Release notes.
What changed in each version of Mailbell. The app shows the same notes when it updates.
Mailbell 0.3.1
The website moved to its own subdomain. The links the app opens follow it.
Google OAuth unverified beta. Unchanged: Google shows an "unverified app" screen during sign-in and limits unverified clients to 100 new users.
Changed
- The website is now
https://mailbell.martonpaulo.com/. The About pane's website, privacy policy, and terms links open the new address. The oldmartonpaulo.com/mailbell/path is gone and does not redirect, so 0.3.0 and earlier open a "not found" page from those links until they update.
Mailbell 0.3.0
Previews that were showing you CSS, base64 and invisible filler now show the message. Mail is listed in the order Gmail lists it. And several ways Mailbell could act on the wrong message, or quietly stop watching, are closed.
Google OAuth unverified beta. Unchanged: Google shows an "unverified app" screen during sign-in and limits unverified clients to 100 new users.
Fixed
- Previews showed stylesheets instead of the message. A notification could open with
body, table, td { font-family: Arial… }. Mail whose stylesheet arrived without its opening tag now has it removed, and a message that is nothing but styling shows no preview rather than showing code. - Previews showed raw base64. Some mail arrived as
ICAgIMKhSmFuZSB0ZSBpbnZpdMOz…. Two causes: the fetch could cut the payload at a length that cannot be decoded, and some transports fold it on spaces. Both decode now. - Previews filled up with invisible characters. Marketing mail pads its preheader with zero-width and no-break characters to keep the inbox snippet short. Those runs used up the whole preview before any readable text. They are removed — but a single joiner is left alone, so emoji and Persian and Indic text are unaffected.
- Accented characters and currency symbols could vanish. Mail that declares one encoding but sends another lost its euro signs and curly quotes.
- Previews opened on a "view online" link. A leading link marker is dropped when there is a message behind it.
- The queue was not in Gmail's order. After a reconnect, mail appeared in whatever order the server answered. It now follows the same chronology Gmail uses, and a reply lifts its whole conversation.
- Mark as Read could mark the wrong message. If Gmail rebuilt a mailbox and reused a number, an action prepared beforehand could land on a different message. Every read action now checks that the mailbox is still the one it was prepared against, and refuses instead of guessing.
- A reply arriving mid-action was marked read without being read. Only the messages actually sent to the server are finalized.
- Older unread mail could never reach the queue. If everything recent had been dismissed, each check spent its whole budget on those same messages.
- Check Now could stop working. Cancelling a connection mid-handshake left the account stuck with no way to recover.
- An account could keep working after you turned it off. Stopping or restarting an account now takes effect even mid-connection.
- Inbox and Spam notifications could replace each other when two messages happened to share a number.
- The menu bar told VoiceOver to sign in for problems that need Reconnect.
Added
- Failures now appear where you started them. A bulk result, a Gmail that opened in the wrong browser, and a sign-in that failed from the menu are all visible in the menu instead of being silently discarded.
- The queue has a stated limit. Each account keeps up to 500 recent messages and shows up to 50 conversations, and the menu says how many more are waiting with a link to Gmail. Nothing is marked read or deleted — Gmail keeps everything.
- Settings says what Google's unverified status actually means for you, including the 100-new-user cap.
- Screenshots on the website and README, captured from the real window.
Changed
- Two System Settings buttons stopped promising a destination they cannot guarantee; each now says what it does and tells you where to go.
- The sign-in page in your browser no longer says you are connected before Mailbell has finished. It points you at the menu bar to confirm.
- Terms now distinguishes removing an account from revoking access at Google. Removing it in Mailbell deletes your tokens locally; it does not tell Google anything.
Mailbell 0.2.0
Mailbell can now alert you without a sound.
Google OAuth unverified beta. Unchanged from 0.1.0: Google shows an "unverified app" screen during sign-in and limits unverified clients to 100 new users.
