web interface to notmuch

web interface to notmuch

[Matthew Lear]

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Hello all. A little side project at work involves me trying to put together
part of a knowledge share system where users can query and search email
stored and indexed centrally (by offlineimap & notmuch). My intention is to
provide a means to support multiple concurrent read-only accesses to the
notmuch database from users' web browsers so they can query and search mail.

Consider a few different email addresses being plugged into various
systems, all receiving email on different topics. I'd like to build an
application which presents a web frontend which I can run on the server
which fetches and indexes the mail, and thus present a web interface to
search all mail using notmuch.

notmuch-web has not seen much development for a few years.
noservice looks pretty nifty but I'm a little unsure of the status and if
it's missing anything fundamental.

I think my requirements are pretty basic:

* Read-only access
* Search and display mail only (no sending), including html mails
* Freeform entry of search terms in accordance with notmuch-search-terms(7).

Would anybody have any ideas about the best way to undertake such a project?

notmuch-web and noservice definitively look like they could be leveraged,
but I don't know if I'd be better trying to construct something from the
ground up which is better suited / tailored to my requirements (which are
much less than either of the above were intended to fulfil).

A standalone app would be preferred rather than having to rely on a web
server, although I'm not picky about infrastructure. Web based programming
is not my forte so I'd appreciate any feedback relating also to
implementation, currently available open source web frameworks which could
be used / considered / leveraged, etc.

Many thanks,
--  Matt

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Brian Sniffen]

I put together something like this, visible at
https://github.com/briansniffen/notmuch/tree/nmweb/contrib/notmuch-web

It's not much of a service.  I am pretty sure it is exploitable---that
content in text/html parts of messages can do Bad Things to your
session.

I haven't thought nearly hard enough about how it will deal with
multiple users.

But it's < 250 lines of Python, so perhaps you can adapt it to what you
need.  It uses web.py, so you *could* run it standalone, but you'll
probably be happier with Apache or nginx or something in front of it,
handling TLS termination and that sort of thing.

It's only approach to sending mail is generating mailto: links that will
open in whatever client the user has configured.

-Brian

Matthew Lear <matt@bubblegen.co.uk> writes:

> Hello all. A little side project at work involves me trying to put together
> part of a knowledge share system where users can query and search email
> stored and indexed centrally (by offlineimap & notmuch). My intention is to
> provide a means to support multiple concurrent read-only accesses to the
> notmuch database from users' web browsers so they can query and search mail.
>
> Consider a few different email addresses being plugged into various
> systems, all receiving email on different topics. I'd like to build an
> application which presents a web frontend which I can run on the server
> which fetches and indexes the mail, and thus present a web interface to
> search all mail using notmuch.
>
> notmuch-web has not seen much development for a few years.
> noservice looks pretty nifty but I'm a little unsure of the status and if
> it's missing anything fundamental.
>
> I think my requirements are pretty basic:
>
> * Read-only access
> * Search and display mail only (no sending), including html mails
> * Freeform entry of search terms in accordance with notmuch-search-terms(7).
>
> Would anybody have any ideas about the best way to undertake such a project?
>
> notmuch-web and noservice definitively look like they could be leveraged,
> but I don't know if I'd be better trying to construct something from the
> ground up which is better suited / tailored to my requirements (which are
> much less than either of the above were intended to fulfil).
>
> A standalone app would be preferred rather than having to rely on a web
> server, although I'm not picky about infrastructure. Web based programming
> is not my forte so I'd appreciate any feedback relating also to
> implementation, currently available open source web frameworks which could
> be used / considered / leveraged, etc.
>
> Many thanks,
> --  Matt
> _______________________________________________
> notmuch mailing list
> notmuch@notmuchmail.org
> https://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch

Re: web interface to notmuch

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

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On Thu 2017-10-19 11:01:53 -0400, Brian Sniffen wrote:
> I put together something like this, visible at
> https://github.com/briansniffen/notmuch/tree/nmweb/contrib/notmuch-web
>
> It's not much of a service.  I am pretty sure it is exploitable---that
> content in text/html parts of messages can do Bad Things to your
> session.

I think this is the crux of the problem, right?  I was noticing the
other day that notmuch's own mail archives are published in pipermail,
which is *absolutely terrible* compared to dealing with a mailstore with
notmuch as a frontend.  I'd love to be able to expose the archive to the
public this way.

Assuming that you had a sanitize_this_html_part() function available to
you, do you think it would be possible to make this safe?  Have you
considered proposing it for inclusion in contrib upstream?

