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Muttlight design notes

2013 mails on Mutt and OS X

MailDir

There are three subdirectories: new, cur, and tmp.

Files in cur are named using six flags:

  • D: draft
  • F: flagged
  • P: passed (resent/forwarded/bounced)
  • R: replied
  • S: seen
  • T: trashed

Flags must be stored in ASCII order.

The leading 2, indicates version 2 (production) of the standard.

Filenames:

.mbox:2,S
.<hostname>:2,S

There are thus 64 possible combinations (per hostname).

(* Generate all possible combinations in OCaml. *)

let rec generate' xs =
  match xs with
  | [] -> []
  | x::xs ->
    let xs' = generate' xs in
    x :: List.map (fun s -> x ^ s) xs' @ xs'

let generate xs = "" :: generate' xs

let print_query s = Printf.printf "kMDItemFSName=\"*:2,%s\"||" s
(* let print_query = print_endline *)

let _ = List.iter print_query (generate ["D"; "F"; "P"; "R"; "S"; "T"])
let _ = print_endline "false"

Compile (ocamlc -o gen gen.ml), then run

mdfind `./gen`

Files in new (and tmp) are named without the version indicator (2,) or an flags.

DoveCot uses an extension of the basic MailDir scheme. Filenames are of the form:

1035478339.27041_118.foo.org,S=1000,W=1030:2,S

where the S= field gives the file size, and the W= field gives the "rfc822" size. This extended scheme cannot be supported by our tool.

TODO: Provide a simple script to (safely) rename such files.

It may be easy to adapt the application to work with MH.

Spotlight

Notes on spotlight

Attributes

  • kMDItemFSName: basename in file system
  • kMDItemDisplayName: name used in result list
  • kMDItemFSCreationDate: creation time

List all indexed mbox files:

mdfind 'kMDItemFSName=*.mbox:*'

See attributes of a file: mdls <filename>

About File Metadata Queries

Spotlight Importers

A spotlight importer is a small plug-in bundle. Only one importer is allowed per uniform type identifier (UTI). Specify supported UTIs in the importers Info.plist file.

Xcode includes a Spotlight project template that provides the required CFPlugin support, as well as templates for the required schema file.

Include inside app bundle inside the MyApp.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight subdirectory.

MyApp.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/SpotlightImporter.mdimporter
+--/Contents
   +--Info.plist
   +--MacOS/SpotlightImporter
   +--Resources/schema.strings      (custom attribute names)
   +--Resources/schema.xml          (treatment of attributes/custom metadata)

Testing:

  • Show installed Spotlight plugins: /usr/bin/mdimport -L
  • Testing importer: /usr/bin/mdimport -d2 test.myCustomDocument
  • Explicitly register application: lsregister -f MyApp.app

Results of running mdls on a Mail draft:

_kMDItemOwnerUserID            = 501
com_apple_mail_dateLastViewed  = 2017-07-09 10:01:35 +0000
com_apple_mail_dateReceived    = 2017-07-09 10:01:35 +0000
com_apple_mail_flagged         = 0
com_apple_mail_messageID       = "GIHOFmmmhBFl"
com_apple_mail_priority        = 3
com_apple_mail_read            = 1
com_apple_mail_repliedTo       = 0
kMDItemAccountIdentifier       = "6E2A5D1B-7F22-426A-8D88-0963A36A3C08"
kMDItemAuthorEmailAddresses    = (
    "[email protected]"
)
kMDItemAuthors                 = (
    "[email protected]"
)
kMDItemContentCreationDate     = 2017-07-09 10:01:35 +0000
kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2017-07-09 10:01:35 +0000
kMDItemContentType             = "com.apple.mail.emlx"
kMDItemContentTypeTree         = (
    "com.apple.mail.emlx",
    "public.data",
    "public.item",
    "public.email-message",
    "public.message"
)
kMDItemDateAdded               = 2017-07-01 17:47:10 +0000
kMDItemDisplayName             = "Test email message 2"
kMDItemFSContentChangeDate     = 2017-07-09 10:01:35 +0000
kMDItemFSCreationDate          = 2017-07-01 17:47:10 +0000
kMDItemFSCreatorCode           = ""
kMDItemFSFinderFlags           = 0
kMDItemFSHasCustomIcon         = (null)
kMDItemFSInvisible             = 0
kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden     = 0
kMDItemFSIsStationery          = (null)
kMDItemFSLabel                 = 0
kMDItemFSName                  = "143923.emlx"
kMDItemFSNodeCount             = (null)
kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID          = 20
kMDItemFSOwnerUserID           = 501
kMDItemFSSize                  = 1286
kMDItemFSTypeCode              = ""
kMDItemIdentifier              = "<[email protected]>"
kMDItemIsApplicationManaged    = 1
kMDItemIsExistingThread        = 0
kMDItemIsLikelyJunk            = 0
kMDItemKind                    = "Mail Message"
kMDItemLastUsedDate            = 2017-07-09 10:01:35 +0000
kMDItemLogicalSize             = 1286
kMDItemMailboxes               = (
    "mailbox.drafts"
)
kMDItemPhysicalSize            = 4096
kMDItemRecipientEmailAddresses = (
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
)
kMDItemRecipients              = (
    "Timothy Bourke",
    "Jean Do",
    "Andre\U0301 Who"
)
kMDItemSubject                 = "Test email message 2"
kMDItemUseCount                = 4
kMDItemUsedDates               = (
    "2017-06-30 22:00:00 +0000",
    "2017-07-08 22:00:00 +0000"
)

