, nothing happens.

It runs once. Later launches start normally.

New: mail deleted or filed elsewhere now keeps up while QuickMail is open

Two things used to wait for a restart. Mail you deleted or moved from Outlook on the web, from your phone, or by a server-side rule stayed in QuickMail's list until you restarted — so the list showed messages that were no longer there. And mail a server rule filed straight into a folder of your own did not appear until you opened that folder.

Both are now handled while QuickMail is running. Deletions and moves made elsewhere are reconciled as they happen, and again when you open a folder, so combined views like All Mail stop showing messages that have gone. And every folder of every account is checked periodically — not just the inbox — so filed mail turns up on its own.

This applies to Microsoft 365 accounts and to IMAP accounts alike. (#366)

Fixed: the same message no longer appears twice in combined views

A Microsoft 365 message was fetched without the identifier that the rest of QuickMail uses to recognize two copies of one message, so nothing could merge them. In All Mail and the other combined views, one message could show up twice. Microsoft 365 mail now carries that identifier and collapses the way IMAP and Gmail mail always has. (#429)

Fixed: a folder no longer stops loading because of one message

Microsoft 365 reports some messages — certain drafts and system-generated mail — with no read state at all. A single one of those failed the entire folder's fetch, so none of that folder's new mail arrived and nothing said why. One real session hit it 49 times. A message with no read state is now treated as unread. (#395)

Fixed: adding a work or school account now always asks your permission

On some organizations, sign-in finished without ever showing a permission screen — and then every attempt to read mail failed. The account was added, looked connected, and could not reach a single message. It happened where the organization had already approved QuickMail for something else, such as contacts or calendar: Microsoft treats an existing approval as covering the whole request and signs you in silently, so the mail permissions were never asked for and never granted.

Adding an account now always shows the permission screen, so the full set is approved once, up front. You will see it when you add an account, and when you use Sign in in Manage Accounts — which is the button you reach for when an account has stopped working, so asking again there is deliberate. An account whose sign-in has merely expired renews as before, without asking. This also applies to Outlook.com accounts added with a Microsoft sign-in over IMAP. (#391)

Reading and organizing mail

The headline here is that the line a message list reads out is no longer fixed: you choose which pieces it says, and in what order.

New: choose what a message list row says, and in what order

Every row in a message list is read as one line — sender, subject, date, and so on — and until now that line was fixed. View → Message List Fields… lets you decide which pieces are spoken and where each one falls.

Every field is a check box. Check one to include it, uncheck it to leave it out, and use Alt+Up and Alt+Down to move it. The Up and Down arrows move through the fields and stop at the first and last one, the way they do in any list. Home and End go straight to those ends, and typing a letter jumps to the next field starting with it. Moving a field that is switched off says so, since that changes nothing you can hear.

A Spoken preview box shows the message you had selected when you opened the window, read exactly as the list would read it, updating as you go. There is no OK or Cancel — changes take effect as you make them, and the window is modeless, so you can leave it open, arrow through the list behind it, and hear the result.

Each kind of row keeps its own arrangement: individual messages, conversation groups, and sender and recipient groups.

Status is no longer one lump. It used to be a single word — "replied", "forwarded", "unread", or "read" — that you could take or leave. Unread, Replied, and Forwarded are now separate fields you can place independently, and each offers Speak only when true or Always speak. So "tell me about unread but never say read" is: turn Status (combined) off, turn Unread on, leave it on Speak only when true. The same applies to Attachments, which can now sit anywhere in the line rather than in the middle of it.

Because Status (combined) and Unread both produce the word "unread", turning one on while the other is already on says it twice. Selecting either field explains what the other is doing, so the two do not quietly fight.

Other fields you can now add: To, Mailing list, and Source folder.

Speak field labels prefixes text fields with their names ("From: Chris Lee. Subject: Budget review."). States and counts are never labelled, since "unread" and "3 messages" already say what they are.

If you never open the window, nothing changes — the default arrangement is exactly what QuickMail has always said, with one deliberate exception: empty fields are now skipped rather than leaving a gap, so a message with no preview or no subject reads without a pause where it would have been.

Two small consequences. The Announce flag status checkbox has left Settings, because Flag is now one field with its own checkbox; if you had it turned off, Flag starts out unchecked for you. And a conversation or sender group used to keep saying "Has unread" after you had read its last unread message — it now updates. (#457)

Show message status column has also left Settings. It only ever governed the visible Status column — the one showing New, Replied, Fwd, or a flag name — and never what a row said out loud, which is what people reasonably expected of a setting with that name; turning it off changed nothing you could hear. Speech is now chosen field by field in the window above. The column itself is always shown, so if you are among the few who turned it off to reclaim the space on screen, it comes back and there is currently no way to hide it — say so and it can be made resizable. The ShowMessageStatus line in config.ini is no longer read and can be deleted; it will disappear on its own the next time QuickMail rewrites the file. (#19)

New: combined views say which folder a message is in

In a view that gathers mail from more than one place, a row never told you where the message actually lives, so an inbox message and one a rule had filed into a custom folder read identically. Each row now ends with its folder — "… 12:24 PM. Inbox." — and when the view spans more than one account the folder is named with its account, "Work -- Inbox".

This applies to All Mail, All Inboxes, All Drafts, All Sent, All Archive, All Trash, All Flagged, an account's own All Mail, every saved view, and the contact-mail results that are also new in this release (see find a contact's mail from the address book). An ordinary single-folder view says nothing extra, because there the folder is already obvious. Source folder is one of the fields in Message List Fields…, so you can move it or switch it off. (#423)

New: All Archive

The All Mail group in the folder tree gathers each kind of folder across every account — All Inboxes, All Drafts, All Sent, All Trash, All Flagged — and archived mail was the one thing missing. All Archive is now there too, listed between All Sent and All Trash, and it is available in the folder picker and as a saved view like the others.

It follows each account's own archive setting rather than guessing. If you pointed an account at a particular folder with Set as Archive Folder, that is the folder All Archive reads, so the list is exactly the mail Move to Archive put there. Accounts with no Archive folder contribute nothing rather than causing an error.

One thing to know if you use Gmail: the guide now recommends creating a Gmail label named Archive and pointing the account at it with Set as Archive Folder, rather than at [Gmail]/All Mail. Both archive correctly, but an account pointed at All Mail contributes its entire mailbox to All Archive, because for that account All Mail is the archive. A label gives you a folder holding only what you archived. (#452)

New: watched conversations

Some conversations you want to keep an eye on — a release announcement, a bug thread, a trip itinerary. Until now the only way was to flag each message as it landed, which means noticing it first.

Press Ctrl+Shift+W on any message and its whole conversation is watched from then on. Watched Conversations, the last item in the All Mail group of the folder tree, then lists every message in that conversation, from every folder and every account, newest first — including the replies that have not arrived yet, which join on their own as they sync. That is the difference from flagging: a flag marks a message you already have, a watch is a standing subscription to the conversation.

The same key stops watching, from any message in the conversation. It works from the message list, from a Conversations group header, from the reading pane, from a message tab, and from a message window. Watch Conversation is also on the Message menu, with a check mark showing whether the conversation you are on is already watched; on a sender or recipient group header it is dimmed, because a group of that kind is not one conversation. Watching changes nothing on the mail server and nothing in other mail programs; it is remembered on this computer only.

Everything else in the message list works there as usual — view modes, filters, sorting, and the message list fields. Conversations view mode is a natural fit, since each watched conversation becomes one group. You can save Watched Conversations as one of your own views.

Tools → Watched Conversations… lists everything you are watching, with how many messages each has collected and when you started. Press Enter on one to jump to that conversation, Delete to stop watching it, or Rename to give it a clearer label — renaming changes the label only, not which messages are collected. Type a letter to jump down the list. The window stays open while you work.

Settings → Notifications → Show a notification when a watched conversation gets a reply tells you when one arrives. Unlike the ordinary new-mail notification this applies to every folder, not just the inbox, because a watched thread's next message can land anywhere. The two settings are independent, and a message that is both new inbox mail and part of a watched conversation produces one notification, the watched one.

View → Filter → Watched narrows any folder to watched conversations, and can be saved as part of a view. If you would like each row to say whether its conversation is watched, turn on the Watched field in View → Message List Fields…; it is off to begin with.

Two things worth knowing. QuickMail groups a conversation by its subject, ignoring Re: and Fwd: prefixes, so a reply is recognized automatically — but two unrelated messages that happen to share a subject count as one conversation. And a message with no subject at all cannot be watched; you will hear "Cannot watch a conversation with no subject" and nothing changes.

Fixed: a saved view's filter was described as "All"

A saved view that used the With Attachments or To Me filter reported its filter as "All" in the View Manager. The view itself always applied the right filter — only the description was wrong.

Fixed: All Flagged was missing from two places the other combined views appear

All Flagged was in the folder tree, but not in the flat folder list or in the Go to Folder picker, and a saved view built on it did not resolve back to the real folder. Every other combined view — All Mail, All Inboxes, All Drafts, All Sent, All Archive, All Trash — was in all three places. It now is too.

