Hi Jaromir,

welcome back, and sorry for the delay! Unfortunately, not even the best communication tooling can magically create the time I do not have for replying earlier. :-)

It's awesome to hear that people are using SIT or might even find it useful! Let me address all of your questions:

>   1.  Inbox Talk conversation "[ANN] Squeak Inbox Talk - bringing squeak-dev into your image" appears split into two threads in the Inbox Talk (see the screenshot); I can't figure out why because the pipermail archive sees it correctly as one single conversation. Possibly a bug?

Good point. I have already noticed some incidents like this but never looked into them before. SIT (or more precisely, Squeak History) looks into the downloadable mbox files from the pipermail archives. In 2021-July.txt, David Stes's message from 2021-07-13 12:00:45 does not have an In-Reply-To header, so I guess this is a bug with the pipermail archives or mailman. No idea how to fix it, though. ^^

>   2.  I miss an information about the sender of the last message in the thread (like in forum.world.st) - either on the line along with the timestamp and the subject or in the preview pane (or see suggestion #4 below). Sometimes it is not clear from the preview who the sender is (her signature being buried somewhere or missing altogether).

Good idea. It was my goal to keep the message list as compact as possible so you can shrink your window, but this would be a helpful addition in the preview pane. Added it to my list. :-)

>   3.  The Preview format differs based on whether a filter was used: no filter => simple last message preview; filter present => 'sophisticated' preview of the whole thread. I find this a bit confusing - why not unify the two?

What do you mean by 'sophisticated preview'? For messages, the preview pane just displays the entire content of the previous message. However, most mail clients (including SIT itself) use to append the previous message to every reply which results in a nested thread compilation - is this what you saw? (Most mail clients will automatically truncate/collapse this quoted stuff - this is something which SIT does not yet support. But this is also an my long list of ideas ... :-))

Or were you talking about a text search went you said filtering? If you enter a search term, only excerpts from the conversation will be displayed that match the search term. The idea of this was, if you search for a selector (for instance, terminate - you might also want to turn on the "match whole word" mode), you can directly read what is written about this selector in context.

>   4.  Accessing more details about the thread means "opening" it in another window - which is ok if you're after one particular thread but if I'm just scanning through the main list, opening (and closing) new windows is awkward; how about having a large window showing the list of threads, the 'sophisticated' preview of the currently selected thread, a list of messages in the that thread and a preview of one message (the first or last by default) - as if the conversation browser was always open and glued together with the main Inbox Talk browser - see my screenshot :) Selecting another thread would automatically display the list of messages in that thread and previewed its first (or last) message allowing to quickly scan through the mailing list... I guess no new functionality needs to be added - just glue the two existing windows' contents? Could it mean a performance issue??

No, I don't think this would be a performance issue. SIT does a lot of stuff in background processes to keep as responsive as possible, btw. It's rather a general UX concern whether you want large single windows or prefer many small windows instead (MDI). I think Squeak has a strong focus on MDIs, their main advantage is that you can compose them more flexibly, but I also see your point of avoiding unnecessary clicks and reusing windows. Hm ... it might be possible to integrate a full conversation browser right into the place of the preview pane, would this fit your needs? Another option would a conversation browser window that follows the currently selected conversation in the main inbox browser (kind of Vivide style iirc). I'm thinking about this and added this to my list. :-)

>   5.  Have you considered an automatic refresh (every hour maybe?)

Yes, this would also be very helpful. :-) This raises multiple complex, though interesting concerns: Usability, performance, and performance. :-) Usability because some kind of automatically triggered tasks are not yet common at all in Squeak - I guess because people want to keep control. But an auto-refresh could be optional. Performance for multiple reasons: At the moment, the refresh operation is not yet completely thread-safe, i.e., at some point during the refresh, the inbox artifacts could not be used and we would have to lock them. On the VM side, every internet request blocks the image for a shorter or longer time. I'm not deep in this, but maybe we could rewrite the low-level network stuff in the image to provide a promise-based interface instead. However, usually you do not want your image to block suddenly and unexpectedly, and this is the main reason which has kept me from trying this out so far.

