CalDAV support!

Initial CalDAV support is here! You can now use Purelymail to synchronize your calendars. Check out the docs to learn more.

A 2021 Recap

Apparently I made the same mistake as last year and forgot to actually use this blog to write about what I was working on. Better late than never, I guess!

Much of this year was spent on bugs and performance fixes, so there’s not much changed that’s visible to a user. I get that’s sort of boring from a user perspective, but for a single-developer project I still prefer stability over polish. And enough people definitely find the simple features useful enough- there was a lot of user growth this year!

A few major things to talk about (though not a comprehensive list of changes):

• Added CalDAV, as mentioned. This was a bit more effort than anticipated because CalDAV’s spec sucks, and calendaring sucks, and timezones suck. But it got done, mostly. I fear there will be more dark corners of calendaring space to iron out in the future.
• Backend file streaming: This is pretty big- a lot of what our servers do is act as intelligent caches for data in front of S3, streaming mail as needed. Previously if we needed a file we’d have to download the entire thing to a server for most purposes, but semitransparent streaming lets us process faster and more selectively. One example of this in action is search on a large account- in some cases we only need 1/20th as much data to perform a search, which makes things easier on our servers and cheaper for users.
• In-transaction SMTP processing: Coming soon, most mail will be processed within the SMTP transaction of the sender instead of always put into a queue for later processing. This should improve error messages from undeliverable mail in many cases as well as being a bit more performant.

Onwards as always! Soon, hopefully, we may even release out of Beta.