     --dkg

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Brian Sniffen]

> On Oct 19, 2017, at 12:55 PM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu 2017-10-19 11:01:53 -0400, Brian Sniffen wrote:
>> I put together something like this, visible at
>> https://github.com/briansniffen/notmuch/tree/nmweb/contrib/notmuch-web
>> 
>> It's not much of a service.  I am pretty sure it is exploitable---that
>> content in text/html parts of messages can do Bad Things to your
>> session.
> 
> I think this is the crux of the problem, right?  I was noticing the
> other day that notmuch's own mail archives are published in pipermail,
> which is *absolutely terrible* compared to dealing with a mailstore with
> notmuch as a frontend.  I'd love to be able to expose the archive to the
> public this way.
> 
> Assuming that you had a sanitize_this_html_part() function available to
> you, do you think it would be possible to make this safe?  Have you
> considered proposing it for inclusion in contrib upstream?

I don’t think they can be sanitized. Web tech moves so fast. But maybe they can be isolated. GMail uses a separate domain for the content from the UI; I have hopes about response headers and iframe attributes. 

Also, if the whole site’s static—not just the nmweb part—you probably can’t hurt much. 

Re: web interface to notmuch

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

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On Thu 2017-10-19 16:00:33 -0400, Brian Sniffen wrote:
> I don’t think they can be sanitized. Web tech moves so fast.

well, there are at least a handful of python modules that claim to do
some sort of sanitization.

in debian alone, we have at least:

   python3-django-html-sanitizer
   python3-feedparser
   python3-bleach
   python3-w3lib

so, one approach would be to just adopt one of them, and then it's their
fault if it breaks :)

I'm not saying it's a great approach, but it seems better than the
current situation where no sanitization is done at all.

> But maybe they can be isolated. GMail uses a separate domain for the
> content from the UI; I have hopes about response headers and iframe
> attributes.

That's an interesting approach too, though it doesn't isolate message A
from message B, which is a distinct concern.  The worry isn't just that
the content could take over the UI, right?

Maybe isolation and sanitization can be used in combination?  even if
neither of them are perfect, it'd be a damn sight better than pipermail
:P

> Also, if the whole site’s static—not just the nmweb part—you probably
> can’t hurt much.

depends on what kind of harm you're talking about -- i think the privacy
harms are potentially pretty serious.  The public library is static, but
if reading one book meant that you ended up reporting on your future
reading habits (of any book) to some unknown third party, that would be
pretty bad.

       --dkg

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[W. Trevor King]

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I haven't looked at the backing code in a while, but I really like the
public-inbox [1] approach to archival.  Since Gmane died, Git (and a
few other projects [2]) have also been using the author's hosted
version.  I haven't looked at the backing code in a while, but it's
live Perl, not a static site.  It uses Xapian for search (like
notmuch), but I was unable to talk Eric into using notmuch directly
because of our lack of Perl bindings [3].  Still, it's a pretty
similar idea, and it may be a good fit for you.  Previous discussion
on this list in [4,5].

Cheers,
Trevor

[1]: https://public-inbox.org/README.html
[2]: https://public-inbox.org/hosted.html
[3]: https://public-inbox.org/meta/20141027005553.GA10990@dcvr.yhbt.net/
[4]: id:20141107190321.GL23609@odin.tremily.us
[5]: id:20160820062931.GY30347@odin.tremily.us

-- 
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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Jani Nikula]

On Thu, 19 Oct 2017, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
> On Thu 2017-10-19 11:01:53 -0400, Brian Sniffen wrote:
>> I put together something like this, visible at
>> https://github.com/briansniffen/notmuch/tree/nmweb/contrib/notmuch-web
>>
>> It's not much of a service.  I am pretty sure it is exploitable---that
>> content in text/html parts of messages can do Bad Things to your
>> session.
>
> I think this is the crux of the problem, right?  I was noticing the
> other day that notmuch's own mail archives are published in pipermail,
> which is *absolutely terrible* compared to dealing with a mailstore with
> notmuch as a frontend.  I'd love to be able to expose the archive to the
> public this way.

For the list archive, we could restrict to displaying text/plain only.

BR,
Jani.

Re: web interface to notmuch

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

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On Sat 2017-10-21 23:00:00 +0300, Jani Nikula wrote:
> For the list archive, we could restrict to displaying text/plain only.

and text/x-diff, surely :)

But yeah, good point.

Brian, what do you think about such a constraint?  would that make your
implementation safe enough to put on the public Internet for a read-only
archive?

    --dkg

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Vladimir Panteleev]

Hi,

Sorry to barge in, I noticed this thread and thought I'd try to have a 
go at setting up a test DFeed instance.

Here it is:

http://dfeed-notmuch.k3.1azy.net/

There is some more info on the help page:

http://dfeed-notmuch.k3.1azy.net/help

Posting is supported, but it is currently (intentionally) unconfigured 
for now.

What do you think?

