Why CardDAV took so long • Hacker News Board

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#61

Post by bad_user » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 6:08 PM UTC

tombrossman wrote: post #20

brongondwana wrote: post #2

I didn't even get into the remaining compatible with the existing contacts system. CalDAV was green field, but CardDAV had to integrate with the web, with spam scanning (whitelist/score bonus for known users), with mailing list address book groups, ...

The only feature I miss with your CardDAV implementation is contact photos. Everything else works very well so I leave email and calendaring to FastMail but I'm back to self-hosted contacts for now. Really hope this can be added soon.

To add something to what @robn already said - with Google Apps the resolution you get on contacts syncing is 96x96 pixels. Not sure what resolution FastMail supports, but seems to be OK on my 1440x2560 phone.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#62

Post by cpr » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 6:30 PM UTC

hedgehog wrote: post #3

Miserable, this kind of stuff is why I don't run my own mail server any more. Happy Fastmail customer since 2006.

Agreed. Ran postfix + cyrus + DSPAM for years and dreaded dealing with spam every day--couldn't get DSPAM to really work reliably, so had to fish out ham daily, and mark a lot of spam. Never really invested the time to learn the ins and outs of postfix hardening, nor to figure out cyrus quirks that kept bugging us on a low-level basis.

With Fastmail for the past more than year, and very happy with them. I'm also very happy they're clearly at the forefront of OSS mail system development.

(Don't use CarDAV or CalDAV, so don't benefit from their efforts there.)

(Though oddly enough, just today I started getting a bunch more spam. Maybe there's a Christmas rush of spam, so the .01% that gets through is more noticeable?)

In general, I haven't had to go fishing for ham more than once or twice in the past year, which is pretty amazing.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#63

Post by eridius » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 6:35 PM UTC

> In future we plan to have a third separate addressbook for automatically added email addresses.

I just want to say that this is something I really want. I don't even care if it's exposed over CardDAV, I just want to get automatically-added addresses out of my normal user addressbook. A couple of weeks ago I realized that my addressbook had a bunch of contacts in it I didn't recognize, so I cleared them all out. Today I checked and there's 3 more unwanted contacts.

It actually feels very broken to me that FastMail is automatically adding things to my address book without asking me, and without any obvious way to turn it off. I don't mind it recording this stuff in a separate addressbook to use for spam filtering and for auto-filling during message composing, but it should not be part of my normal addressbook and should not be coming down over CardDAV for my user addressbook.

The reason this is a problem is because I use my FastMail CardDAV addressbook as a shared addressbook for me and my wife (she doesn't use FastMail herself but I do), since we use iCloud for our normal address books but iCloud doesn't have a way to share addressbooks. It occurs to me now that since I'm actually using a Family account (for a single user, so I can have a custom domain without having the more expensive plan), I have a Shared address book available and I should just switch over to that (since I assume nothing ever auto-adds there). But it was still a rude surprise to find a bunch of unknown contacts appearing in my Contacts app on iOS.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#64

Post by brerlapn » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #18

zachlatta wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried using FastMail for our (small) company, but switched after ~8 months because we started running into deliverability issues and countless issues with shared calendars being unshared (or sometimes losing events). We also couldn't use any of the nice sales tools that integrate with Google Apps (or any of the tools that make managing calendars easier, like https://claralabs.com/ or http://boomerangcalendar.com/…

I've seen a couple of nice tools integrated with Gmail and its web UI. The ones you mention are like that. However my problem with such tools are that they are not operating on standards. For one I wouldn't want to be locked into Gmail. But more importantly, tools depending on proprietary platforms usually have a short life. For example people loved Mailbox from Dropbox, while I was the one complaining that it only w…

There can be odd behaviors with third party apps, too, and if you get dependent on that service you're at their mercy if they don't fix the issue.

I mentioned in a separate comment, Sunrise substituted a generic email address for mine in an invite response, but with my name ("Brer Lapn "), which when someone replied to the group began to propagate across multiple co-workers' Outlook as the autofill address for my name. I missed email from some people for a week before one of my coders noticed it and let me know, at which point I had to get colleagues to forward me any message with that address, contact the sender and ask them to remove it from their Outlook autofill settings, and repeat ad nauseum until correspondence started coming to me again.

