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Continuing SmarterMail 16.x Bugs
Problem reported by Bryan Zimmerman - 5/26/2017 at 1:57 PM
Submitted
1. Calendar Event does not show full information under description.  Using Google Chrome, or any browser the event description is not fully displayed or accessible.  Here is an example of what is displayed for an event
"Description
This event has a Google Hangouts video call. Join: https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/inspiredhigher.com/bryanzim-yvonne?..."
Obviously that ... is important, but no way to access it without going to original deleted message where the calendar invite was contained.  If that message was not available then no way to access information.
2. Pale Moon - still unusable in Pale Moon
3. RSS Feeds - The RSS Feeds do not update when they are selected nor are they periodically refreshed in the background.  If you manually refresh using the circle then all items are marked as new.
 
 

37 Replies

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Tim Uzzanti Replied
5/26/2017 at 4:28 PM
Employee Post
We will look into 1 and 3.

Pale Moon is not a browser we are testing against at this time. Its currently at .004% market share and has a number missing technical features or in a state of flux.
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
5/29/2017 at 12:52 PM
I can appreciate the business case for not looking at Pale Moon. However with the latest Firefox 54.0b11 (64-bit) the time from clicking the New Mail button until the windows appears for population is approximately 30 seconds. On the latest Google Chrome 64 bit, it is about 7 seconds still slow but at least usable.

Many other windows take a long time also, i.e. add Calendar Event.

There still seem to be some serious performance issues that many people are reporting.
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
5/29/2017 at 1:49 PM
Employee Post
In another thread in the community which was discussing load times... lead me to requesting another round of speed testing from our QC team. We have a VERY extensive matrix of 25 different areas in the web application that is being tested with a number of browsers. These tests are done with many gigabyte mailboxes and significant calendars, contacts etc. I have seen some of the results and there are a couple areas of concern. Data is still being compiled.

In regards to your Firefox and Chrome references... we are seeing 2.21 and 2.32 seconds on new message window.

That would lead me to something specific about your server, install or mailbox that would need to be evaluated.

Tim
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
5/29/2017 at 2:45 PM
Tim,

For background I have been running SmarterMail for 7 years since version 7.X and through all the iterations, unfortunately even though V16.x is supposed to be the fastest, it is slower in many aspects. So I have not changed server/client configuration since going from 15.x to 16.x, Just the usual uninstall and reinstall

Client Machine
Windows Server 2016 Standard x64
Processor: Intel Xeon CPU E5-2650 V2 @2.60 GHz(8 core/16 hyper)
RAM: 32 GB
HDD: 2TB SSD
Browsers: IE11, Chrome, Firefox, PaleMoon and Opera

Server Machine:
Windows Server 2016 DataCenter x64
Processors: Dual Intel Xeon E5520 @2.27 GHz
RAM: 32 GB
HDD: OS (2 TB RAID 6), Data(Mailboxes) 65 TB RAID 6
IIS 10
SmarterMail IIS configured as HTTPS site using .NET Framework 4.0.30319

I am willing to share privately some information about the domains, smartermail config, etc.

Professionally I am expert C++ 11/14/17 programmer specializing in HPC, numerical, concurrent, and distributed computing.

Bryan Z
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
5/29/2017 at 3:01 PM
Employee Post
I will have someone open an outbound ticket with you. Not questioning whether your seeing it... just not able to duplicate it and not the results were seeing and the reason it, leads me to believe it is something unique to the server, installation or mailbox.

We need to make sure you have the Windows Defender exceptions enabled as well. That will TRIPLE the time EVERYTHING takes in SmarterMail and could cause corruption.

The areas we are seeing inconsistent load times which I want resolved; login page which we have seen 7 to 10 seconds sometimes and also scrolling through the message list on a large mailbox. The number of requests are getting queued to the server and grabbing pages of messages are never displayed and should be skipped.

In most other cases, were seeing page loads 10% to 15% faster in 16.x than 15.x with the extensibility of a complete API layer which is awesome. Now, were looking for those unique scenarios where performance hasn't been increased or isn't equal to previous versions.

Tim
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
5/29/2017 at 3:23 PM
Windows Defender is disabled on both Client and Server. They have Symantec Endpoint Protection installed and enabling or disabling real time protection seems to have no effect.