On 2017-10-21 22:21, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On Sat 2017-10-21 23:00:00 +0300, Jani Nikula wrote:
>> For the list archive, we could restrict to displaying text/plain only.
> 
> and text/x-diff, surely :)
> 
> But yeah, good point.
> 
> Brian, what do you think about such a constraint?  would that make your
> implementation safe enough to put on the public Internet for a read-only
> archive?
> 
>      --dkg
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> notmuch mailing list
> notmuch@notmuchmail.org
> https://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch
> 

-- 
Best regards,
  Vladimir

Re: web interface to notmuch

[Matthew Lear]

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Thanks for doing that, and thanks to all for the feedback and input so far.
For the interface I want to set up, I'd like the ability to enter notmuch
search syntax in an input box, and also show tags applied to messages.
The interface presented by the current version of notmuch-web ticks a lot
of boxes for me. Speed of being able to enter free-form search syntax (or
ideally, selecting from a list of favourite or predefined searches) and
returning the results quickly, I think are critical for how I'd like the
interface to be used. I see that the DFeed instance has an advanced search
facility, but it's a few clicks away.
I've not looked seriously at the other suggestions so far in this thread,
though.
Cheers,
--  Matt


On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 4:00 AM, Vladimir Panteleev <
thecybershadow@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Sorry to barge in, I noticed this thread and thought I'd try to have a go
> at setting up a test DFeed instance.
>
> Here it is:
>
> http://dfeed-notmuch.k3.1azy.net/
>
> There is some more info on the help page:
>
> http://dfeed-notmuch.k3.1azy.net/help
>
> Posting is supported, but it is currently (intentionally) unconfigured for
> now.
>
> What do you think?
>
>
> On 2017-10-21 22:21, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
>
>> On Sat 2017-10-21 23:00:00 +0300, Jani Nikula wrote:
>>
>>> For the list archive, we could restrict to displaying text/plain only.
>>>
>>
>> and text/x-diff, surely :)
>>
>> But yeah, good point.
>>
>> Brian, what do you think about such a constraint?  would that make your
>> implementation safe enough to put on the public Internet for a read-only
>> archive?
>>
>>      --dkg
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> notmuch mailing list
>> notmuch@notmuchmail.org
>> https://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch
>>
>>
> --
> Best regards,
>  Vladimir
>
>

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Brian Sniffen]

That's inspiring!  Now there's a demo of nmweb at

https://nmweb.evenmere.org/


It's possible to get it to dump the whole mbox by clicking through the
obvious links; please consider exploring at
https://nmweb.evenmere.org/search/monkey instead.  There are not many
monkeys in the inbox.

-Brian

Vladimir Panteleev <thecybershadow@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Sorry to barge in, I noticed this thread and thought I'd try to have a 
> go at setting up a test DFeed instance.
>
> Here it is:
>
> http://dfeed-notmuch.k3.1azy.net/
>
> There is some more info on the help page:
>
> http://dfeed-notmuch.k3.1azy.net/help
>
> Posting is supported, but it is currently (intentionally) unconfigured 
> for now.
>
> What do you think?
>
> On 2017-10-21 22:21, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
>> On Sat 2017-10-21 23:00:00 +0300, Jani Nikula wrote:
>>> For the list archive, we could restrict to displaying text/plain only.
>> 
>> and text/x-diff, surely :)
>> 
>> But yeah, good point.
>> 
>> Brian, what do you think about such a constraint?  would that make your
>> implementation safe enough to put on the public Internet for a read-only
>> archive?
>> 
>>      --dkg
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> notmuch mailing list
>> notmuch@notmuchmail.org
>> https://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch
>> 
>
> -- 
> Best regards,
>   Vladimir

Re: web interface to notmuch

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

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On Wed 2017-10-25 18:03:01 -0400, Brian Sniffen wrote:
> That's inspiring!  Now there's a demo of nmweb at
>
> https://nmweb.evenmere.org/

this is very nice, Brian.

Your URL highlighter seems a bit trigger-happy though:

   https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/8760s7zr47.fsf%40zancas.localnet

I don't think bremner was trying to link to http://index.cc !

> It's possible to get it to dump the whole mbox by clicking through the
> obvious links; please consider exploring at
> https://nmweb.evenmere.org/search/monkey instead.

this is interesting because it shows me threads where some messages have
monkey in them, but i can't tell which messages actually have the
relevant search term.  Maybe it could highlight the found messages?

Also, once i'm looking at one message, i don't see an easy way to go
"next" in the thread.

see: you show off a cool trick, you get requests for more cool tricks :)

> There are not many monkeys in the inbox.

speak for your own inbox, please.