Fill in information:

com_apple_mail_dateReceived    = from header Date: field.
com_apple_mail_flagged         = from filename (F)
com_apple_mail_read            = from filename (S)
com_apple_mail_repliedTo       = from filename (R)

kMDItemMailboxes               = ( "mailbox.drafts") ?

kMDItemKind                    = "Mail Message"
kMDItemIdentifier              = from header Message-Id: field
kMDItemDisplayName             = from header Subject: field
kMDItemSubject                 = from header Subject: field
kMDItemContentCreationDate     = from header Date: field.

kMDItemAuthorEmailAddresses    = ( from header From: field )    Array of CFStrings
kMDItemAuthors                 = ( from header From: field )    Array of CFStrings
kMDItemRecipientEmailAddresses = ( from header To: field )
kMDItemRecipients              = ( from header To: field )

kMDItemContentType             = "org.tbrk.muttlight.email"
kMDItemContentTypeTree         = (                            UTI hierarchy of file
    "com.apple.mail.emlx",
    "public.data",
    "public.item",
    "public.email-message",
    "public.message"
) ?

The size of the Spotlight index for a given volume can be determined by running du -h -d 1 /.Spotlight-V100.

Spotlight still indexes files when no plugin is registered for them—that is, the files appear in the search results for keywords that they contain. It seems just to treat their contents as plain text. When a plugin is registered, this does not happen automatically; it is necessary to return the kMDItemTextContent field. There are at least four possible ways to do this.

  1. Recurse through the message (MIME) parts, including text directly, turning HTML into text, and possibly calling other filters to treat binary attachments. This is the ideal solution, but demands non-negligible programming and debugging time.

  2. Use the mutt pager to turn a message into plain text, as is already done for the Quick Look plugin. This approach leverages the existing mutt code and attachments can be treated using the mailcap mechanism. The disadvantage is that many types of attachements (.pdf, .xls, .doc, etcetera) are not normally displayed as plain text by mutt. Unfortunately, this approach is not easy to implement without duplicating much of the mutt source code, since Spotlight importers execute in a sandbox which seems to prohibit them from creating temporary files and directories. The calls to mkdtemp in the mutt pager thus fail and the plugin crashes.

  3. Simply slurp the whole file into kMDItemTextContent. This approach is easy to implement and may be no worse than before installation of the plugin. Besides not properly treating file attachments, it does not decode RFC2045 text nor strip tags from HTML. It may cause spotlight to generate a larger index file than necessary.

  4. Use a hybrid of 1 and 3: recurse through the parts, using mutt functions to decode RFC2045 text and NSAttributedString or custom code to decode HTML, and ignoring other attachments. This seems to be a reasonable compromise between development effort and results. It has been implemented in the current version.

Quick Look

There are several existing open-source "Quick Look Plugins":

It does not seem possible to somehow reuse the existing Mail Quick Look feature.

Put Quick Look plugins in /Library/Quick Look and activate by resetting Quick Look with qlmanage -r.

Quick Look can be invoked with ⌘-Y or qlmanage -p file.

The following text summarizes the Apple Quick Look Programming docs.

Quick Look displays

  • thumbnail: static image depicting a document (multiple at once).
  • preview: a larger representation of a document (one at a time).

Architecture

  • Quick Look Consumer (client): wants to display a thumbnail or preview.
  • Quick Look Producer (daemon): satisfies requests for thumbnails and previews using Quick Look Generators.