Fixed: attachments were unreachable when a message opens in its own window

v0.8.36 added Alt+A for jumping to the attachment list, and fixed the Shift+Tab path (#350). One part was still missing: with Message open mode set to Window, a message with attachments had no attachment list at all. Alt+A answered "No attachments" and Shift+Tab from the message body skipped straight past it. Reading pane and Tab modes were unaffected, which is what made it look like an Alt+A problem — the list existed, it was just never shown. Both now work in every mode. (#439)

Alt+A now also works while composing. It moves focus to the attachment list of the message you are writing, matching what it does in an open message, and lands on the first file rather than the empty list. Ctrl+Shift+A is still the way to add files. The new command is in the compose window's Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) as Focus Attachment List; compose shortcuts are fixed and are not among the ones Settings → Keyboard can rebind.

Fixed: some links opened inside QuickMail instead of your browser

Pressing Enter on a link in a message opened with Message open mode set to Window could land you in a bare window inside QuickMail rather than in your default browser. That window is QuickMail's own display of a web page: none of your browser's cookies, saved passwords, passkeys, or extensions are there, so a password manager had nothing to fill and a site you were already signed in to asked you to sign in again.

It depended on the message, which is why it looked intermittent. A great deal of mail — newsletters and anything sent by a mailing tool in particular — marks its links to open in a new window, and those links took a different route out of the message than ordinary ones. QuickMail handled the ordinary route and not the other one. The same thing happened to a link opened with Ctrl or Shift held down, or with the middle mouse button.

Every link in every message now opens in your default browser, from the reading pane, a message tab, or a message window alike. The Markdown preview window is fixed in the same way. Links are still limited to web and mail addresses, as before. (#483)

Mail rules

Mail rules — the ones you set up in Tools → Rules… to file, flag, or delete mail automatically — changed in four ways this release. If you have a Microsoft 365 account, the Rules Manager now shows the rules that live on your Exchange mailbox as well as the ones that run inside QuickMail. For everyone, three things changed about the rules QuickMail runs: which account a rule belongs to, when rules run, and which folders they act on. If you use rules, all of it is worth reading, because together these change behaviour you may be relying on.

New: your Microsoft 365 server rules, in the Rules Manager

If you have a Microsoft 365 (Exchange) account, the Rules Manager now shows that mailbox's server-side rules — the same rules Outlook calls "Inbox rules" — alongside the rules that run inside QuickMail. A server rule runs on Microsoft's servers, so it acts on your mail even when QuickMail is closed, and wherever else you read that mailbox. You can create, edit, enable and disable, reorder, and delete them from QuickMail.

Most people will see none of this yet. It needs a Microsoft 365 mailbox connected through Microsoft sign-in, and for a work or school mailbox that means your organization's administrator has approved QuickMail for your tenant — which few have so far, since few know the app exists. If that is not you, nothing in this entry applies and nothing about your rules has changed shape; the rest of the Mail rules section is what affects you.

If you do have one, the change you will notice first: the Rules Manager is now one account at a time. When you have a Microsoft 365 account, the Rules Manager opens on a single account chosen in an Account list at the top, instead of listing every account's rules together. Your rules are not gone — they are behind the account picker. Choose the account, and the list below shows that mailbox's rules. With only one account there is no picker.

The rest of what is worth knowing:

  • Server and QuickMail rules share one list, each row saying where it runs — on server or in QuickMail — along with its name and whether it is enabled.
  • QuickMail decides where a new rule lives. It saves a rule as a server rule whenever it can, so the rule keeps working while QuickMail is closed. A rule that needs something only QuickMail can do — today, Mark as unread — is saved as a QuickMail rule instead, and QuickMail tells you why.
  • Some rules built in Outlook are shown read-only. If a rule uses conditions or actions QuickMail cannot represent exactly, you can read it here but not change it, so it cannot quietly become something you did not mean. Change those in Outlook.
  • Test works on QuickMail rules. For a server rule the Test control is turned off, the same way Edit and Delete are for a read-only rule — a server rule runs in Exchange, so there is nothing local to test it against.

For most work or school accounts this needs your administrator to allow QuickMail to read and change your mailbox rules. Without that permission you will see a message saying so rather than your server rules. Your QuickMail rules are unaffected either way — they are fetched separately, so they still load, still run, and can still be created and edited, whether the permission is missing, the server is unreachable, or the account is not a Microsoft 365 one at all. Rules have not become a Microsoft 365 feature; this adds a second place they can run. (#333)

Changed: rules are now per-account

The "All accounts" rule option has been replaced by scoping each rule to a specific account. This happens automatically the first time rules load after updating, once QuickMail can see your account list:

  • Existing "All accounts" rules are copied to each of your standard (IMAP/SMTP) accounts, so they keep working exactly as before.
  • If you use only Microsoft 365 accounts, any old "All accounts" rules are removed, because the migration has no standard account to attach them to. If you had such rules, recreate them and scope them to the account you want — a rule scoped to a Microsoft 365 account does run. (This affects very few people; every removal is recorded in the log.)
  • New rules now ask which account they apply to, starting on your default account, instead of offering "All accounts". (#333)

Changed: rules run on mail that arrives while QuickMail is open

Rules used to be applied only during a full sync. Mail that arrived afterwards — the mail QuickMail picks up while you are sitting there working — was never looked at, so a rule that should have moved or flagged it simply did not fire until the next full sync. Rules now run on new mail as it arrives, on every sync path. Each message is considered once, so nothing is acted on twice. (#411)

Changed: rules act on the Inbox, and only on new arrivals

Two things used to happen that they should not have. Rules ran against every folder QuickMail synced, so a message that a server-side rule — or you — had already filed into Sent, Archive, or a folder of your own could be picked up and acted on again when that folder synced. And closing the Rules Manager silently reprocessed your whole cached mailbox, so simply looking at your rules could move mail.

Rules now behave the classic way: they run on the Inbox, on new arrivals, and never retroactively unless you ask. Other folders are still fetched and cached as before — they are just not rule-processed. Closing the Rules Manager no longer runs anything. (#336)

Run on Existing Mail is how you ask. Its reach is now the Inbox of each account rather than every cached folder, so it can no longer move or delete mail you deliberately filed somewhere else. It reports how many messages were moved or deleted. An account whose Inbox cannot be identified is skipped rather than guessed at, and that is recorded in the log. It covers every account either way, not only the one you are looking at. (#346)

Where to find it depends on which Rules Manager you get. Without a Microsoft 365 account it is the button beside New and Delete, where it has always been. With a Microsoft 365 account — where Rules opens the account-at-a-time window described above — there is no button for it in this release: press Ctrl+Shift+P in that window and choose Run Rules on Existing Mail. It does the same thing from there. (#493)

Fixed: the rules editor no longer offers actions with nothing to act on

Two things in the Rules Manager, both in the window you get without a Microsoft 365 account:

  • With no rule selected, the rule's fields are disabled and drop out of the Tab order, so you cannot land on a live but meaningless Account list. The buttons stay reachable, so Close always works.
  • Delete, Save, and Test are disabled until you select a rule, and Run on Existing Mail is disabled while you have no rules — including the moment you delete the last one.

With a Microsoft 365 account the account-at-a-time window applies the same principle by its own route: it has no editable fields to disable, because editing opens a separate window, and Edit, Delete, Enable/Disable, Move Up, Move Down, and Test each switch off when they have nothing to act on — including for a rule that is shown read-only, and for Test on a server rule, which runs in Exchange rather than in QuickMail. Close always works there too.

"Show field labels in the rules list" now survives a restart. The setting saved and applied for the session, but was never written to config.ini, so it reverted to off every time QuickMail started. Note that it governs the window without a Microsoft 365 account; the account-at-a-time window does not read it yet, so with a Microsoft 365 account the checkbox currently changes nothing. (#493)

Writing and sending mail

Fixed: choosing a sending account could send the message

Pressing Enter after arrowing to an account in the compose window's From list sent the message (#201). Not chose the account — sent the mail, half-written, to whoever was already in the To field. Choosing a mode from the compose-mode list, or pressing Enter in the Subject box or the attachment list, did the same thing.

The Send button was marked as the window's default button, which in Windows means Enter activates it from anywhere in the window that does not use Enter for something of its own. A closed list is exactly such a place: arrowing through it already changes the selection, so Enter had nothing to do there and went to Send instead. That default is now removed. Enter no longer sends from anywhere in the compose window.

Send is still Alt+S, Ctrl+Enter, or Enter or Space with the Send button focused.

Enter on the From list now confirms the account. Since the keystroke no longer sends, it says which account you landed on — "IdeaPlace used as From address". You also hear it when you pick an account from the expanded list, and when you leave the From field having changed it. Arrowing past accounts stays quiet, because your screen reader is already reading each one. This uses the Announce action results setting, so turning that off turns this off with it.

Fixed: sending mail gave no feedback

A report of "sending an email gives no feedback, and does not close the compose window" (#396) turned out to be four separate problems stacked on top of each other. All four are fixed.

A send that fails now says so out loud. The failure message was classed as background progress, so if you had turned Announce background progress off — a reasonable thing to do, since that is the setting that stops every folder announcing itself during a sync — pressing Send produced the button greying out, coming back, and nothing else. Send failures, refusals, and confirmations are now announced as results, which is the category for the outcome of something you just did, and they interrupt rather than queue. The same fix applies to a refused save in Add Account and Manage Accounts.