I sent a bug report, they responded "we'll look into it" and never heard another word about it, so for all I know it is still happening. If we'd have integrated that into the company processes rather than just my using it to consolidate my calendars it would have been a serious problem.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#65

Post by FireBeyond » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 6:52 PM UTC

shocks wrote: post #24

broodbucket wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I configured a pretty simple system (dovecot + opensmtpd) following the guide on the Arch wiki in under an hour, it really wasn't that tricky. I have dodged some common problems, though: - my domain wasn't completely unknown so I had no issues with gmail flagging me as spam - I use my gmail for signing up to things I don't care about mail from, so I have yet to actually receive any spam (at which point I will figure…

Running a mail server is easy, providing a mail service is HARD. Deliverability is really difficult. Being online all the time to make sure you're always recieving email is hard. I was constantly plagued by worry that the important email I sent never actually arrived, or the important email I was waiting for had been sent but I never actually got it.

I don't know if it still exists, but I'm sure it could be found or would make a good service. I seem to recall paying about $10/mo to a company that would provide secondary MX services. They did no delivery/webmail etc, it was purely "You can list us as a secondary MX and when yours is online we'll forward".

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#66

Post by nmjenkins » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 8:06 PM UTC

eridius wrote: post #63

> In future we plan to have a third separate addressbook for automatically added email addresses. I just want to say that this is something I really want. I don't even care if it's exposed over CardDAV, I just want to get automatically-added addresses out of my normal user addressbook. A couple of weeks ago I realized that my addressbook had a bunch of contacts in it I didn't recognize, so I cleared them all out. Tod…

You can turn this off in Settings -> Preferences -> Auto-save contacts.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#67

Post by lfowles » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 8:19 PM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #19

oever wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really hard to run you own mail server. Much harder than a web server. This is bad for freedom on the internet. http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/09/15/email.html

It is not that hard to run your own email server, what is hard is to get your mail into recipients mailboxes. The big players in this market have basically decided to block (at random) all mail that doesn't come out of a known email service. I have just given up running my own mail server after more than 15 years because of this problem. Five years ago I had no problems, but these last 12 months have made me decide t…

> I have just given up running my own mail server after more than 15 years because of this problem. Five years ago I had no problems, but these last 12 months have made me decide to give up and just pay.

I'm tempted to do so as well, but I haven't found a provider that will just use my domain and let me set up aliases as I can now in postfix. (Wildcard on the domain to me, a handful split out to separate mailboxes for scripts to chew on, etc)

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#68

Post by johntash » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 10:23 PM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #55

johntash wrote: post #52

Can you use multiple domains with fastmail? And do they allow wildcard addresses/forwarders? It's probably on the website, but I haven't found it yet.

Yes and yes. I'm using those features since I migrated my mail there from personally hosting an all forwarding config.

Cool, thank you for the response! I'll probably give it a shot for my non-gmail.com emails and see how it goes.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#69

Post by josteink » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 10:16 AM UTC

> Even if we reported a bug to Apple right now, it would still take months at a minimum before a fix is in the field and on all devices. So we need to get this working for everyone so we can move CardDAV out of beta.

Basically make a hacky workaround, and leave the situation as is for everyone else.

This is not meant directly as criticism, but one thing I really appreciate about the OpenBSD team is how they refuse to "fix" things by creating bad code as a workaround to other broken code.

They always submit patches upstream, and everyone gets to benefit.

If more people had that attitude towards code quality, we might not be in such a buggy universe as we are now.

Re: Why CardDAV took so long

#70

Post by eridius » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 6:13 PM UTC

nmjenkins wrote: post #66

eridius wrote: post #63

> In future we plan to have a third separate addressbook for automatically added email addresses. I just want to say that this is something I really want. I don't even care if it's exposed over CardDAV, I just want to get automatically-added addresses out of my normal user addressbook. A couple of weeks ago I realized that my addressbook had a bunch of contacts in it I didn't recognize, so I cleared them all out. Tod…

You can turn this off in Settings -> Preferences -> Auto-save contacts.

Good to know, thanks. I'm still looking forward to being able to have auto-saved contacts in a separate addressbook though, as I do like being able to autocomplete addresses when composing messages even if I don't want that address in my contacts list.