      --dkg

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Brian Sniffen]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> writes:

> On Wed 2017-10-25 18:03:01 -0400, Brian Sniffen wrote:
>> That's inspiring!  Now there's a demo of nmweb at
>>
>> https://nmweb.evenmere.org/
>
> this is very nice, Brian.

Thanks!  The part I'm happiest about is the speed: this is as fast as I
remember gmail being.  The Secret Ingredient is HTTP chunked encoding,
accessed through web.py's generators, and careful page design---almost
every byte from the server is renderable as it arrives, and later bytes
never disrupt placement of earlier objects.

> Your URL highlighter seems a bit trigger-happy though:
>
>    https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/8760s7zr47.fsf%40zancas.localnet
>
> I don't think bremner was trying to link to http://index.cc !

As a wise soul once told me, use a library and then blame them.  This is
the Mozilla Bleach library, used for both sanitizing text/html parts and
for linkifying text/plain parts.  But since that supports filtering:
sure, this can only linkify things starting with 'http[s]://'

>> It's possible to get it to dump the whole mbox by clicking through the
>> obvious links; please consider exploring at
>> https://nmweb.evenmere.org/search/monkey instead.
>
> this is interesting because it shows me threads where some messages have
> monkey in them, but i can't tell which messages actually have the
> relevant search term.  Maybe it could highlight the found messages?

Very careful examination would have shown that the em-dashes between
author and subject were red for matches.  Now matches are in italics.

> Also, once i'm looking at one message, i don't see an easy way to go
> "next" in the thread.

Yup.  The thread object isn't accessible by then: it existed in the
scope of the search query, and is gone by the time we show the message.
get_replies isn't available.  So what's the alternative?
get_thread_id(), search for that thread id, identify this message *in*
that thread id, and then link to the next message with a "next" link?
While doing it, why not show the thread structure at the bottom of the
message, I guess.

With bleach integrated (all of five lines), I think this is safe enough
to let random notmuch users run it.  The worst they'll do is expose
their mailstore on tcp/8080.  Any interest in taking this into the
upstream contrib directory?

-Brian

Re: web interface to notmuch

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

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On Fri 2017-10-27 00:04:21 -0400, Brian Sniffen wrote:
> Thanks!  The part I'm happiest about is the speed:

amen, it feels very lightweight.

> Very careful examination would have shown that the em-dashes between
> author and subject were red for matches.  Now matches are in italics.

cool.  perhaps assigning a class to those elements and stashing some CSS
would make that easier for folks to experiment with (and probably reduce
the bytecount transfered)?

or would that hurt the rendering time for some reason i'm unaware of?  i
haven't thought about these mechanics as much as you have.

> Yup.  The thread object isn't accessible by then: it existed in the
> scope of the search query, and is gone by the time we show the message.
> get_replies isn't available.  So what's the alternative?
> get_thread_id(), search for that thread id, identify this message *in*
> that thread id, and then link to the next message with a "next" link?
> While doing it, why not show the thread structure at the bottom of the
> message, I guess.

yep, i think that's right.

> With bleach integrated (all of five lines), I think this is safe enough
> to let random notmuch users run it.  The worst they'll do is expose
> their mailstore on tcp/8080.  Any interest in taking this into the
> upstream contrib directory?

Yes, i think this should move into contrib/ upstream.  And we should
think about what might be the appropriate way to package it for debian,
too.

        --dkg

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

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On Fri 2017-10-27 00:04:21 -0400, Brian Sniffen wrote:
> With bleach integrated (all of five lines), I think this is safe enough
> to let random notmuch users run it.

hm, bleach might be a little too aggressive.

jrollins just pointed toward:

https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/87innmvvam.fsf%40ligo.caltech.edu

which i'm pretty sure had actual content initially
(id:87innmvvam.fsf@ligo.caltech.edu) but it starts with stdin
redirection (using a left angle bracket) and then the rest of the
message is gone :/

        --dkg

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Matthew Lear]

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I've had a play with this this morning. It's great! The speed and page
loading efficiency is fantastic. Would be really nice if we could go
next/previous in the thread (yes I know I'm complaining about one extra
mouse click). Also, if I select a date via the drop down I need to delete
the timestamp that appears prior to searching, otherwise there is a xapian
error.
This is definitely a candidate solution for me, though.
Thanks Brian!
Cheers,
  Matt

On Fri, 27 Oct 2017, 05:24 Daniel Kahn Gillmor, <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>
wrote:

> On Fri 2017-10-27 00:04:21 -0400, Brian Sniffen wrote:
> > Thanks!  The part I'm happiest about is the speed:
>
> amen, it feels very lightweight.
>
> > Very careful examination would have shown that the em-dashes between
> > author and subject were red for matches.  Now matches are in italics.
>
> cool.  perhaps assigning a class to those elements and stashing some CSS
> would make that easier for folks to experiment with (and probably reduce
> the bytecount transfered)?
>
> or would that hurt the rendering time for some reason i'm unaware of?  i
> haven't thought about these mechanics as much as you have.
>
> > Yup.  The thread object isn't accessible by then: it existed in the
> > scope of the search query, and is gone by the time we show the message.
> > get_replies isn't available.  So what's the alternative?
> > get_thread_id(), search for that thread id, identify this message *in*
> > that thread id, and then link to the next message with a "next" link?
> > While doing it, why not show the thread structure at the bottom of the
> > message, I guess.
>
> yep, i think that's right.
>
> > With bleach integrated (all of five lines), I think this is safe enough
> > to let random notmuch users run it.  The worst they'll do is expose
> > their mailstore on tcp/8080.  Any interest in taking this into the
> > upstream contrib directory?
>
> Yes, i think this should move into contrib/ upstream.  And we should
> think about what might be the appropriate way to package it for debian,
> too.
>
>         --dkg
>

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Brian Sniffen]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> writes:

> On Fri 2017-10-27 00:04:21 -0400, Brian Sniffen wrote:
>> With bleach integrated (all of five lines), I think this is safe enough
>> to let random notmuch users run it.
>
> hm, bleach might be a little too aggressive.
>
> jrollins just pointed toward:
>
> https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/87innmvvam.fsf%40ligo.caltech.edu

That's fixed in 53403ecd, and there's some examples of bleach on a rope
at
https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/20141107190321.GL23609%40odin.tremily.us

The mbox URL is linkified, the many other link-like texts aren't.


Next/prev links are at the bottom, and a thread listing.  I haven't
thought through how to get the body delivered immediately, but speed
seems acceptable.  Next up, some style revisions---and I'd love
proposals for something that looks less awful, or at least makes the
interface more clear.  UI design is a strong anti-specialty for me.

Re: web interface to notmuch

[Matthew Lear]

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On Fri, 27 Oct 2017, 18:52 Brian Sniffen, <bts@evenmere.org> wrote:

> Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> writes:
>
> > On Fri 2017-10-27 00:04:21 -0400, Brian Sniffen wrote:
> >> With bleach integrated (all of five lines), I think this is safe enough
> >> to let random notmuch users run it.
> >
> > hm, bleach might be a little too aggressive.
> >
> > jrollins just pointed toward:
> >
> > https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/87innmvvam.fsf%40ligo.caltech.edu
>
> That's fixed in 53403ecd, and there's some examples of bleach on a rope
> at
> https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/20141107190321.GL23609%40odin.tremily.us
>
> The mbox URL is linkified, the many other link-like texts aren't.
>
>
> Next/prev links are at the bottom, and a thread listing.  I haven't
> thought through how to get the body delivered immediately, but speed
> seems acceptable.  Next up, some style revisions---and I'd love
> proposals for something that looks less awful, or at least makes the
> interface more clear.  UI design is a strong anti-specialty for me.
>

I've been running this today - standalone on localhost port 80 with the
built in CherryPy web server on my mail store. First impressions are it's
terrific :-) As my intended 'target' mail store will be geared towards a
'internal work stuff knowledge collection', lots of emails contain html
links to intranet pages and sites. I can adapt the bleach usage to suit (or
just remove it), but along the way of searching and viewing mail, I've
encountered quite a few occurrences of failing to UnicodeEncode. An example
backtrace looks like this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/web/application.py", line 239, in
process
    return self.handle()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/web/application.py", line 230, in
handle
    return self._delegate(fn, self.fvars, args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/web/application.py", line 420, in
_delegate
    return handle_class(cls)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/web/application.py", line 396, in
handle_class
    return tocall(*args)
  File "/b/git/notmuch-brians.git/contrib/notmuch-web/nmweb.py", line 153,
in GET
    sprefix=webprefix)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/jinja2/environment.py", line 989,
in render
    return self.environment.handle_exception(exc_info, True)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/jinja2/environment.py", line 754,
in handle_exception
    reraise(exc_type, exc_value, tb)
  File "templates/show.html", line 1, in top-level template code
    {% extends "base.html" %}
  File "templates/base.html", line 32, in top-level template code
    {% block content %}
  File "templates/show.html", line 12, in block "content"
    {% for part in format_message(m.get_filename(),mid): %}{{ part|safe
}}{% endfor %}
  File "/b/git/notmuch-brians.git/contrib/notmuch-web/nmweb.py", line 245,
in format_message_walk
    tags=safe_tags).encode(part.get_content_charset('ascii')))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u201c' in
position 1141: ordinal not in range(256)

127.0.0.1:60968 - - [31/Oct/2017 17:00:02] "HTTP/1.1 GET /show/
665d8c5c2b024898ae21951c4b8b4f93@CO2PR05MB747.namprd05.prod.outlook.com" -
500 Internal Server Error

I'm no Python expert, but from a quick google it would seem like the cause
of such an exception is related to not using utf-8.