6., concerning your SMTP problems: I could reproduce your issue with outlook.com on Windows ("SSL connect failed with code: -5"). Then I retried from WSL/Ubuntu and succeeded with the same credentials there! (Important note: You need to specify your full email address as SMTP username). So probably there's something wrong with the SqueakSSL plugin on Windows? There are eight possible reasons for this error, someone should debug this in detail (I don't like C. :P). See [1]. For my institute's Outlook Exchange server, it works on both platforms. Also make sure to enter your right email address into the "sender" field, some SMTP servers will reject to send messages in behalf of someone else.

Regarding the empty credentials, if you try out System-ct.1241 from the inbox and proceed from the "no * specified" debuggers, are you able to send from the MailComposition using your local server? If yes, we should update MailSender again to officially allow for "nil" as user name and passwords.

>   7.  An observation: when attaching a file the Squeak mail editor won't show or notify whether the attachment has been attached. The only clue you get is when you press "remove attachment": it lists the attachments.

At the bottom of the message text, the name of the attachment is inserted into the editor. This is not very convenient but still a useful indicator. The "remove attachment" button is a very nice hack if you have deleted the attachment note from the editor. :-) Hm ... maybe we should rename it to "manage attachments" and show a dialog from which you can also view, replace, or reorder attachments?

> I'd like to use the Inbox Talk as my main tool so I may be back with more feedback :)

Yahoo! :-)

PS: Obviously, both SIT and MailSender/SMTPClient are open-source, so your contributions will be very welcome, as always. :D

Best,
Christoph

[1] https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+repo:%5Egithub%5C.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm%24%400d706fc+file:%5Eplatforms/win32/plugins/SqueakSSL/sqWin32SSL%5C.c+SQSSL_GENERIC_ERROR&patternType=literal


---
Sent from Squeak Inbox Talk

On 2021-11-01T17:52:33+00:00, mail at jaromir.net wrote:

> Hi Christoph,
> 
> I'm learning to use the Inbox Talk as a replacement for forum.world.st which I was using as my primary workflow tool (rather than a mail client). I'm very impressed by your Inbox Talk and would like to share my feedback:
> 
> 1. Inbox Talk conversation "[ANN] Squeak Inbox Talk - bringing squeak-dev into your image" appears split into two threads in the Inbox Talk (see the screenshot); I can't figure out why because the pipermail archive sees it correctly as one single conversation. Possibly a bug?
> 2. I miss an information about the sender of the last message in the thread (like in forum.world.st) - either on the line along with the timestamp and the subject or in the preview pane (or see suggestion #4 below). Sometimes it is not clear from the preview who the sender is (her signature being buried somewhere or missing altogether).
> 3. The Preview format differs based on whether a filter was used: no filter => simple last message preview; filter present => 'sophisticated' preview of the whole thread. I find this a bit confusing - why not unify the two?
> 4. Accessing more details about the thread means "opening" it in another window - which is ok if you're after one particular thread but if I'm just scanning through the main list, opening (and closing) new windows is awkward; how about having a large window showing the list of threads, the 'sophisticated' preview of the currently selected thread, a list of messages in the that thread and a preview of one message (the first or last by default) - as if the conversation browser was always open and glued together with the main Inbox Talk browser - see my screenshot :) Selecting another thread would automatically display the list of messages in that thread and previewed its first (or last) message allowing to quickly scan through the mailing list... I guess no new functionality needs to be added - just glue the two existing windows' contents? Could it mean a performance issue??
> 5. Have you considered an automatic refresh (every hour maybe?)
> 6. Tried to send this via the Inbox Talk but failed with the message: "SSL connect failed with code: -5". I'm on Win10, smtp-mail.outlook.com, port 587 - in case it matters :) I'd probably need some help here - it didn't even ask me for my password, just failed... Tried a different smtp server, port 465 - failed too. Trying port 25 now... Nope: it asked for my username/password but eventually failed with: "telnet protocol error:" :( So I'm sending this via my Windows mail client. Is it possible to setup and test the Squeak mail editor separately?
> 7. An observation: when attaching a file the Squeak mail editor won't show or notify whether the attachment has been attached. The only clue you get is when you press "remove attachment": it lists the attachments.
> 
> I'd like to use the Inbox Talk as my main tool so I may be back with more feedback :)
> 
> Thanks a lot!!
> 
> Jaromir
> 
> 
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