A message that was accepted is no longer reported as failed. QuickMail closed the connection inside the same step that sent the message, so a server that hangs up the instant it takes your mail — or any hiccup during the sign-off — produced "Send failed" for a message that was already on its way. This is why the reporter saw messages sometimes arrive anyway. The sign-off is now separate and its own failure is ignored, because by then the server has your message.

Your login and your email address can now be different things. There was one box serving as both, and for some accounts they are not the same string: an iCloud mailbox on your own domain logs in under the Apple ID, and some hosted servers want a bare user name. Whichever one you entered, the other use of it was wrong — a login name in the box became the From address on your mail, which servers reject. Advanced settings in both account dialogs now has a Login username box, empty for almost everyone, filled in only when your server logs in under something other than your email address. The Email address box is now only that, and saving an account refuses an entry that is not a full address, pointing at the new box instead.

If you already had an account set up with a login name in the address box, QuickMail copies it into Login username for you the first time it starts. That matters: correcting the address is what you are now asked to do, and without the copy you would be deleting the very thing your account signs in with. You enter the address; the login carries on working. This also covers contact and calendar sync on iCloud, which sign in with the same name.

A wrong encryption setting on a known server is corrected at startup. An account set up by hand before QuickMail knew these providers could end up with Implicit SSL on connect checked while using port 587, which is a STARTTLS port. That combination fails every single send, about a second after you press the button, with an error that names a certificate rather than a checkbox. At startup QuickMail now corrects the encryption setting when — and only when — the account is one you have never saved yourself, the server is one it ships settings for, and the port is the exact port it publishes for that server. Anything else — one of those servers on a different port, or any account you have saved in Manage Accounts — is left exactly as you set it. A corrected connection also requires encryption from then on, rather than falling back to plain text if the server offers none.

Fixed: the compose window used only part of its width

The address fields, the subject line, and the body editor were squeezed into a narrow column against the left edge, leaving roughly two thirds of the window blank no matter how large you made it. It had been that way since the compose window was built. They now stretch across the full width and grow when you resize. Nothing else about the window changed — the same fields, the same order, the same keyboard behaviour. (#435)

Address book

New: find a contact's mail from the address book

Select someone in the address book, press Shift+F10, and choose Find mail from this contact or Find mail to this contact. The address book closes and the message list fills with the matches, newest first, drawn from every account and folder QuickMail has cached — not just the folder you were in. Focus lands on the message list and the count is announced ("12 messages from Bob Baker."), and the window title reads Mail from Bob Baker so the results are easy to tell apart from a folder.

Press Escape in the message list to close the results and return to the folder you started from — the destination and its message count are announced ("Search closed. Inbox, 42 messages."). There is also a Close button above the results next to the count, and Close Contact Mail Results in the Command Palette, which you can give a keyboard shortcut in Settings → Keyboard. Escape keeps everything else it already did: an open reading pane, the calendar, and tab mode claim it first, and in the search box it still clears your search text.

Both actions are also in the address book's Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) as Find Mail From Contact and Find Mail To Contact.

Two things to know about the results: mail older than your sync range is not stored locally, so it is not searched, and Find mail to this contact matches the To line — a message where the person was only in Cc does not appear. (#370)

New: filter the contact list by account

A Filter button sits to the right of the address book's search box and carries the current filter in its own label, so it reads Filter: All accounts, Filter: Work, and so on. Alt+F reaches it from anywhere on the Contacts tab. The menu offers All accounts, then Local address book, then each of your accounts; the active one is checked and is where the menu opens, and applying one announces the result ("Work, 12 contacts").

The filter works alongside the search box, survives a contact sync or an edit, and falls back to All accounts if the account it named is removed. A contact filtered out of view is deselected, so Edit and Delete cannot act on a row you can no longer see. It is also in the address book's Command Palette as Filter Addresses by Account, with no default key, so you can assign one. Where the address book opens with focus is unchanged. (#399)

Fixed: typing a letter jumps to a contact

With focus on the address book's contact list, typing a letter did nothing. Now it jumps to the first contact starting with that letter, the same way lists behave elsewhere in Windows. Type several letters quickly to match a longer beginning ("br" goes to Brenda rather than Bob), or press the same letter again to move to the next contact starting with it. Contacts saved without a name are matched on their address. The Groups and Group members lists work the same way. (#371)

Calendar

New: typing and stepping dates and times in the appointment editor

The appointment editor's dates went through a calendar popup built for a mouse, and its times were plain text boxes. Nothing responded to the arrow keys, so changing anything meant retyping the whole value.

Start date, Start time, End date, End time, Repeat interval, and Repeat until are now ordinary edit fields that step with the arrow keys. The same field is used for the date in the Go to date window.

Keys Date field Time field Number field
Up / Down 1 day 15 minutes, snapped to the quarter hour 1
Ctrl+Up / Ctrl+Down 1 day 1 minute 1
Shift+Up / Shift+Down 1 week 1 hour 5
Page Up / Page Down 1 month 1 hour 10
Ctrl+Page Up / Ctrl+Page Down 1 year 1 day 10

Typing still works, and takes far more than it used to. Dates accept "8/3", "August 3", "2026-08-03", "today", "tomorrow", "yesterday", weekday names like "fri" or "next tuesday", a bare day number, and offsets such as "+7", "-3", "+2w", "+1m", "+1y". Times accept "9", "930", "9:30", "9:30 AM", "9p", "14:30", "noon", "midnight", and "+30" or "-15". Enter or moving to another field applies what you typed; text that cannot be read as a date or time puts the previous value back rather than guessing.

Two behaviours worth knowing. Stepping a time past midnight carries the date with it — 11:50 PM stepped up becomes 12:00 AM the next day, instead of wrapping round and leaving the date behind. And the end follows the start: moving the start moves the end by the same amount and keeps the appointment's length, while changing the end sets a new length.

If a save is refused, QuickMail now moves focus to the field at fault and selects its text, and shows the reason on a line above the buttons that clears itself when you fix the field — so the refusal is visible and reachable however your announcement settings are set. (#400)

Fixed: creating an appointment late in the evening

Pressing N for a new appointment after about 11:30 PM produced a default half-hour range whose end crossed midnight while its end date stayed on the day you started, so the appointment ended before it began and Save was refused over values you had never touched. The only way out was to correct the end date by hand. A new appointment started at 11:45 PM now ends at 12:15 AM the next day and saves. (#378)

Keyboard and navigation

Fixed: moving or copying a folder now shows the folder tree

Choosing where to move or copy a folder — Shift+F10 on a folder, then Move Folder… or Copy Folder… — presented one long flat list of every folder in every account, with each one spelled out as a full path. Every other place QuickMail asks you to pick a destination folder shows a tree. This picker now does too: folders nested under their parent, everything expanded so arrow keys and type-ahead reach any folder without opening anything first. (#431)

Two destinations it no longer offers, both of which could only fail:

  • Folders in your other accounts. A folder moves and copies within its own account; the old list showed every account's folders with the account name spelled into each row. In a tree the account name sits on a header several rows up, so two accounts that each have an "Archive" would have been told apart only by where you had arrowed from — and the move would have silently acted on the wrong one. The picker is now limited to the account the folder already lives in.
  • The folder you are moving, and everything inside it. Nothing can be moved or copied into itself.

Both folder pickers now open on the folder you came from, rather than on nothing. Moving or copying messages opens on the folder those messages are in — in a combined view such as All Inboxes that is the message's own folder, not the view. Moving or copying a folder opens on the folder it currently sits under, since the folder being moved is not one of the destinations. Where there is no single place you came from — messages selected from several folders, or a top-level folder with no parent — it opens on the first folder rather than leaving the tree unselected.

Open is unavailable when what is selected is not a folder: an account header, or one of the intermediate names some servers produce for a level that holds folders but is not a mailbox itself. Pressing Enter on one announces "Choose a folder" rather than appearing to ignore the keypress.

Since the picker now opens on where you already are, QuickMail no longer carries out a move or copy that puts something back where it started. It says so instead. That was worth guarding: copying messages into the folder they are already in used to duplicate every one of them, and on Microsoft 365 accounts copying a folder into its own parent left a second copy of the folder and all of its mail.

Two cases that used to end in silence or a server error now say what happened: when the exclusions above leave nowhere to move the folder, QuickMail says so instead of opening an empty picker; and Move Folder… or Copy Folder… on one of the views that sit in the folder tree — All Inboxes, All Mail, an account's All Mail — now says it is a view rather than a folder. Choosing it on a per-account All Mail previously opened a full picker and failed at the server.

Fixed: choosing a rule's target folder now shows the folder tree

The rule editors were the last place still asking for a destination folder as one long flat list: Choose Target Folder in the Rules Manager, and the move and copy folder in the Microsoft 365 rule editor. Both now show the same tree as everywhere else, and both open on a folder rather than on nothing:

  • Editing a rule that already files somewhere opens on that folder, so checking or changing where a rule files starts where the rule already points. A new rule, or one whose folder has since been deleted or renamed on the server, opens on the first folder instead of leaving the tree unselected.
  • Only the rule's own account is offered. A rule files mail within one mailbox, so another account's folder was never a real choice — and with two accounts that each have an "Archive", the flat list's account-prefixed rows were the only thing telling them apart. If QuickMail cannot tell which account a rule belongs to, or has not cached that account's folders yet, it still shows every account rather than an empty picker.

