Even though there's a Thunderbird add-on in the works, and that the GNOME and KDE EteSync plugins are making great progress, it does not mean we have forgotten about EteSync-DAV, the desktop DAV bridge. We are still working hard on it, and we don't plan on stopping in the forseeable future.
As you may know, EteSync-DAV is an EteSync compatibility layer that lets you use EteSync with any CalDAV and CardDAV supporting client such as Thunderbird, Evolution, Outlook and Calendar.app. You just run it locally, point your DAV client to it, and all of the encryption and syncing is handled automatically for your in the background.
There have been been two major changes in the most recent DAV bridge release that greatly improve the user experience! In summary, syncs are faster now, and they happen more often if your DAV client requests it. Additionally, if you use want to use SOCKS proxy (e.g. Tor), you can now do it!
Changing the sync to being semi-synchronous
As you may remember, we have previously improved the DAV bridge to work in an asynchronous manner. If you don't remember why we did it, please take a look at our previous post on the topic for more information. Here is how it looked before the most recent page (picture taken from the previous post):
This improvement was great and made everything faster by doing the syncs in the background. The main problem with this change though is that as you can see, the DAV bridge is replying to Thunderbird before it finished fetching data from the server. This means that EteSync DAV may return stale information!
This is not an issue in most cases, as the sync happens automatically in the background, but it was very annoying when testing things, because you are not getting immediate feedback, and was very confusing for users.
We have no changed it so that the sync happens in the background, like before, though unlike before it now also tries to wait for a short period of time to see if it's able to return fresh information before giving up and returning stale one.
Socks proxy support
A lot of people use proxies for various reasons, for example if their corporate environment requires using one, or if they use Tor for example.
The DAV bridge has always supported proxies, though due to an oversight, the docker image and the pre-built binaries didn't have this support included. This has now fixed, and you can finally use SOCKS proxies with the most recent DAV bridge version by setting the HTTPS_PROXY (https_proxy on some platforms) enivornemnt variable and launching the DAV bridge.
As usual, we would like to remind you that we rely on your feedback and contributions to make EteSync better. Do you have any suggestions or are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.
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