Added
- A setting to turn notification sounds off. Settings › Notifications has "Play notification sounds", on by default. When it is off, every Mailbell notification (new mail, sign-in and test) arrives silently but still shows. macOS settings still decide whether Mailbell may play sounds at all.
Mailbell 0.1.2
An expired sign-in now reaches you instead of waiting to be noticed.
Google OAuth unverified beta. Unchanged from 0.1.0: Google shows an "unverified app" screen during sign-in and limits unverified clients to 100 new users.
Added
- A notification when an account's sign-in expires. Until now the only signal was the menu bar alert icon, which helps only if you happen to look at it — Mailbell could stop watching your mail quietly. The alert names the account, fires once per expiry, and is not a preference, for the same reason the alert icon is not.
Mailbell 0.1.1
Settings now follows macOS System Settings conventions, and a preview defect that reached real notifications is fixed.
Google OAuth unverified beta. Unchanged from 0.1.0: Google shows an "unverified app" screen during sign-in and limits unverified clients to 100 new users.
Fixed
- Notification previews no longer leak Markdown. A message whose plain-text alternative was Markdown could reach the notification as
[![]( [IMG] broadcast\_body\_warning. Escaped punctuation is now unescaped, image and link scaffolding is unwrapped, and heading, quote, and rule markers are stripped. - The account toggle no longer reads as its own opposite. It was labelled "Disable Account" while switched on; it now says "Watch this account for new mail".
Changed
- Settings is four panes instead of six. Everything about an account — status, review count, where its mail opens, reconnecting, removal — now lives in that account's own section, instead of being split between Accounts and Advanced. Spam moved to a "Watched Mailboxes" section that states plainly that Inbox is always watched, and Updates folded into General.
- Controls follow the platform. Action buttons are sized to their content and trailing-aligned, placed by scope the way System Settings places them: in the row for a row-scoped action, as the box's last row for a section-scoped one, and below every box for a pane-scoped one such as Restore Defaults. Explanations sit under their own control's label rather than in a footer.
- Sign-in now warns about Google's unverified-app screen *before* you meet it.
- The review count per account no longer hides behind the menu bar count preference.
- Internal: one build number derivation shared by the local and CI release paths.
- Internal: settings control-semantics rules moved into repository validation.
Mailbell 0.1.0
First public beta.
Google OAuth unverified beta. Mailbell's Google OAuth client has not been verified by Google yet. During sign-in Google shows an "unverified app" screen, and Google limits unverified clients to 100 new users. Mailbell still runs entirely on your Mac and no Gmail data passes through any server operated by this project.
Added
- Mark All as Read clears the whole review queue and marks every message read in Gmail, using one authenticated IMAP session per account instead of one connection per message.
- Dismiss All clears the review queue locally without touching Gmail. Dismissed messages stay unread in your mailbox and do not come back.
- Menu bar alert icon. When an account needs you to sign in again, or has a surfaced error, the menu bar shows an alert symbol instead of the normal bell, so Mailbell can no longer look idle while it is monitoring nothing.
- Automatic updates via Sparkle, verified against the release signature before replacing the app.
- Updates pane in Settings with an automatic-check toggle, the current version, and a manual check.
- Restore Defaults in Settings, which resets menu bar and mail preferences without touching accounts, sign-ins, or notification permission.
- About pane with links to the website, source, issue tracker, latest release, privacy policy, terms, and Google access management.
- A public website with the privacy policy and terms of service.
Changed
- Mailbell is now distributed as a signed, notarized, stapled DMG through GitHub Releases, with the Google OAuth client already configured. You no longer need to create your own Google Cloud client to use it.
- When a build is packaged without OAuth credentials, Settings reports it as a build problem with a link to the issue tracker, rather than instructing you to create a Google Cloud client.
- Settings panes share one window size, so switching panes no longer resizes the window.
- Every packaging path (install, DMG, release) now goes through one bundle builder, so the layout and the Sparkle nested-signing order have a single definition.
- Internal: marking messages read batches UID sets per mailbox over a single IMAP session.
- Internal: repository invariants are enforced by
Scripts/validate.shand run in CI.