Fixed: typing a folder name in the folder picker now works

Typing letters in the tree view of the folder picker — the view you get when moving or copying a message — did nothing. The v0.8.32 notes said typing a folder name there would jump to it; the mechanism behind that claim turned out never to have worked, and nothing else was wired in its place. The tree now has the same type-ahead as the main window's folder tree: type the first letters of a folder's name and the selection jumps to it, keep typing to narrow the match, repeat a letter to cycle through folders that share it. (#418)

Two related repairs in the same picker:

  • The flat "Go to Folder" list matched against the wrong text. Typing a letter there searched an internal name rather than the folder names on screen, so it went nowhere useful. It now matches the folder path you see.
  • Typing "o" or "c" could press a button. The Open and Cancel buttons carried shortcut letters that fire on a bare keypress when focus is in a list, so an unmatched type-ahead letter could activate one of them — "c" closed the picker. The same problem was fixed for the New Folder button in v0.8.32; Open and Cancel now follow. Enter still opens the selected folder and Escape still cancels.

In the main window's folder tree, type-ahead now continues a prefix. Typing "s", "e" in quick succession finds "Sent" rather than treating each letter as a fresh first-letter search. The v0.5.5 notes described the folder tree working this way, but the code never actually did — each letter was always a fresh search; the message list is where continuation really lived. The tree now genuinely does what those notes said.

Repeating a letter now cycles through matches everywhere. Pressing "s" twice quickly used to build the prefix "ss", which matches nothing, so rapid repeats went dead until the timeout passed. A repeated letter now keeps the single-letter prefix and moves to the next match — the standard list behavior — in the message list, the grouped views, both folder trees, and the picker.

One more small change in the same code: a capital letter now works for type-ahead. Shift+S was silently ignored in the message list and grouped views; it now matches the same as "s". (Matching was always case-insensitive once the letter got through.)

Fixed: arrowing through settings options now chooses them

In Settings, arrowing through a group of options — Message open mode, Message list density, Log format, Spelling suggestions verbosity — moved between them without choosing one; you had to press Space on the option you had landed on, which is not how these behave elsewhere in Windows. Arrow keys now select the option they move to. Tab still enters the group on the option already chosen and changes nothing on the way in or out. The same applies to the Change: this event only / all events in the series choice when editing a repeating appointment.

QuickMail also stopped speaking the option name itself when you choose one. That announcement was added to paper over this same bug — choices went unannounced because arrowing never made one — and with the groups behaving correctly it was QuickMail talking over software you have already set up to speak the way you want. (#441)

Screen readers

Fixed: four lists read out an internal name instead of their contents

The calendar agenda read "QuickMail.Models.CalendarEvent" for every row rather than the appointment. The same fault affected three other lists: Group Manager, Message Properties, and the shortcut list in Settings → Keyboard.

All four are multi-column lists, and each row's spoken name was coming from the row object rather than from the columns on screen — so the columns were visible but unreadable, and what was spoken was the internal type name. This looked completely correct to anyone reading the screen, which is why it survived. (#448)

Fixed: the Rules Manager said its status line twice

The Rules Manager's status text was wired to speak through two independent mechanisms at once, so it was announced twice — and one of those routes ignored your announcement settings entirely, so turning announcements off did not silence it. It also spoke on opening the window, over the thing you had just moved to.

There is now one route, it respects your settings, and the status is silent on open — press F6 to read it when you want it.

Fixed: Ctrl+Shift+P did nothing inside a message window

With Message open mode set to Window, the command palette shortcut did nothing. Focus lands inside the message body as soon as the window opens, and the keystroke was not being passed out of it. Found while adding Ctrl+Shift+W to the same window; both work there now.

Appearance

New: message list density

Message List Density offers Comfortable and Compact. It is in Settings → Appearance, and also directly on the View → Density submenu so you can change it without opening Settings. Choosing one announces "Comfortable density." or "Compact density."

Comfortable is the new default and puts a little more space around each message row. Compact is the tighter spacing QuickMail has always used, so choosing it returns the message list to exactly what you had before. The setting changes spacing only — the rows say the same thing either way, and nothing about keyboard navigation changes.

Both options are also available as commands, Density: Comfortable and Density: Compact, in the Command Palette and in Settings → Keyboard, so you can give either one a shortcut. Neither has a shortcut by default. (#421)

Changed: themes

  • Ember, Fjord, and Heather are complete themes now. Each of them previously supplied only four colors and borrowed everything else from Parchment. Each now carries its own full set — text, borders, links, selection, focus, and status colors included.
  • The toolbar follows your theme. Its buttons, separators, and background used stock Windows colors in every theme, which is why the toolbar looked out of place in the dark themes in particular.
  • Borders are darker against their backgrounds in Parchment and Parchment Dark, so the edges of boxes, fields, and panes stand out more clearly.
  • The focus indicator gained an outline behind it, which keeps it visible against backgrounds close to its own color.
  • The Markdown preview window no longer opens with a white background under a dark theme.

Changed: Manage Themes moved to the View menu

Manage Themes… is on the View menu now rather than Tools — choosing how the app looks belongs with the rest of what View controls. The Next Theme and Previous Theme menu items were removed; both are still commands, so they remain in the Command Palette and keep any shortcut you assigned them.

Fixed: the Rules Manager was cut off at large text sizes

At a Windows text size of 150% the Rules Manager's boxes and buttons clipped their contents — text ran out of the bottom of fields, and button labels were cut off. The rows had fixed heights that did not grow with the text. They size to their content now. (#449)

Fixed: the compose window's mode selector was crushed to "Pl"

At 150% text the Plain text / HTML / Markdown selector at the top of the compose window was squeezed down to about two characters, because the buttons beside it claimed the width first. The selector now gets its width before they do. (#450)

Fixed: the Theme Manager's Import button at large text sizes

At a Windows text size of 150% the buttons beside the theme list ran past the bottom of the window and Import could not be reached at all. That column scrolls now, and moving to a button with the keyboard brings it into view.

Windows on ARM

New: a version built for ARM PCs

QuickMail now has a build for PCs with an ARM processor — the Snapdragon X models of Surface Laptop and Surface Pro, and similar machines from other manufacturers. Until now those PCs ran the regular build through Windows' built-in emulation, which works but costs speed and battery life. The ARM build runs on the processor directly.

Nothing changes for anyone on a regular PC, and nothing changes for you automatically: automatic updates stay on whichever version you installed, and QuickMail will never move you across on its own.

If you are on an ARM PC running the regular build, QuickMail says so once, and the Help menu keeps a Get the ARM Version entry that opens the switching instructions in the user guide, where the download is linked. That entry appears only on an ARM PC running the regular build — which makes it the way to check where you stand. Once you are on the ARM version, it is gone.

Switching is a manual uninstall and reinstall, and the uninstall is not optional:

  1. Uninstall QuickMail from Settings → Apps. When the uninstaller offers to delete your data, choose No.
  2. Download and run QuickMail-win-arm64.msi.
  3. Start QuickMail. Your accounts, settings, contacts, rules, templates, saved views, and cached mail are all as you left them — your data lives separately from the program itself.

Running the ARM installer on top of a regular QuickMail of the same version does not replace it. Windows treats the two as separate programs, installs the second beside the first, reports success, and leaves the regular build running. Nothing in QuickMail would look wrong afterwards, which is exactly why it is worth saying plainly: uninstall first, and check the Help menu once you have restarted. If it has already happened, uninstalling and running the ARM installer again puts it right — and note that Settings → Apps cannot tell you which build you have, since both report the same name and version there. (#18)

Diagnostics and troubleshooting

Fixed: adding an account no longer shows every other account as disconnected

Adding a new account made the accounts you already had report disconnected in the account list, and they stayed that way until you restarted QuickMail. This has been reported several times, and each previous attempt fixed a real connection bug that turned out not to be this one.

Nothing was ever actually disconnecting. Your accounts stayed connected the whole time — mail kept arriving, folders kept working. What broke was the account list's picture of them. Adding an account makes QuickMail re-read your account file, and connection status is live information that is deliberately never written to that file, so every account came back from the re-read reporting "disconnected". Accounts that were already working were then skipped by the reconnect pass — correctly, since nothing was wrong with them — so nothing ever corrected the status, and the wrong label stuck.

The status now survives a re-read. Adding, editing, or removing an account leaves the others reporting exactly what they were.

This one hid for so long because it looks exactly like a connection failure: it appears the moment you touch your accounts, it hits every account at once, and it lasts until a restart. It was found by recording what QuickMail's connections were actually doing at the moment it happened — which is the feature below. (#312)

New: Connection Diagnostics, for when something looks wrong

Settings → Advanced → Record connection diagnostics turns on a record of how QuickMail connects to your mail servers. It is off by default, and most people will never need it.

Turn it on when an account reports the wrong status, mail stops arriving, or an action reports a failure you cannot explain — then reproduce the problem. It starts recording the moment you switch it on, so you do not have to restart first and lose what you were trying to capture.

While it is on, a Connection Diagnostics item appears in the Help menu. It shows each account with what QuickMail believes about it alongside what its mail server actually says, and a Test this account button checks an account directly on a brand-new connection. That is the question this exists to answer: whether the problem is your connection or what QuickMail is reporting about it. Copy report and Save report produce a plain-text file you can attach to a bug report.

