Mailsmith 2.1.5 Release Notes

This page documents all feature enhancements and bug fixes included in the Mailsmith 2.1.5 release. For information on changes made in previous versions, please see the release notes archive.

Additions

The following features and enhancements are new for Mailsmith 2.1.5:

• There is a new switch in the “Advanced” tab for email accounts: “Allow Clear Text SMTP Authentication”. This option controls whether Mailsmith is allowed to employ SMTP authentication methods that involve sending your password to the server unencrypted (as “clear text”). If it’s turned on (which is the default for accounts created with previous versions of Mailsmith), then Mailsmith will continue to operate as before. If it’s turned off (the default for newly created accounts), then Mailsmith will not attempt to use the “LOGIN” or “PLAIN” SMTP authentication methods, even if the server supports them, because doing so would allow the transmission of your SMTP password over an unsecured channel.

Note that if “Require SSL for SMTP” is turned on, the connection to the server is by definition secure, so it’s safe to use the clear-text SMTP authentication methods. Thus, if you turn on “Require SSL for SMTP”, then “Allow Clear Text SMTP Authentication” is turned on as well.

Changes

• Some SMTP servers advertise that they support CRAM-MD5 authentication, but then return an error (and an incorrect one at that) when Mailsmith attempts to authenticate using CRAM-MD5. To work around this, Mailsmith will ignore a CRAM-MD5 authentication failure if “Allow Clear Text SMTP Authentication” is turned on and the server advertises that it supports PLAIN or LOGIN authentication.

Fixes

The following problems have been corrected in Mailsmith 2.1.4:

• Mailsmith no longer explicitly flushes databases when notifying of newly arrived mail. (If “Leave Mail on Server” is turned off, messages are explicitly written to disk anyway.) This eliminates the burst of disk activity which occurred right before new-mail notification.

• Fixed case in which some drawing code was inappropriately called from a background thread, which typically caused a crash.

• Fixed a bug in which an individual mail database file larger than 1GB was subject to data corruption.

• After successfully negotiating a secure connection using STARTTLS, Mailsmith will repeat the server handshake. This corrects a problem when working with servers that enforce the handshake-after-STARTTLS requirement, such as the MailHop relay service.

• Mailsmith now correctly decodes AppleDouble enclosures sent by Apple Mail in which the resource fork and metadata are encoded as quoted-printable. (Why they did that is beyond me, since Base64 is perfectly serviceable, but there you have it.)