Mailbell 0.3.0

9 September 2026

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.