What it records: your account names, your mail server names and addresses, connection attempts and their results, and error messages. What it never records: passwords, authentication tokens, and the contents of your mail. Your account names may be email addresses, and mail server names identify your provider, so it is worth knowing what is in a report before you share one.

The record goes into a file named connection.log, kept beside QuickMail's other settings. It is capped in size, and it stops the moment you turn the setting off.

New: debug screenshots — off by default, and off again every time you exit

QuickMail can save a picture of each window as you open it, so that how the app looks can be reviewed by someone who is not looking at the screen. It is genuinely useful — it is how the visual problems fixed in this release were found — but it is the one feature here that writes pictures of your actual mail to disk, so it is deliberately hard to switch on and impossible to leave on by accident.

Two separate deliberate acts are required, and neither is remembered.

  1. Start QuickMail with the /debug switch. Without it the feature does not exist — the setting is not merely hidden, there is nothing behind it to turn on.
  2. Then, in Tools → Settings → Advanced, find Diagnostics (debug) and check Capture screenshots of new windows.

It turns itself off when QuickMail closes. The setting is never written to config.ini — it lives only in memory for the session. Start QuickMail again with /debug again and capture is off again, waiting to be switched on deliberately a second time. There is no way to make it stick, and that is the point.

While it is on, every window's title bar says so, ending in " - SCREENSHOTS ON". If that text is not in your title bars, nothing is being captured.

Never attach a screenshot to a GitHub issue. A GitHub issue is public and permanent, and a QuickMail screenshot is a picture of your real mailbox — senders, subject lines, and the text of whatever message was open. QuickMail itself never uploads them and never attaches them to a bug report: Help → Report a Bug does not touch them in any form. They stay in a folder on your computer (Open screenshots folder in that same Settings group takes you there), and Settings → Advanced → Delete QuickMail logs removes the whole folder. If a picture is genuinely needed to explain a problem, email it to quickmailissues@theideaplace.net, where it reaches a person rather than a public page — and look at what it shows before you send it.

Whether this ships enabled at all is still being decided. It is in this release so it can be evaluated in real use; it may be restricted further, or removed from production builds entirely, in a future version. If you have a view on that, say so through any of the routes in Reporting Issues. (#175)

Changed: Delete QuickMail logs removes every diagnostic file

QuickMail can leave three kinds of diagnostic file on your computer, and Settings → Advanced → Delete QuickMail logs removes all of them. Two of the three are new in this release, so this is what the command covers rather than a change to what it used to do:

  • The application log (quickmail.log) — a running record of what QuickMail did. It is always written, and in more detail if you start QuickMail with the /debug switch.
  • The connection log (connection.log) — the connection record described just above, written only while Record connection diagnostics is switched on.
  • Debug screenshots — pictures of QuickMail's own windows, saved to a folder, as described in the entry just above. It is not something you will meet in ordinary use, and it can never be capturing without your knowing.

Delete QuickMail logs removes all three, and says so before it does it. The usual reason to delete these files is that they carry your email addresses and mail server names — and screenshots hold pictures of your actual mail — so leaving one behind because it happens to live in a different folder would quietly defeat the point. Screenshots are cleared even when you are running normally, in case an earlier /debug session left some behind. (#436)

Thank You to Contributors

Thanks to everyone who reported problems and tested fixes for this release. The reports behind the Microsoft 365 mail-reappearing investigation (#366), the silent send failures (#396), the compose Enter-sends-the-message report (#201), and the rules-scoping and attachment feedback shaped a great deal of what shipped here.

Internal

Everything below is developer detail — implementation notes, test coverage, and build changes. Nothing here is needed to use QuickMail.

Microsoft 365 / Graph

  • Immutable ids everywhere (#419). GraphHeaders adds the immutable-id preference header; every read (GraphMailService summary/detail/delta paths) and every write (delete, move, mark-read, flag) now round-trips an id that survives a folder move, as does GraphChangeNotifier's delta poll. Graph's default ids change on move, so a cached id went stale the moment a server rule or another client filed the message — the delete then 404'd and the next sync resurrected it.
  • One-time cache rebuild. App.OnStartup clears MessageDetail, MessageSummary, and DeltaToken rows for BackendKind.MicrosoftGraph accounts only, guarded by a .immutable-id-rebuilt marker file in the profile directory. CalendarEvent rows are deliberately untouched, and IMAP caches are untouched so IMAP invite-source links survive. A failed clear is caught, logged, and leaves the marker unwritten so the next launch retries; the rebuild is skipped in --online and --ui-probe. SyncService.SeedRebuildBaseline makes the first full sync per folder cache without running rules, so the refetched backlog does not re-fire rules — a crash between the wipe and that first Inbox sync can still lose the in-memory baseline, tracked as #454. Note the downgrade hazard: an older build run against a rebuilt cache treats the stored immutable ids as mutable.
  • IsAlreadyGone (#416) is retained as belt-and-braces on delete/move even though #419 removed the cause; it still covers a message genuinely deleted from another device.
  • #366 live reconciliation landed after all. An earlier draft of these notes said the remaining #366 work was not in this release; that was written before it merged. SyncService.ReconcileFolderAsync compares the server's id set against the store and raises MessagesRemoved for the difference; it runs on folder open, on the Graph delta poll (which now consumes @removed tombstones), and on the periodic sweep. The sweep covers every non-excluded folder of every account on MailSyncPollMinutes (default 5), not just inboxes, which is what makes server-rule-filed mail appear without opening the folder. Probe mode never deletes.
  • internetMessageId is selected on Graph summaries (#429). Without it MessageDeduplicator.CollapseKeyFor fell back to the per-folder key (account + folder + id), which cannot merge copies, so Graph messages doubled in every aggregate view.
  • GraphMessage.IsRead becomes bool?, mapped ?? false at both sites. As a non-nullable bool it threw JsonException: Cannot get the value of a token type 'Null' as a boolean mid-batch, and because the throw escaped the whole deserialization, one message took down the entire folder fetch.
  • OAuthService.PromptForSignIn(firstConnect, username) centralizes the MSAL prompt choice: the add-account path forces Prompt.Consent, re-auth keeps ForceLogin/SelectAccount. Scopes stay .default for work/school, so requested-equals-declared still holds by construction (#208) and Azure resolves the set per account type — an explicit org-only scope list would have broken personal accounts on a custom domain. SignInInteractiveAsync(account, ct) is the add path and is reached from both AddAccountViewModel and AccountManagerViewModel's Sign in button, since both derive from AccountEditorViewModel. The #202 identity-mismatch guard still refuses to adopt a different identity that completes sign-in, so the protection moves from prevention to detection rather than disappearing. .default never surfaces a newly declared permission to a user who already holds an older grant — any permission added in future must be requested explicitly at the point it is needed, as contacts and calendar already do.

Rules

  • SyncService.ApplyRulesToArrivalsAsync is the single chokepoint for rule application, called from the full sync and from both IDLE paths (cached and online). Previously only the full sync applied rules, so IDLE-delivered mail permanently escaped them. Dedupe authority is the store in cached mode (an id snapshot taken before the upsert) and an in-session set in online mode. Rule-removed messages are stripped from the returned batch and from the store so they never flash in the origin folder.
  • The #336 Inbox gate is folder.Kind == SpecialFolderKind.Inbox || folder.FullName == "INBOX". For Graph accounts FullName is an opaque id that never equals "INBOX", so Kind is the only thing keeping client rules alive on a Graph inbox — pinned by SyncServiceRuleApplicationTests.GraphInbox_ByKind_RunsRules_EvenWithOpaqueFolderId. Any new sync entry point handing this method a Graph inbox with Kind == None would silently stop running rules on it.
  • Online mode baselines the first fetch per folder (the last-50 reconciliation batch) as seen without running rules, so a move/delete rule never rewrites up to fifty pre-existing messages on the first reconciliation.
  • RuleService.MigrateAllAccountRules runs from LoadRules() and is not feature-gated. It defers entirely when the account list is empty — an empty read can be transient (startup ordering, a locked accounts.json) and migrating against it would drop every unscoped rule. A genuine Graph-only profile still drops, and logs each dropped rule by name. AccountOptions lists every account including Graph ones, so a user can rescope a dropped rule and it will run.
  • ApplyRulesToExistingAsync takes an account→Inbox-FullName map and filters cached mail to those pairs Ordinal, skipping accounts absent from the map fail-closed rather than guessing an Inbox. The caller builds the map from CachedFolders, logs unresolved accounts, and runs under a 60-second timeout. The Rules Manager's Closed handler no longer calls it — it only refreshes the status text.
  • The status line carried two independent speech mechanisms: an AutomationProperties.LiveSetting="Polite" live region and the gated custom Announce path on the same text. The live region ignored the user's announcement config entirely and double-spoke the count. LiveSetting is removed from all three rules status TextBlocks — the unified window's and the client window's two; the line keeps its AutomationProperties.Name and stays focusable, so it never auto-announces on open or refresh but F6 reads the count on demand, and action outcomes still go through the gated path. Verified with the screen-reader user against a build with the surface enabled. The unified editor window is documented as a deliberate New-Window-Checklist exception to the F6 requirement: it is a single linear form (Name → conditions → action → Save/Cancel) with no distinct panes, so Tab-only is correct there rather than missed (#466).
  • Never reached a user: the blank Account combo. Retiring the "All accounts" option left a new rule's AccountId null with nothing in AccountOptions matching it, so the combo rendered blank. Introduced 77 minutes after the v0.8.36 tag and fixed 35 minutes later, so no shipped build ever had it — which is why it is not in the user-facing notes.
  • Server rules ship on. FeatureFlag.ServerRules now defaults to true in ConfigFeatureGate.Defaults — the flag existed to keep the surface hidden while list/create/edit/delete/reorder and the unified per-account window were built, and they are done. MainWindow builds UnifiedRulesWindow when the flag is on, a ServerRuleService exists, and a Graph account is present; a profile with no Graph account still gets the client-only RulesManagerWindow, unchanged. Note what the flip actually swaps for a Graph user: the whole Rules Manager, not an extra section — so the client-only window's per-rule Account column gives way to the unified window's account picker, and every action the old window offered had to exist in the new one. Turn the surface off again with ServerRules=false under [features] in config.ini, or --no-feature ServerRules at launch. There is no Settings UI for it.
  • Test Rule was the parity gap the flip nearly shipped. RulesManagerWindow has had a Test button since before the unified window existed; UnifiedRulesViewModel had no equivalent, so enabling the flag would have silently removed rule testing for every Microsoft 365 user — including for their client rules on IMAP accounts, since one Graph account swaps the window for all of them. Caught in review of the flag flip, not of the window that omitted it. CanTestSelected gates on the row being a client rule, and the button, context-menu item, and command-palette entry all follow it. Testing a server rule is deliberately a disabled control rather than an enabled one that announces "not available": that message was Result-category, so a user running with announcements off would have pressed a button and perceived nothing.
  • Live verification (Timothy Spaulding, real M365 mailbox, 67 server rules): create → edit → reorder → disable → delete each confirmed by re-listing from Graph afterwards rather than trusting the app's own state. The reorder held its minimal diff — 2 rules PATCHed, not all 66. A create rejected by Graph for an invalid Sent-To address surfaced the exact error and left the editor open, so the failure path is exercised too.