Brian - do you think something needs modifying in nmweb.py to cater for
this type of thing, or is this somehow related my own mailstore (not sure
why that would be as my messages haven't been modified).
Cheers,
--  Matt

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Tomas Nordin]

Hi Matthew

Sorry for just chiming in here out of the blue. I don't really know
anything on the code you are discussing, but I have some experience with
python.

Matthew Lear <matt@bubblegen.co.uk> writes:

> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/web/application.py", line 239, in
> process
>     return self.handle()
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/web/application.py", line 230, in
> handle
>     return self._delegate(fn, self.fvars, args)
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/web/application.py", line 420, in
> _delegate
>     return handle_class(cls)
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/web/application.py", line 396, in
> handle_class
>     return tocall(*args)
>   File "/b/git/notmuch-brians.git/contrib/notmuch-web/nmweb.py", line 153,
> in GET
>     sprefix=webprefix)
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/jinja2/environment.py", line 989,
> in render
>     return self.environment.handle_exception(exc_info, True)
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/jinja2/environment.py", line 754,
> in handle_exception
>     reraise(exc_type, exc_value, tb)
>   File "templates/show.html", line 1, in top-level template code
>     {% extends "base.html" %}
>   File "templates/base.html", line 32, in top-level template code
>     {% block content %}
>   File "templates/show.html", line 12, in block "content"
>     {% for part in format_message(m.get_filename(),mid): %}{{ part|safe
> }}{% endfor %}
>   File "/b/git/notmuch-brians.git/contrib/notmuch-web/nmweb.py", line 245,
> in format_message_walk
>     tags=safe_tags).encode(part.get_content_charset('ascii')))

My guess is that the function part.get_content_charset is requesting the
encoding used for a message, providing 'ascii' as a backup if not found.
It is getting 'latin-1', which is hence tried for encoding output.

> UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u201c'
> in position 1141: ordinal not in range(256)

Here is an interactive python session to reproduce:

>>> u = u'\u201c'
>>> u
u'\u201c'
>>> type(u)
<type 'unicode'> # (un-encoded)
>>> u.encode('utf-8')
'\xe2\x80\x9c'   # utf-8 for encoding work fine
>>> print u.encode('utf-8')
“
>>> print u.encode('latin-1')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u201c' in position 0: ordinal not in range(256)

The character is not encodable with latin-1. So one should check that
the function getting the encoding is doing a proper job and if so blame
the message information.

Just my 2 cents

Best regards
--
Tomas

Re: web interface to notmuch

[Brian Sniffen]

> just remove it), but along the way of searching and viewing mail, I've
> encountered quite a few occurrences of failing to UnicodeEncode. An example
> backtrace looks like this:
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/web/application.py", line 239, in
> process
>     return self.handle()
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/web/application.py", line 230, in
> handle
>     return self._delegate(fn, self.fvars, args)
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/web/application.py", line 420, in
> _delegate
>     return handle_class(cls)
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/web/application.py", line 396, in
> handle_class
>     return tocall(*args)
>   File "/b/git/notmuch-brians.git/contrib/notmuch-web/nmweb.py", line 153,
> in GET
>     sprefix=webprefix)
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/jinja2/environment.py", line 989,
> in render
>     return self.environment.handle_exception(exc_info, True)
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/jinja2/environment.py", line 754,
> in handle_exception
>     reraise(exc_type, exc_value, tb)
>   File "templates/show.html", line 1, in top-level template code
>     {% extends "base.html" %}
>   File "templates/base.html", line 32, in top-level template code
>     {% block content %}
>   File "templates/show.html", line 12, in block "content"
>     {% for part in format_message(m.get_filename(),mid): %}{{ part|safe
> }}{% endfor %}
>   File "/b/git/notmuch-brians.git/contrib/notmuch-web/nmweb.py", line 245,
> in format_message_walk
>     tags=safe_tags).encode(part.get_content_charset('ascii')))
> UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u201c' in
> position 1141: ordinal not in range(256)
>
> 127.0.0.1:60968 - - [31/Oct/2017 17:00:02] "HTTP/1.1 GET /show/
> 665d8c5c2b024898ae21951c4b8b4f93@CO2PR05MB747.namprd05.prod.outlook.com" -
> 500 Internal Server Error
>
> I'm no Python expert, but from a quick google it would seem like the cause
> of such an exception is related to not using utf-8.