I will respond to trouble ticket.
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
5/29/2017 at 3:35 PM
Employee Post
Sounds good. On the server any antivirus or malware needs to exclude the .GRP, .XML and .CFG extensions. Huge issues otherwise!
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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Paul Blank Replied
5/31/2017 at 5:44 AM
Pale Moon (a lovingly-hacked older version of FireFox) is good to have around because it's committed to retaining, amongst other older standards, NPAPI plugin support, which is used by many surveillance NVR/DVR devices, as one example. And the firmware for those "older" devices is not expected to be updated (ever!). But it shouldn't be relied upon to keep up with current browser standards. As such, it's fully understandable that some versions of SM won't run well in that environment.
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
6/7/2017 at 6:16 AM
Remaining unresolved issues:
1. With an event especially a private one the description field is not completely accessible still.  For example "This event has a Google Hangouts video call. Join: https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/inspiredhigher.com/bryanzim-yvonne?..."  So that the event cannot be joined when needed.
2. Even with a non private event if the description field is large enough it still is not completely accessible and is truncated.
3. RSS Feeds are not working properly in many ways but I know these are low priority where the first two issues have real business impact.
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Employee Replied
6/8/2017 at 8:16 AM
Employee Post
Bryan, for the first two issues, what are the replication steps that are causing them to be inaccessible? You should just be able to click on the description field and it opens a modal with the full description.
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
6/8/2017 at 8:24 AM
1. If the event is a private one, i.e. an accepted meeting that can only be changed by issuer, then their is no editing of any fields and the description modal dialog is not available.
2. Even with an available modal dialog the field is still truncated if too long, i.e. google hangout links, coder pad links, etc.
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Employee Replied
6/8/2017 at 10:20 AM
Employee Post
Bryan, I was able to resolve the first and second issues you have reported. Non-organizers can now click on the description field and have the description modal open properly. It will be included in tomorrow's release.
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
6/8/2017 at 11:37 AM
Robert, thank you for confirming the issue and providing a fix.
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Employee Replied
6/13/2017 at 1:19 PM
Employee Post
"The RSS Feeds do not update when they are selected nor are they periodically refreshed in the background."
    - From what I can tell this is untrue. My RSS Feeds 
    have updated in the background on smarterTools. There 
    is also code that does run every hour to update the 
    RSS Feeds.

"If you manually refresh using the circle then all items are marked as new."
    - This is true. This is due to us caching the unread 
    states but not storing them on the server. So updating 
    reloads the cache and thus the unread states. If the 
    service is restarted this would also remove unread 
    states. 
 
Tracking and saving individual unread states would require significant changes to the back end of SmarterMail and so this has been added to our feature requests list to be considered at a later date.
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Elazar Broad Replied
6/14/2017 at 5:10 PM
The RSS issues could be due to permissions issues on the RSS folder under App_Data. I ran into this after upgrading as I run the SmarterMail service under a different user. I think it would be helpful if SmarterTools were to release a permissions matrix for key folders, i.e. which folders need to be readable/writeable by the user the SmarterMail service is running under vs. the user running the IIS worker process. Especially now that processes that ran within the web application code under SM 15 may have moved to the service under the new architecture in SM 16.
 
Thanks,
 Elazar
1
Bryan Zimmerman Replied
6/16/2017 at 12:02 PM
SmarterMail 15.x worked very well for indicating when a feed had new posts where SmarterMail 16.x does not usually work.  You either have to refresh to get all marked as new or look at each feed and sometimes see new ones for which the feed did not indicate because of a background refresh.  I have also found on sites such as warp2search.net that it would miss feeds between today and yesterday depending on when pulled/refreshed.
 
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
6/16/2017 at 12:03 PM
What permission did you have to change?
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Elazar Broad Replied
6/17/2017 at 8:30 PM
Via procmon, I found the following under App_Data:

Attachments: IIS worker process user = Read/Write, not sure about the MailService user
FileStorageTemp: MailService user = Read/Write
Logs: IIS worker process user = Read/Write
RSS: IIS worker process user = Read/Write, not sure about the MailService user
upload: IIS worker process user = Read/Write, MailService user = Read/Write

I have also found some UI performance improvement when enabling static content compression and output caching for css and js files in IIS.

Thanks,
Elazar
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Debby Coutinho Replied
6/23/2017 at 5:26 AM
sm16 ui is sloow, we seeing this as well.
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
6/29/2017 at 7:30 AM
As a stop gap measure to the multiple RSS issues if the ability is added such that the user could right click on a feed and open the web page associated with it, then it would be a great help.
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Karl Jones Replied
6/29/2017 at 9:24 AM
My users also reporting slow updates, annoying slow..
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Scott Carullo Replied
6/30/2017 at 8:31 AM
I agree that this version is the slowest version I have used. Its got nothing to do with anything other than upgrading from 15,x to 16.x We all run networks with lots of people, I assure you the feedback we are providing from the real world is more valuable than your test bed. The mere fact you are sort of arguing the point scares me as a customer... I too have been running your software over 10 years.
1
Tim Uzzanti Replied
6/30/2017 at 12:12 PM
Employee Post
Today's release will help significantly.
 