Message-list row speech

  • RowFieldCatalog / RowLayoutService / RowSpeechBuilder replace the six hand-written accessible-name converters. The catalog is the single source of field ids, display names, labels, bound property paths, and formats; the default order is ["flag", "status", "attachments", "from", "subject", "preview", "date", "folder"], which reproduces the previously shipped speech exactly except that empty fields are skipped rather than emitting a bare ". ". MessageAccessibleNameConverter is gone.
  • The legacy AnnounceFlagStatus setting is honoured once at seed time in RowLayoutService: false means the Flag field starts unchecked. The Settings checkbox is deleted; the config key remains readable so an existing config.ini still lands correctly.
  • FieldCheckList uses real CheckBox controls, not a ListBox. A ListBoxItem wrapper carries a second copy of the row's name; making each row the actual check box means role and checked state come from the platform and Space toggles natively. The cost is that Home/End and first-letter navigation — free in a ListBox — are implemented on the control, using TypeAheadPrefixTracker rather than WPF TextSearch (which requires a Selector). It is therefore not a TypeAheadWiringTests site.
  • StampFolderDisplayNames fills FolderDisplayName on aggregate rows only; AggregateSpansMultipleAccounts decides account-qualification by view identity, and an uncached folder appends nothing rather than a raw backend id.

Watched conversations

  • A watch is a predicate, not per-message state. WatchService stores a JSON watch list (watches.json) keyed on ConversationBuilder.NormalizeSubject — the same key the Conversations view mode already uses — rather than an is_watched column. Future messages are therefore already members without anything having to notice them arrive, and watches survive a cache clear and work unchanged in --online mode. MailMessageSummary.IsWatched is transient and derived, stamped in SetMessages and OnFolderSynced, and is deliberately not in ReconcileMessageState: a freshly fetched summary has never been stamped, so copying it would clear the flag on every aggregate merge. FetchAllMailAsync, FetchViewFoldersAsync, and FetchAccountAllMailAsync insert via InsertMessageSorted, bypassing SetMessages, so they stamp explicitly — without it the newest rows, the ones this feature exists for, spoke no watch state.
  • The target is resolved by the View, not read off SelectedMessage. GroupedMessageTreeController assigns SelectedMessage only for a MailMessageSummary, so selecting a group header leaves it stale — reading it watched the wrong conversation and announced that wrong subject, in Conversations view, which is exactly where the command gets used. MainWindow supplies a WatchTargetResolver (same shape as RegisterAccountBackend): a conversation group resolves to its own subject, a From/To group header to null so the command is unavailable, otherwise the selected message. isAvailable reads the target without storing it, since availability is polled and must not mutate state.
  • Two WebView2 keydown relays, and the key is 'W'. Focus is inside the document as soon as a message opens, so neither the WPF key ladder nor the local registry is reachable. The reading pane's relay and MessageWindow's separate one both forward the chord; the test must accept 'W' as well as 'w' because the browser reports the upper-case key with Shift held, and the branch is ordered before the lower-case ctrl-w branch so closing and watching stay distinct. Ctrl+Shift+P had the identical pre-existing gap in MessageWindow and is relayed too. MessageWindow raises WatchToggleRequested and MainWindow routes it to MainViewModel, keeping one writer for the watch list so main-window rows and the watched folder stay in step.
  • The manager is a modeless singleton whose counts are computed per open, never stored — a stored count drifts from the cache on every sync — and read "count unavailable" rather than a confident zero in --online mode. The count read moved into Task.Run because Sqlite's *Async completes synchronously, so the read and its GroupBy were running on the dispatcher. Rename is deliberately label-only: the matching key is the normalized subject, and editing it would silently change which messages the watch collects while presenting as a rename. Identity is captured at BeginRename, since selection stays reachable while renaming (F6, arrows) and a plain keyboard sequence otherwise renamed the wrong watch silently.
  • No button in that window carries an access-key underscore. The list has first-letter type-ahead, and WPF fires a bare mnemonic without Alt when focus is not in a text field — which is how "c" closed the folder picker (#418). Alt+G/R/S/C are wired explicitly and guarded on Modifiers == Alt exactly, so AltGr (Ctrl+Alt) still reaches type-ahead, and they are suppressed while a rename is in progress. Escape cancels the rename rather than closing the window: PreviewKeyDown tunnels root-to-leaf, so the window override runs before the text box's handler. The list is a constructor-time snapshot while Ctrl+Shift+W stays live behind it, so both stale paths now say so and reload, and stopping a watch here routes through RefreshWatchStateFor — one writer, one place that reacts.
  • The notification ordering is load-bearing and tested. The watched path runs first and is handed only the watched subset, because both paths share _notifiedMessageKeys and NewMailFilter.SelectNew consumes whatever it is shown: handing it the full list would claim ordinary inbox mail and silently suppress the new-mail toast, and running it second would give a watched inbox message the generic toast instead of the informative one. A watched inbox message produces exactly one toast, the watched one. NotifyOnWatchedConversation defaults off and fires in every folder, unlike the inbox-only new-mail path.
  • Adding a MessageFilter value touches eleven sites and nothing enumerated the enum, so a missed site failed silently. The new coverage test walks every value through FilterKey → SetFilterCommand → FilterLabel, asserting keys are unique, nameable, and that none can describe itself as "All" — and it immediately surfaced two real pre-existing bugs. ViewManagerViewModel's two summary builders labelled the current filter from CurrentFilter.ToString().ToLowerInvariant(), but the enum name and the stored key are not the same string for every value (WithAttachments lowercases to withattachments, which FilterLabel has no arm for); both now route through FilterKey, the single writer of that field.
  • All Flagged was absent from the flat folder list, which ApplyViewAsync resolves a saved view's VirtualFolderKey against — so a view saved over it fell through to a fabricated folder instead of the live singleton. Flagged twice as pre-existing debt during this work; the fix is two lines.
  • Specs: docs/planning/watched-conversations-pm-dev-spec.md and docs/planning/watched-conversations-phase2-pm-dev-spec.md. Section 14A of the first and 13A of the second record each defect found by adversarial review and why it is re-introducible.

Type-ahead

  • TypeAheadPrefixTracker + TypeAheadMatcher (new) — the hand-rolled prefix accumulator and wrap-around matcher, extracted from MainWindow so they can be tested without a window (#415). The tracker takes a TimeProvider, so TypeAheadLogicTests exercises the 1-second reset window deterministically, including its exact boundary — coverage that previously required synthesized keystrokes racing a real clock (#380/#414). The tracker's peek/commit split also closes a latent double-append: the PreviewKeyDown route now peeks and commits only on a match, so an unmatched keystroke is recorded once (by PreviewTextInput), not twice.
  • TypeAheadWiringTests now fails any TreeView declaring TextSearch.TextPath. WPF disables text search by default on TreeView/TreeViewItem (verified against the control defaults; ListBox/ListView/ComboBox enable it), and even enabled it matches one level's items only — which is how the picker's inert attribute shipped in v0.8.32 with a release note claiming it worked. Trees must wire PreviewTextInput to the shared tracker instead.