Neat.  So to get there, this has to be a text/html part.  It has to have
been decoded, either with the declared content type or with ascii.  If a
\u201c (left double quote) showed up, it didn't get decoded as
ascii---and indeed, it looks like the content-type specifies latin-1.
But now when we try to encode back, using the same latin-1, it fails?
That's really neat.

> Brian - do you think something needs modifying in nmweb.py to cater for
> this type of thing, or is this somehow related my own mailstore (not sure
> why that would be as my messages haven't been modified).

Lots of mail has busted encoding.  I've done some defensive work against
that---look at decodeAnyway and shed a tear for purity---but clearly not
enough.  Can you send me a message that causes the problem?

In the mean time, I think like 245 ought to be, appropriately indented:

    tags=safe_tags).encode(part.get_content_charset('ascii'),
    'xmlcharrefreplace'))

Thanks for the report---investigating it showed me that the search box
doesn't tolerate that character either.

-Brian

Re: web interface to notmuch

[Matthew Lear]

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On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 7:21 PM, Brian Sniffen <bts@evenmere.org> wrote:

>
> > I'm no Python expert, but from a quick google it would seem like the
> cause
> > of such an exception is related to not using utf-8.
>
> Neat.  So to get there, this has to be a text/html part.  It has to have
> been decoded, either with the declared content type or with ascii.  If a
> \u201c (left double quote) showed up, it didn't get decoded as
> ascii---and indeed, it looks like the content-type specifies latin-1.
> But now when we try to encode back, using the same latin-1, it fails?
> That's really neat.
>
> > Brian - do you think something needs modifying in nmweb.py to cater for
> > this type of thing, or is this somehow related my own mailstore (not sure
> > why that would be as my messages haven't been modified).
>
> Lots of mail has busted encoding.  I've done some defensive work against
> that---look at decodeAnyway and shed a tear for purity---but clearly not
> enough.  Can you send me a message that causes the problem?
>

I'll need to fix up the text in the message because it's confidential. That
should be easy enough to do.
I'll send it to you once I've done that.

One other thing - it looks like accessing attachments should work, but I've
seen messages in my local set up here which have attachments shown, but
I've not been able to retrieve them.
Not sure what would cause that. Also some messages which are tagged as
having attachments, don't have them shown by nmweb.

FWIW this link (
https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/CACMMjMLecmXopb8AATjE3UuCnNLOO%2B5Nmev5X8K-UostDEUdrQ%40mail.gmail.com)
has the tag attachment applied to the message, but there is no attachment
shown.  And another (
https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/87d31artti.fsf%40inf-8657.int-evry.fr).

Maybe text/plain only emails are the ones which aren't problematic w.r.t.
having their attachments shown?
Cheers,
--  Matt

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Matthew Lear]

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Comparing with the Haskell based notmuch-web, while slightly slower to
render a browser page with the same search terms as nmweb, I can view the
email which causes nmweb to throw the encoding exception just fine in it. I
guess something in that implementation is able to handle encoding
differently.
Regards,
  Matt

On Tue, 31 Oct 2017, 21:32 Matthew Lear, <matt@bubblegen.co.uk> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 7:21 PM, Brian Sniffen <bts@evenmere.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> > I'm no Python expert, but from a quick google it would seem like the
>> cause
>> > of such an exception is related to not using utf-8.
>>
>> Neat.  So to get there, this has to be a text/html part.  It has to have
>> been decoded, either with the declared content type or with ascii.  If a
>> \u201c (left double quote) showed up, it didn't get decoded as
>> ascii---and indeed, it looks like the content-type specifies latin-1.
>> But now when we try to encode back, using the same latin-1, it fails?
>> That's really neat.
>>
>> > Brian - do you think something needs modifying in nmweb.py to cater for
>> > this type of thing, or is this somehow related my own mailstore (not
>> sure
>> > why that would be as my messages haven't been modified).
>>
>> Lots of mail has busted encoding.  I've done some defensive work against
>> that---look at decodeAnyway and shed a tear for purity---but clearly not
>> enough.  Can you send me a message that causes the problem?
>>
>
> I'll need to fix up the text in the message because it's confidential.
> That should be easy enough to do.
> I'll send it to you once I've done that.
>
> One other thing - it looks like accessing attachments should work, but
> I've seen messages in my local set up here which have attachments shown,
> but I've not been able to retrieve them.
> Not sure what would cause that. Also some messages which are tagged as
> having attachments, don't have them shown by nmweb.
>
> FWIW this link (
> https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/CACMMjMLecmXopb8AATjE3UuCnNLOO%2B5Nmev5X8K-UostDEUdrQ%40mail.gmail.com)
> has the tag attachment applied to the message, but there is no attachment
> shown.  And another (
> https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/87d31artti.fsf%40inf-8657.int-evry.fr).
>
> Maybe text/plain only emails are the ones which aren't problematic w.r.t.
> having their attachments shown?
> Cheers,
> --  Matt
>
>
>

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Brian Sniffen]

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> On Oct 31, 2017, at 5:32 PM, Matthew Lear <matt@bubblegen.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> FWIW this link (https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/CACMMjMLecmXopb8AATjE3UuCnNLOO%2B5Nmev5X8K-UostDEUdrQ%40mail.gmail.com) has the tag attachment applied to the message, but there is no attachment shown.  And another (https://nmweb.evenmere.org/show/87d31artti.fsf%40inf-8657.int-evry.fr).

