Calendar and Contacts now sync with your own server, and Mail has a junk filter that learns locally

When Calendar and Contacts arrived in Rutba Office in September, your events and cards lived on your computer and nowhere else. That suits plenty of people. It does not suit somebody whose diary also lives on a phone. 1.29.8 adds accounts on a CalDAV or CardDAV server, the standard that iCloud, Fastmail and Nextcloud all offer.

Calendars and address books, kept in step

Home → Accounts adds a server by its address, a user name and a password. For iCloud and services like it, that is an app password made for the purpose rather than your main one. Rutba Office finds your calendars and address books and brings them in: each calendar beside your own, each card among the rest.

• Your changes go first. A sync sends what changed here, written so that an event changed on the server in the meantime is never overwritten without you seeing it. When both changed, the server’s copy wins.
• Then it fetches only what changed there, rather than the whole calendar each time.
• When it runs: when you add the account, when you press Sync, a little after you change something, and every quarter of an hour.
• Removing the account removes its calendars and cards here and touches nothing on the server.

The requests go only to the address you typed, over HTTPS. Plain HTTP is allowed only to a server on the same computer. None of it comes to us. The privacy page lists this alongside the two network calls the suite makes on its own.

A junk filter that learns on your computer

Home → Junk (1.29.4) marks a message as junk or not junk, blocks a sender, or says never to block a sender or their whole domain. Arriving mail is filed by your Safe and Blocked Senders lists, by the spam headers your mail server already adds, and by a filter that learns from what you mark. Nothing is sent anywhere to decide. A message in Junk says why it is there, with Not junk beside it.

The options run from off, through low and high, to safe lists only. At the default, low, a filter that has not learnt anything yet files only what the server itself marked as spam, so a new install does not start hiding your mail. Mail from your contacts can be trusted as well. 1.29.6 made the options per account, as Outlook keeps them. Mail to a group or a mailing list you belong to is never junked, and mail from chosen countries’ domains or in chosen character sets can be blocked.

Signatures with a logo, and links that work

Signatures can be rich text now (1.29.4): bold, italic, underline, colour, size, a link and a picture. A picture in a signature goes as an attachment of the message, which every mail reader shows. Insert link in the composer works, and switching a message to plain text and back keeps what you typed.

Safer with what strangers send

An inbox is the one part of an office suite that strangers write to, and 1.28.1 closed some of the ways that could go wrong:

• An attachment is saved where you put it. Its name is written by the sender, and a name built to climb out of the folder, such as one pointing at the Startup folder, used to be saved where it pointed. Only the last part of the name is used now, made safe for Windows.
• A program asks before it runs. One click on an attached .exe, script, installer, shortcut or disk image used to run it. It is still yours to open, but the window now says that opening it runs it.
• A password never crosses an open line. An account on a plain IMAP port now insists on encryption before it sends your password, as sending mail already did.

Other fixes in the same releases: moving a message by Archive, Junk, Move to or a rule no longer loses its attachments; rules and automatic replies no longer pass over a message that was delivered late; and a meeting invitation that repeats on a day that never comes, such as the 30th of February, no longer freezes every window when it is opened.