Connection diagnostics and account status

  • MainViewModel.LoadAccountList carries IsConnected/TotalUnread across a reload, keyed by account id. Both are runtime state deliberately excluded from accounts.json, so rebuilding the models produced objects defaulting to disconnected, and replacing the Accounts collection made the whole list read that way at once. RefreshAccountList reconnects only accounts failing AccountsNeedingConnect, so healthy accounts were never re-evaluated and the false label persisted until restart. The carry-over is skipped when the account's connection identity changed (host, port, login, auth or security settings), so an edited account is not vouched for by connections belonging to the old server; duplicate ids in accounts.json no longer throw on reload. Guarded by AccountListReloadStatusTests (4 of its 5 fail with the carry-over removed) and AccountListCarryOverGuardTests.
  • The instrumentation could not see this directly, and that is the lesson worth keeping: the state was lost by object replacement, not assignment. ApplyAccountStatus genuinely is the only writer of IsConnected, so no write was ever observable — the journal's silence next to a plainly visible symptom was itself the evidence. LoadAccountList now records an accounts-reloaded event closing that blind spot, and ApplyAccountStatus takes a source tag from all eight call sites.
  • ConnectionJournal (new) — bounded, self-rotating connection.log plus a 2000-event in-memory ring backing the diagnostics window. Gated on ConfigModel.ConnectionDiagnostics (default false). Record returns on a volatile read before allocating, but arguments to the eager overload are evaluated first — so call sites whose detail invokes HostConnectionCensus (which resolves DNS) use a Func<string> overload or check Enabled themselves. An independent review caught the original version computing the census on every pool rent with the feature off. Enable and disable each write a marker, so a journal that stops is distinguishable from one switched off mid-investigation. File writes take a separate lock from the ring, so a background disk write never blocks a UI-thread Snapshot().
  • HostConnectionCensus (new) — live socket counts per host with cached DNS resolution, and shared-address detection. Our cap is per account; a server's is per user+IP, and on shared hosting per IP overall. Registrations live in a ConditionalWeakTable keyed by client so release is idempotent. Documented limitation: the count is decremented only via Released(), which every disposal path funnels through — a client collected without being disposed would leave the counter high, so an implausibly high census is to be treated as suspect rather than as proof and cross-checked against the pool= figure on the same line.
  • IConnectionProbe / ConnectionTruthProbe (new) — independent reachability verification on a connection sharing nothing with the pools or watchers, emitting a greppable verdict line stating what the UI shows against what the server said. Serialized process-wide and rate-limited per account, since a per-IP limit is a plausible suspect and the probe must not become part of what it measures. Gated on the setting at every entry point: an independent review found the first version starting its verification loop regardless, so a single IDLE failure on a default install opened an authenticated connection outside the pool cap every 60 seconds, indefinitely — against exactly the host already refusing connections. RetainOnly also abandons verification for an account removed while it was showing disconnected, which otherwise probed a deleted mailbox for the rest of the session.
  • ProbeResult carries a three-state ProbeOutcome (Reachable/Unreachable/NotSupported). The first live run wired the probe straight to ImapMailService, which answered "not registered with the IMAP service" for a Graph account; collapsed to a boolean that read as unreachable, it reported a healthy account as broken. Unreachable is false for NotSupported, so the two cannot be conflated again. GraphMailService implements the interface via the Inbox counts, and MailServiceRouter dispatches per account with no default-backend fallback — defaulting to IMAP was the original defect.
  • ImapMailService.RaiseReachability funnels AccountReachabilityChanged so every raise carries a reason. Worth noting for anyone reading the connection code: the IDLE watcher is still the only source of reachability, and it marks an account unreachable after a single failure, before any retry (#314).
  • ConnectionDiagnosticsWindow is modeless per the modal-dialog rules, with its own F6 ring, Escape handling, focus restoration, a CancellationTokenSource field cancelled in OnClosing (closing mid-test previously left a probe holding the process-wide probe semaphore for up to 45 seconds), and a window-scoped command palette listing its own actions rather than the main window's. Pane names on F6 announce as Status, not Hint, so turning hints off does not make the ring silent. Refresh preserves the event filter — rebuilding the combo dropped its selection, wrote null back through the TwoWay binding, and blanked the journal pane permanently. help.connectionDiagnostics is registered and unregistered by ApplyConnectionDiagnosticsSetting rather than at startup, so the palette and the Help menu never disagree about whether the feature exists.
  • Delete QuickMail logs removes quickmail.log, connection.log (and its rolled-over .1, clearing the in-memory ring with it), and the whole debug-screenshots tree. ScreenshotCaptureService.DeleteAllCaptures is static and profile-keyed so it works in a normal launch where only the null capture service is wired; in-flight PNG saves are flushed first so nothing survives by holding a handle (#436).

Accounts, provider catalog, and sending

  • AccountModel.LoginUsername (persisted, nullable) plus computed AuthUsername = LoginUsername ?? Username. Every password authentication uses AuthUsername — IMAP, all three SMTP entry points, and the iCloud CardDAV/CalDAV Basic auth in ICloudContactSource and GraphCalendarSyncService, which is the same credential pair. OAuth still uses Username, the mailbox the token was issued for. Username is now documented as the email address and nothing else — it is the From header, the provider-catalog match, and the autodiscovery domain. SameConnectionSettings includes LoginUsername so a corrected login invalidates the pooled client.
  • EmailAddressValidator (new) parses with AllowAddressesWithoutDomain = false — MimeKit's default accepts a bare local part, which is exactly the input that produced MAIL FROM:<fastfinge>. Deliberately does not require a dot in the domain. TryNormalize returns mailbox.Address, and that normalized form is what both editors save: MailboxAddress.TryParse accepts Kelly Ford <kelly@example.com>, an angle-addr, and padded input, while the MailboxAddress(name, address) constructor MimeMessageBuilder calls throws on all three — so validating without normalizing would only have moved the failure from a refused save to a rejected send. Enforced in AccountEditorViewModel.IsEmailAddressUsable (shared by IsReadyToSave and AccountManagerViewModel.SaveAccount) and as a pre-send guard in ComposeViewModel.SendAsync.
  • AccountStartupRepair (new) runs in OnStartup against the loaded account list and does two things. It corrects ImapUseSsl/SmtpUseSsl where the account carries no ProviderId (the marker for predating the catalog — SaveAccount backfills it, so a deliberate pairing the user has saved is never overruled), the host equals a catalog provider's host, and the port equals that provider's published port; a leg moved to STARTTLS also gets RequireStartTls, matching what ApplyProvider sets for the same host and port, so a repaired account is not left weaker than a freshly added one. It also copies a non-address Username into LoginUsername on password accounts, so correcting the address does not destroy the working login. Matched on host rather than ProviderCatalog.Resolve, whose email-domain fallback would claim an address relayed through a third-party server.
  • SmtpService.DisconnectQuietlyAsync replaces the in-try DisconnectAsync in SendAsync, SendIcsReplyAsync, and VerifyAsync, so a failed sign-off cannot be reported as a failed send.
  • AnnouncementCategory StatusCategory on ComposeViewModel and AccountEditorViewModel, with SetStatusOutcome/SetProgress. One-shot — it returns to Status after every raise, matching MainViewModel.StatusAnnouncementCategory, because both VMs assign StatusText directly in dozens of places and a latched Result would re-classify all of them as interrupting outcomes. The setter also clears StatusText first so an identical repeated message still raises PropertyChanged; without that, pressing a button twice on the same unfixed field announced nothing the second time. Replaces AddAccountDialog's local _statusCategory field, and removes three double-announce sites in ComposeWindow. AccountManagerViewModel.EmailAddressRejected lets the View open Advanced settings and focus the address box, since the refusal names a control behind a collapsed expander.
  • FeatureFlag.GoogleAuth default flips to false. It gates only the offer — no runtime authentication path consults it, so saved AuthType.OAuth2Google accounts are unaffected. New ProviderCatalog entry gmail-oauth ("Gmail (sign in with Google)"), DefaultAuthType = OAuth2Google, no app-password hint, exposed as IProviderCatalog.GmailGoogleSignIn. It carries the gmail.com domains but sits after the plain Gmail entry, so MatchByEmail and Resolve's host fallback still answer gmail for every Gmail address; it is reached only by an explicit pick or a saved ProviderId. AccountEditorViewModel.Providers is an ObservableCollection<MailProvider> built from the catalog minus the Google entry, with EnsureGoogleSignInListed() inserting it after Gmail — absent from the list rather than collapsed, so it is out of the keyboard order and the accessibility tree entirely. ShowGoogleAuthOption is IsGoogleAuthEnabled || AuthType == AuthType.OAuth2Google, and that second clause is what keeps an existing Google account's Authentication combo populated. ConfigModel.Features is an OrdinalIgnoreCase dictionary so SettingsViewModel.GoogleSignIn updates the existing key instead of adding a second one in different capitalization.
  • Account Manager's Provider value is a read-only TextBox, not a TextBlock. A TextBox exposes its Text as a value alongside the LabeledBy name; on a TextBlock, LabeledBy overrode the automatic name (its own text) and left no value behind it, so the binding was announced as nothing.