Funny thing, the text of those attachments was being emitted by the app server... but since an iframe tag used in showing text/html parts *wasn’t* being closed, that didn’t matter.

I’ll push some fixes to encoding to github later today.

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Matthew Lear]

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On Wed, 1 Nov 2017, 14:38 Brian Sniffen, <bts@evenmere.org> wrote:

> On Oct 31, 2017, at 5:32 PM, Matthew Lear <matt@bubblegen.co.uk> wrote
>
> I’ll push some fixes to encoding to github later today.
>

I've just tested with e3ba123 and there is a significant improvement. Also,
attachments can be accessed from html too. And it's even faster than
before! Sweet :-) I've still got a couple of mails which don't throw
exceptions but do have issues when rendered in the browser (encoding of the
body generates unreadable characters). I'll try to send you some examples
tomorrow.

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[Brian Sniffen]

> Assuming that you had a sanitize_this_html_part() function available to
> you, do you think it would be possible to make this safe?  Have you
> considered proposing it for inclusion in contrib upstream?

Okay, https://github.com/briansniffen/notmuch/tree/nmweb is now rebased
onto the notmuchmail.org head as of this morning.  All of the changes
are under contrib/notmuch-web.

I haven't done this before, so: exactly how would you like this proposed
for upstream inclusion?  It looks from
https://notmuchmail.org/contributing/ like you'd like documentation,
tests, NEWS, and then `git send-email`.  Is that right?  

Do you want this crunched into one commit, "write an e-mail client"?

Thanks,
Brian

Re: web interface to notmuch

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

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Hi Brian--

On Wed 2017-12-06 10:00:19 -0500, Brian Sniffen wrote:
> Okay, https://github.com/briansniffen/notmuch/tree/nmweb is now rebased
> onto the notmuchmail.org head as of this morning.  All of the changes
> are under contrib/notmuch-web.

thanks for doing this!  

traditionally, we've encouraged code contributions to come in in
separate patches (not one big lump), with each commit clearly justifying
their changes.  And yes, tests would make it much more likely that this
sweet contribution doesn't bitrot!

one thing i note is you've included a copy of jquery directly.  i think
we want to avoid having retrieved or generated code in the repository.
if there's an external dependency, the repo should point to it but it
shouldn't include it.  notmuch doesn't include gmime, but it states that
it has gmime as a dependency (with specific versions), and lets the
builder/maintainer retrieve the dependency themselves.  This makes
licensing, source vetting, and maintenance easier by ensuring that it
all stays loosely coupled.  Presumably you aren't signing up for
ensuring that any security vulnerabilities in jquery get pushed into the
notmuch repo too :)

Maybe you could do a similar explicitly-stated dependency for jquery
instead of including it directly?  debian ships jquery as libjs-jquery,
for example (though you could also use an explicit fetch from the web
for systems that aren't running an OS that provides a packaged form of
jquery).

other folks might have other preferences, i hope they'll chime in.

         --dkg

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Re: web interface to notmuch

[David Bremner]

Brian Sniffen <bts@evenmere.org> writes:

>> Assuming that you had a sanitize_this_html_part() function available to
>> you, do you think it would be possible to make this safe?  Have you
>> considered proposing it for inclusion in contrib upstream?
>
> Okay, https://github.com/briansniffen/notmuch/tree/nmweb is now rebased
> onto the notmuchmail.org head as of this morning.  All of the changes
> are under contrib/notmuch-web.
>

Maybe a minor point, but there is at least one existing "notmuch-web" [1].

I'm not sure if John Lenz (in copy) considers the project a going
concern, but it might be worth thinking about search engine collision.

> I haven't done this before, so: exactly how would you like this proposed
> for upstream inclusion?  It looks from
> https://notmuchmail.org/contributing/ like you'd like documentation,
> tests, NEWS, and then `git send-email`.  Is that right?  
>
> Do you want this crunched into one commit, "write an e-mail client"?

I think Daniel covered this well, but let me reinforce that we want to
review things in meaningful, not too large chunks.

[1]: https://bitbucket.org/wuzzeb/notmuch-web