Firstly, I’m thrilled about Mailspring as It’s the best, most intuitive and least fuss mail client I’ve come across in a while. I’m thankful to all those of you who keep the project running and I hope to make a small contribution myself buy reporting this bug.
When I click on ‘Compose new message’ a smaller window opens, much similar to any other mail client. All goes well if I don’t touch the menu atop the window (File, Edit, View etc.) but If I do, the menu extends/opens for a second or two and then the whole program freezes and promptly crashes. I can open, say, Help and see the version number for a moment without the whole application crashing, but everytime I open View, everything falls apart. This only applies to the Compose new message Window. Luckily there seem to be no lasting negative effects.
The version I’m currently running is 1.8.0-8983dca2, my OS is Fedora 33, kernel 5.10.13-200.fc33.x86_64 with GNOME 3.38.3 and Mutter. PC is a Lenovo ThinkPad with Intel i5 and 16GB DDR3.
I hope you can find a way to resolve this issue at some point in the future. Thank you very much!
This seems quite odd; I haven’t encountered any similar reports from other Fedora users yet.
Do you experience anything similar with other Electron apps, such as Visual Studio Code or Slack? (There’s a whole list here: Electron Apps | Electron)
Also, does the Snapcraft version also have this problem?
I would gladly remove the application and reinstall via snap but I fear my settings will get lost along the way - I have done some customization to the UI and other settings which I’d hate to lose. Is there a way for me to export these settings and safely attempt to reinstall?
Thanks again!
P.S.: I’ll install Slack right now and see how it fairs.
You don’t actually need to uninstall the .rpm version. You can just install the Snapcraft version at the same time with snap install mailspring, and start it via the Snapcraft version directly from the command line, via snap run mailspring.
(You can also remove it at any time via snap remove mailspring.)
I have installed the .rpm, Fedora Linux version of Slack and tested the menus in question. I’ve have not encountered and such or similar problems.
Judging from nothing but outward appearance, both the applications mentioned look very similar so I’m guessing what you meant when you mentioned Electron Apps was that both Slack and Mailspring share a front-end or some similar building block. Oddly enough, I recently tried the Linux version of Discord on this same system and while I don’t recall it crashing it did freeze and overall refused to work as it should. Discord’s GUI was awfully similar to Slack and Mailspring’s. (Just FYI).
I’ve gone ahead and started the install of snapcraft and will report back shortly. I really like Mailspring and so I was pissed an saddened when I found out it would crash, here’s hoping I can bamboozle a fix!
@melnit Here’s hoping the Snapcraft version works for you! If it does, you can copy your ~/.config/Mailspring/config.json and ~/.config/keymap.json files into snap/mailspring/config. You can similarly copy the ~/.config/Mailspring/templates/ directory if you have any templates you want to save.
@melnit Mailspring uses a framework called Electron, which is used by a number of popular apps, including Discord, Slack, and Visual Studio Code. If you’re experiencing these same problems with other Electron apps, then the problem isn’t in Mailspring, nor is it something we could fix. The issue would need to be reported to Electron directly.
That segfault makes me suspect that may indeed be the case, in fact.
Nonetheless, I’ll mark this as #spooky in case others encounter it, and it turns out to be somehow something we can fix down the road.
Hey, what happens if you switch the window controls? That is, go to Edit > Preferences in the main window (I assume that won’t crash, from what you said), click Appearance, and switch either to “Custom Window Frame” or “Default Window Controls and Menubar”, whichever it DOESN’T have selected. Then relaunch, and see if the problem persists.
Genius. Choosing ‘Custom Window Frame’ has done the trick - I can’t get it to crash anymore and I actually like the looks a bit more. I had a hunch there ought to be a way to solve this!