Theming, density, and visual verification

  • Theme tokens. Theme.FocusHaloThickness (= FocusThickness + 2) is consumed by AccessibleStyles.xaml as a halo stroke under the focus dash. ThemedControls.xaml gained a ToolBarTray style and the seven ToolBar.*StyleKey item styles — WPF default chrome ignores theming, which is why the unstyled ToolBar shipped washed-out for months and passed every sighted spot-check. Ember, Fjord, and Heather went from 4-token files inheriting from Parchment to full 26-token palettes. ThemedControlCoverageTests requires every WPF control type used in Views/ and Controls/ to have an implicit style or a reviewed exemption; contrast is computed by the WCAG math in BuiltInThemeTests, never eyeballed.
  • Density is padding only. Theme.ListRowPadding is Thickness(2,1,2,1) compact versus Thickness(4,3,4,3) comfortable; the UIA tree and announcements are identical in both modes by design. Compact reproduces the message list's original shipped rendering, whose row template hardcoded 2,1. ThemeService now separates its publish signature from its announce signature so a density change does not announce a theme change.
  • Debug-only screenshot capture (#175). The real ScreenshotCaptureService is constructed only under /debug; otherwise a null service is wired, so the feature is structurally inert rather than merely hidden. The Settings group is bound to IsDebugDiagnosticsVisible (LogService.DebugMode && _screenshotCapture != null), capture defaults off and is session-only, output goes to <profileDir>\debug-screenshots\<yyyyMMdd-HHmmss>\, and every window title gains a " - SCREENSHOTS ON" suffix while it is running.
  • The ui-probe harness (#180) is developer tooling: scripts/ui-probe.ps1, scripts/ui-probe-plan.json, scripts/ui-review-prompt.md, and the Tools/QuickMail.Fixtures project, which is referenced only by the test project and never packaged (installer/quickmail.iss ships a single file). In-app it is a launch mode only — --ui-probe <surface> implies /debug, forces offline services, drives the surface, captures, and exits; malformed args shut down with exit 64. The script refuses to run on a locked desktop, since DWM never composites new windows there and captures come out white.
  • ComposeWindow's form grid was not the DockPanel fill child. The autocomplete Popup was declared last, so LastChildFill applied to it — a Popup occupies no layout space — and the grid fell back to Dock=Left at content width. Declaring the popup before the grid fixes it; a Popup's position in the child list has no layout or rendering effect because placement is set in code-behind. Element set, tab order, and UIA tree are unchanged.

Controls and accessibility infrastructure

  • RadioGroupNavigation (new, Helpers/) — an opt-in attached behaviour, SelectionFollowsFocus="True", set on the container of a radio group. Arrow keys move to the next or previous enabled button of the same GroupName (wrapping, to match DirectionalNavigation="Cycle"), focus it, and check it; every other key is left to WPF. Walks the logical tree, so it works before the group has been rendered. It checks the button before focusing it, so the focus that follows lands on an option already selected and the state reported is the new one, and it announces nothing itself. Applied to the four SettingsDialog groups and the EventEditorWindow edit-scope group. Deliberately not applied to the FlagManager colour swatches, whose buttons carry a Command: ButtonBase invokes it from OnClick(), which a programmatic IsChecked = true does not raise, so arrowing there would show a swatch as chosen while the command that applies the colour never ran.

  • SettingsDialog.RadioButton_Checked is deleted, not suppressed. f71f86f added it so that choosing an option was announced at all, on the reading that a bare StackPanel is not a UIA selection container. That was treating a symptom: the reason a choice went unannounced is that arrowing never made one — it moved focus and left the selection behind. With selection following focus the platform reports the change itself, and an app that speaks over that is overriding a decision the user has already made in their own software. The suppression flag the first cut of this fix introduced (IsMovingSelection) is gone with it; a mechanism whose only job is to mute an announcement that should not exist is a sign the announcement is the bug. Guarded by RadioGroupWiringTests.SettingsRadioButtons_DoNotAnnounceThemselves.

  • Controls/DateTimeField is a plain TextBox with no automation peer of its own. Three shapes were built and evaluated with three screen readers before this one was chosen: an edit field, an edit field claiming AutomationControlType.Spinner, and a purpose-built spinner implementing IValueProvider and IRangeValueProvider. All three announced correctly, so the one that invents nothing won — replacing TextBox.Text raises the UIA value-change event screen readers already act on. There is no AccessibilityHelper.Announce in the stepping path, and there must not be: a programmatic announcement is filtered by the user's announcement settings, a native value change is not. Stepping and parsing live in Helpers/DateTimeFieldParser.cs (pure, unit-tested); a time field holds a full instant rather than a TimeSpan, so stepping past midnight carries into the date, and TryParseTime explicitly rejects date-shaped text because DateTime.TryParse("8/3") succeeds with a TimeOfDay of zero.

  • MailMessageDetail.Attachments keeps the inherited HasAttachments flag in sync — nothing else ever set it on a detail. ImapMailService, GraphMailService, and LocalStoreService.LoadDetailAsync all populate the list only, and MainViewModel patched the summary after loading, which is exactly why the reading pane looked right. MessageWindow.xaml binds the attachment list's Visibility to MessageDetail.HasAttachments with FallbackValue=Collapsed, so the always-false flag hid the list, and FocusAttachmentList's visibility check then reported "No attachments." Fixing the three producers one at a time would have left the next one free to reintroduce it. MessageDetailAttachmentTests covers the invariant, the local-store round trip, and reads MessageWindow.xaml to assert that whatever property the Visibility binding names really is true for a message with attachments.

  • WebView2 splits link activation across two events, and every host must handle both. An ordinary link raises NavigationStarting; a link carrying target="_blank", or one activated with Ctrl/Shift/middle-click, raises NewWindowRequested instead — the parent CoreWebView2 never sees a NavigationStarting for it. Unhandled, WebView2's default is to open the URI in its own popup window against QuickMail's user-data folder, which is a browser with none of the user's cookies, passkeys, or extensions. MainWindow handled both; MessageWindow and MarkdownPreviewWindow handled only the first, so window mode leaked links into the app. Both now set args.Handled = true and route the URI through ExternalUriPolicy, same as the reading pane. TryStripHeavyHtml additionally strips the target attribute, so the rendered document does not depend on any host getting the second event right. ExternalLinkWiringTests discovers WebView2 hosts by scanning Views/*.xaml for the element tag — not the bare word, which appears in a comment in ThemeManagerWindow.xaml and as a leftover xmlns in ComposeWindow.xaml — and asserts each code-behind handles NewWindowRequested and routes through the policy, so a new WebView2 window is covered the day it is added. (#483)

Tests and build

  • Keep non-WPF tests out of the WpfTests collection. The radio-group wiring tests are plain XML parsing and were first written inside RadioGroupNavigationTests, which carries [Collection("WpfTests")]. That reliably broke six AccountDialogHintTests ("focusing AccountNameBox produced no hint. Heard: (nothing)") across three full runs, while main was green under the same conditions — the collection exists to serialize window-loading tests, and non-STA tests scheduled inside it disturb them. Moving them to their own class fixed it. Worth remembering the next time a full-suite run goes red in a class the change never touched.
  • New or extended suites in this release: AccountStartupRepairTests (17), AccountLoginUsernameTests (20), ComposeViewModelSendFeedbackTests (13), EmailAddressValidatorTests (26), GoogleSignInOptInTests (20), RadioGroupNavigationTests (10), RadioGroupWiringTests (6), SyncServiceRuleApplicationTests, MessageDetailAttachmentTests, TypeAheadLogicTests, ConnectionDiagnosticsTests, ConnectionDiagnosticsSettingTests, ConnectionDiagnosticsWindowTests, ConnectionDiagnosticsReviewFixTests, AccountListCarryOverGuardTests, AccountListReloadStatusTests, WatchServiceTests, WatchedConversationsTests, WatchedConversationsPhase2Tests, ExternalLinkWiringTests, MainViewModelTabTests and TabSessionModelTests (tab and window management, Phase 6, closing #40), ImapConnectionInstrumentationTests (real connect path against a closed port and a hang-up listener, asserting socket error codes are captured and the census does not drift), plus login-identity tests in CardDavContactSyncTests and CalDavCalendarSyncTests. StatusAnnouncementRecorder captures announcements inside the PropertyChanged notification, the way the View does — asserting the category afterwards would pass against a broken implementation now that the category is one-shot.
  • Test-harness fixes: LogServiceTests is immune to parallel writers; the capture service no longer crashes across threads in parallel runs (#433); two flaky tests that depended on the real clipboard and on window activation were repaired (#410); and synthesized-input type-ahead tests are gated behind QUICKMAIL_RUN_INPUT_TESTS (#414).
  • Build: bin/obj are excluded from the default Compile glob via Directory.Build.props, and the RID and TFM no longer appear in output paths, so Dependabot can read the dependency graph (#382). CI's -warnaserror gate is now real rather than nominal (#446).

Reporting Issues

Found a problem or have a suggestion? There are three ways to reach us — pick the one that fits:

  1. Report a Bug → Send (Help menu, inside QuickMail). Files the report for you anonymously — it includes no email address or other identifying information, so there is no way to follow up with you. Best when you don't want any follow-up.
  2. Report a Bug → Copy report and open GitHub (Help menu). Opens a pre-filled issue that you submit under your own GitHub account, so your GitHub contact information is attached. Best when you have a GitHub account and want automatic filing plus direct contact.
  3. Email quickmailissues@theideaplace.net. Best when you don't mind sending email and want a personal follow-up.

Full details, including exactly what a report contains (and what it never contains), are in the Reporting Issues section of the User Guide.

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