Producers and consumers communicate over one or more Mach ports. Allows crash-recovery of daemons and their termination when idle.

The producer consists of one or more Quick Look daemons (quicklookd) and multiple Quick Look generators. The Generator interface is based on CFPlugIn and is specified in ANSI C. Clients have access to the public function QLThumbnailImageCreate and to the Quick Look preview panel (QLPreviewPanel). The Generator must convert document data into one of the QuickLook native types (plain text, rtf, html, pdf, jpg, png, tiff, etc.).

The QLGenerator.h file specifies the programmatic interface for generators. The API is broken into three categories:

  1. GenerateThumbnailForURL and GeneratePreviewForURL callbacks (and callbacks for cancelling generation).
  2. Functions for creating graphics contexts to generate thumbnails and previews.
  3. Functions for returning more information about a given request.

Requests specify distinct options (dictionary of hints for generation) and properties (supplemental data).

Use QLPreviewRequestSetDataRepresentation with a contentTypeUTI of kUTTypeHTML to render the text-based preview with the Web Kit. Use the properties dictionary to specify attachements in the HTML (images, sounds, etc.).

If the generator and frameworks that it uses are thread-safe, then set the QLSupportsConcurrentRequests and QLNeedsToBeRunInMainThread properties in the generator's Info.plist file. To handle cancellations, a generator should either implement the two callback functions (difficult and not recommended), or poll QLThumbnailRequestIsCancelled or QLPreviewRequestIsCancelled.

A Generator bundle must have the .qlgenerator extension and be in the filesystem at one of the following locations (in order).

  • MyApp.app/Contents/Library/Quick Look/
  • ~/Library/QuickLook
  • /Library/QuickLook
  • /System/Library/QuickLook

Debugging a generator, use either

/usr/bin/qlmanage -t /path/to/document   # generate thumbnail
/usr/bin/qlmanage -p /path/to/document   # generate preview
/usr/bin/qlmanage -m                     # print report from daemon
defaults write -g QLEnableLogging YES    # turn on logging

Run with particular generator:

qlmanage -c org.tbrk.muttlight.email -g ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/muttlight-quicklook-ezvizvcnspmnffbobvbwamlodciz/Build/Products/Debug/muttlight-quicklook.qlgenerator -d4 -p test5.mbox\:2\,S

qlmanage -d4 -p test5.mbox\:2\,S  | egrep --color '.*tbrk.*|$'

If qlmanage is not displaying previews, it may be necessary to kill the pboard process.

Parsing mail headers (DONE)

Bernstein notes

Better (easier and less potential for bugs) to just integrate the Mutt code (GPL2)? See parse.c and mutt_read_rfc822_header.

Yes. This works well.

Interpreting and Formatting Mail Messages

Good summary of MIME.

To call mutt_parse_mime_message, we need a HEADER and a CONTEXT.

Rework mx.c:mx_open_mailbox() to create a CONTEXT.

For the HEADER, see mh.c:maildir_parse_dir() (it calls mutt_new_header()), which afterwards calls mh.c:maildir_parse_message(), which returns a HEADER with ENVELOPE (using mutt_read_rfc822_header).

Or just use copy.c:mutt_copy_message() to render the message as plain text in a file? It calls handler.c:mutt_body_handler which has a switch over body types.

Viewing HTML with Mutt

Opening a given message in Mutt

mutt -f ~/tmp/testeml -e 'push <limit>~i<186B6575EF414D42849814076AE9B22B0100401380@EU-DCC-MBX01.dsone.3ds.com>\n<limit>all\n<display-message>'

Uniform Type Identifiers

UTI: a string that identifies a document type.

E.g., "public.jpeg" supersedes "JPEG" OSType, ".jpg" and ".jpeg" extensions, and the mime type "image/jpeg".

Use reverse-DNS format, e.g., "com.apple.quicktime-movie".

They are defined in an inheritance hierarchy.

Identifier tags indicate alternate methods of type identification, such as filename extensions, MIME types, or NSPasteboard types. You use these tags to assign specific extensions, MIME types, and so on, as being equivalent types in a UTI declaration.

Mac apps can declare new UTIs for their own proprietary formats. You declare new UTIs inside a bundle’s information property list. (UTTypeCopyDeclaringBundleURL). Declare in info.plist of an application or spotlight bundle. Ours would be declared as an imported UTI.

The .eml format is for messages stored in the Internet Mail Format (RFC 5322).

Do we need to declare our own UTI? Or can we simply import the Apple UTI com.apple.mail.email and simply declare new filename-extensions?