We made a number of improvements but one in particular was a component we use called UI-Router component which had a bug and would stall trying to figure out routes.  Each request for new page (login, popups, and even pages within the app) would go through this routing component and could stall from time to time.  It was incredibly difficult to find and seemed to happen more often on Safari and Firefox than other browsers.
 
Hope this helps....
 
 
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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Shaun Peet Replied
7/1/2017 at 1:36 PM
We actually hadn't been struggling with webmail speed issues in too many scenarios except in Firefox (which appears to be resolved) and Google Chrome on Android (which is still quite sluggish with ~11-14 seconds to open the reply window). Latest version is certainly a big step in the right direction though looking at other comments.
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
7/5/2017 at 8:07 AM
Many RSS issues still persist with the latest release.  Please implement the suggestion above as a stop gap measure.
 
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Employee Replied
7/5/2017 at 12:09 PM
Employee Post
Your stop gap measure suggestion has been added to our list. We will _try_ to get it included in this week's build.
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Employee Replied
7/5/2017 at 2:32 PM
Employee Post
Can you elaborate on your suggestion further? It is already possible to click on a feed item and have it open the associated web page.
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
7/5/2017 at 2:43 PM
I do not mean to click on the feed item, I mean to click on the feed itself in the feed list and bring up the webpage associated with the entire feed and all its items.
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Employee Replied
7/5/2017 at 2:53 PM
Employee Post
I am unsure of how this would work. Going directly to the feed link could take the user to the raw xml such as https://www.nintendo.com/feed. However stripping the url down to its hostname could also cause issues with sites such as http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
7/5/2017 at 3:48 PM
Both of your problem feeds are perfectly readable in firefox for the purposes of my desires.
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Employee Replied
7/6/2017 at 3:02 PM
Employee Post
I have implemented read/unread states in RSS feeds and it will be in this week's release.
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
7/8/2017 at 5:43 AM
The read/unread feature of the RSS is very well done and a welcome addition.  However, there is still what I believe is a bug.
 
BUG - Feeds like http://www.warp2search.net/news/rss will truncate older items and correspondingly the RSS feed in SmarterMail will truncate items but it does mark the new items as unread.  I think it would be better to keep a minimum number of days of the feed from previously read items. 
 
FEATURE - A Mark Read on the All Feeds would be a welcome addition.
 
FEATURE - I still think right clicking on the feed name and opening the raw feed in the web browser would be a welcome addition.
 
Thanks again for the work done so far.
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Derek Curtis Replied
7/8/2017 at 12:45 PM
Employee Post
Thanks, Bryan. We'll add the suggestions. I have a list of my own: I use Digg Reader and like some of the features there, so those have carried over to our list as well.
Derek Curtis COO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
7/9/2017 at 3:23 PM
BUG - I have seen RSS items show as bold meaning unread but the feed itself did not have a bold number next to it indicating unread items. This is under Firefox.

Replicate 1 - Issue appears when going to RSS page after a background update where under all items items to the right show in bold but feeds to left do not have any bold numbers next to them.
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Employee Replied
7/11/2017 at 3:41 PM
Employee Post
I cannot replicate this. Does this happen often or only occasionally? Do you have any steps to replicate?
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
7/13/2017 at 5:21 AM
BUG - Bold number of unread articles is negative, i.e. -1.

The bug about unread bold items but numbers not shown shows up only occasionally. Unfortunately there were no specific steps to recreate.

Replicate 1 - Feed shows unread items say 8. First feed item is double clicked which opens story. Story is closed, and bold number of unread stories shows -1 while right side still shows bold unread items below first.
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Bryan Zimmerman Replied
7/26/2017 at 3:05 AM
Post 16.1 - Thank you for addressing some of the issues.  Here is a report on the post 16.1 so far.
 
1. [Fixed] - Have not seen the negative values since update.
2. [BUG] - Old items at the end of the RSS feed are frequently marked unread again after begin marked read.
3. [BUG] - Frequent Errors when navigating between feeds or refreshing feeds on a WAN connection that force a re login.
 
Bryan Z
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