Notes seems to be broken in beta

[n5bb]

I suddenly see a very odd behavior with Notes in the beta web interface. When I edit a note, it seems to usually disappear from Notes and appear with the exact same text in a MailNotes folder as an internally generated email. That folder just mysteriously appeared when this problem started a few hours ago.

So far I can duplicate the problem (sometimes with a few differences in some messages seen when you try saving a note) in the web interface beta, but so far I have not seen this Notes bug in the production (normal) Fastmail login. So I recommend not using beta for a while until Fastmail has fixed this issue.

By the way, the previous beta features (right-side bar) seem to be added to the production interface now.

I have sent an email describing the details to Fastmail staff and will report here what they say.

Bill

[Fenman]

Thanks for the tip-off, Bill. It's the same for me and the fault remains. Did you hear anything back yet?

[n5bb]

Not yet. Such things always seem to happen to me on Friday, when it’s already Saturday in Australia. I often hear back late Sunday my time, after the weekend is over at Fastmail HQ.

Bill

[n5bb]

Rob Mueller at Fastmail found the beta interface bug and fixed it. I have verified on my account that this bug is no longer present. Here is what he says:

Originally Posted by email from Rob Mueller

Ok I've found out what was causing this. It was a bug due to some changes that had been put on beta to fix one problem, but unfortunately had a side-effect of breaking notes in this way. Ouch.

FYI, the way Notes work is they're just emails, stored in a special folder called "Notes". Each email also has a couple of special headers like 'X-Uniform-Type-Identifier'. That folder is made invisible to the Mail part of the web UI. The reason we do it this way is it basically matches what Apple does for Notes on iOS/macOS, so you can see/edit notes on those platforms in their native app.

Since the Notes folder is just an IMAP folder though, it's possible for someone to accidentally move regular emails into that folder that aren't "Notes". iOS/macOS don't see these emails as notes, so to avoid confusion about "notes that appear in the web UI but not on my phone", our code detects these emails, creates a "MailNotes" folder, and moves the emails into that folder.

All fine so far. In this case, the bug caused some headers to be incorrectly encoded, this meant that the X-Uniform-Type-Identifier header was encoded in a way we didn't expect ourselves, so we created a note, then when we read it back, we said "oh, this isn't actually a note", and so moved it to the MailNotes folder. Ooops.

I recommend the easiest thing to do for now is to create a new note in the web ui, then copy + paste the content from the emails that are in the MailNotes folder. Once you've done that, just delete the MailNotes folder and the emails in it. Going forward, editing notes should work correctly.

Sorry about that, but big thanks for pointing it out so it could get fixed early!

[Fenman]

Appreciated, Bill.