No. This will not work, because we want our Spotlight Importer to be called and not Apple's. We should thus declare our own UTI (org.tbrk.mail? org.mutt.mail? to.yp.cr.maildir.mail?) and declare that it derives from the standard Apple one.

From /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/Info.plist:

<key>UTExportedTypeDeclarations</key>
<array>
  <dict>
    <key>UTTypeConformsTo</key>
    <array>
      <string>public.data</string>
      <string>public.email-message</string>
    </array>
    <key>UTTypeDescription</key>
    <string>Email Message</string>
    <key>UTTypeIconFile</key>
    <string>document.icns</string>
    <key>UTTypeIdentifier</key>
    <string>com.apple.mail.email</string>
    <key>UTTypeTagSpecification</key>
    <dict>
      <key>public.filename-extension</key>
      <string>eml</string>
      <key>public.mime-type</key>
      <string>message/rfc822</string>
    </dict>
  </dict>
...
</array>

See UTCoreTypes.h.

kUTTypeMessage (public.message, base type for messages (email, IM, etc.)) KUTTypeEmailMessage (public.email-message, e-mail message, conforms to public.message)

There are API functions to convert other type identifiers (OSType, MIME, etc) to and from UTIs. (UTTypeCreatePreferredIdentifierForTag)

Dump the launch services database:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -dump

Register the UTIs and file extensions declared in an app's Info.plist:

lsregister ~/Desktop/MyDummyApp.app

Preferences panel

Build a preferences pane modelled after the Spotlight one.

Write it in Swift? No: stick with a mix of C and Objective C.

Show the icon (mutts sniffing around in folders), and a brief description.

Have two tabs:

  • "File extensions": table view of checkboxes populated from the plist file and an mdfind search.

  • "About": show author names and the license details.

Need to learn basic Mac GUI concepts:

Exploiting Apple plugins

MacOS already includes the following applications and plugins

/Applications/Mail.app
/System/Library/Spotlight/Mail.mdimporter
/System/Library/QuickLook/Mail.qlgenerator

Why not try to exploit them directly to minimize programming and give better results?

It seems that the following steps would be necessary.

  1. In /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/Info.plist, under the UTExportedTypeDeclarations key, wrap the existing <string> in an <array> and add the required extensions. To reregister, touch the application binary (Contents/MacOS/Mail) and run lsregister on the bundle directory.

  2. In /System/Library/QuickLook/Mail.qlgenerator, as above, but edit the UTImportedTypeDeclarations key.

I have not tested these steps, since they require write permission on the system files (and sudo is not enough). The Muttlight GUI could easily be adapted to perform the required modifications (but using it in this way would also required ‘violating’ MacOS' standard security settings).

There is reason to expect the QuickLook plugin to work, as evidenced by running the following command on a suitably renamed mail file.

qlmanage -d 4 -c com.apple.mail.email -g /System/Library/QuickLook/Mail.qlgenerator -p test.hostname\:2,S

But what about Spotlight indexing? The following command correctly imports data from the message headers, but the kMDItemTextContent field is not populated. This means that the payload contents will not be indexed (maybe the programmers were worried about Spotlight indexing costs?).

mdimport -d 4 -g /System/Library/Spotlight/Mail.mdimporter ./test.hostname\:2\,S

The same can be observed with a filename like test.eml, showing that it is not simply a problem of UTI registration. In fact, googling for ‘spotlight eml files’ unearths a bunch of people trying to work around this limitation.

One approach would be to modify the Muttlight app to update the Mail application and its QuickLook plugin, and to remove the Muttlight QuickLook plugin but to keep the Muttlight spotlight plugin (edited to accept the com.apple.email.email UTI). The only obstacle is the System Integrity Protection (SIP) of MacOS. Suggestions on StackOverflow include disabling it (requiring a reboot), or making copies of the required applications elsewhere and editing the copies (may not work for Mail.app since it includes a UTExportedTypeDeclarations key).

Another approach would be to copy /System/Library/QuickLook/Mail.qlgenerator into the Muttlight application and to edit its Info.plist file to accept the org.tbrk.muttlight.email UTI. This would seem to be an ideal solution: no need to work around SIP, it exploits the Muttlight interface and Spotlight plugins, and use the Mail plugin to generate high-quality previews. Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to make it work. it's possible that the Mail plugin switches internally on the UTI, in which case it won't accept org.tbrk.muttlight.email. Maybe find and directly modify the relevant comparison operand in the binary?