Every now and then I'd get a question on Github or the community chat about the status of EteSync given that there hasn't been as much activity on the blog and the repos as there has been in the past.

The gist of it: the service works well, I and many others use it daily. However, I have much less time than before so the development of the apps has slowed down. With that being said they continue to be maintained, and they power many people's sync needs on a daily basis. Mine included.

The servers themselves are also actively maintained and are updated regularly. In fact, we had downtime earlier this week due to an upgrade (sorry again!). We also upgraded the billing code last month, and fixed some bugs with the email notification system.

As for support: all billing questions gets answered within a couple of days, though people asking technical questions are sent to the community chat for support. It's unfortunately unsustainable to provide personal technical support for $2 / month. Though the community (and documentation) have been great in answering all of the questions. Thanks a lot to everyone there!

The community is also very much alive, with people reporting issues, helping out with patches, etc. I'd love to get more people to help with the development of the server and various clients, there are a lot of cool features that could be built that are currently sitting in the backlog! Quite a few distros now include the EteSync libraries and server in their official repos, e.g. Arch, OpenWRT and Debian. Many thanks to the maintainers working on these.

We have some ideas for immediate improvements (thanks barath!) such as adding more maintainers, moving the docs to the wiki, and making sure to do more regular community updates. We will be working towards all of these in the upcoming months.

So in short: the service is alive and well, and we are providing privacy respecting and end-to-end encrypted sync for thousands of people on the hosted service, and many many more that host the server themselves.

Interested in helping maintaining EteSync? Please reach out at contact@etesync.com!

We are sorry! Due to a combination of unlucky events, sync was failing for everyone across all apps and the billing dashboard. IT'S NOW FIXED!

TL;DR: we haven't been hacked, the service is safe, accepting or rejecting the certificate would both have been fine and not lead to any compromise of your data or issues. This is in addition to the fact that EteSync is end-to-end encrypted so even if we were hacked (we weren't!), it would not have mattered for the safety of your data.

What to do?

Just dismiss the notification if you got it, that's it. No need to accept or reject the certificate (though either are fine).

What happened?

The EteSync certificates have expired causing all HTTPS connections to fail. Since EteSync enforces HTTPS, everything was failing.

How it happened?

EteSync, like many services out there, uses the popular LetsEncrypt service for issuing TLS (HTTPS) certificates for its servers. LetsEncrypt certificates have a short validity period of three months by design. This means that services have to update their certificates at least once every three months.

EteSync follows best practices and has an automated process that runs nightly, checks the validity of all of the certificates and renews any certificates that are due to expire in the next month (so we have a safety buffer). Unfortunately, while updating something in the renewal process two months ago we introduced a bug that was causing renewals to fail. In addition, our error monitoring for this script was also failing (unknowingly to us). To make matters even worse it happened in the middle of the European night which meant it took us quite a few hours to notice it before it got fixed.

Short & long term fixes

We fixed the issue with the renewal script so the error itself is now fixed. We are also going to fix (edit: fixed!) the issue with the error reporting for this script to make sure that we get these errors a long time before the certificates fail.

Another contributing fact was that this process was running nightly. While this may sound like a good idea to run things when people are sleeping, it's actually not. First of all, EteSync has users from all over the world, so users are always awake. Second of all, this means that failure cases, like this one, happen at night for the developers. Which is definitely not what you want. We changed the automated process to happen during the day.

We are sorry!

You trust us to be operational non-stop, and we failed you. There's no excuse. Getting perfect 100% uptime is hard, though we've had a good run without any issues so far. Well, until today... We've learned from this error and are making sure it never happens again.

Hello, I'm Kévin (@zecakeh), and I'm here to tell you about some of my recent contributions to EteSync Notes.

Here I was, back in December, still trying to find a good notes app. Those were my criteria:

• Open source
• Available on Android and Linux (or be compatible with other apps)
• Sync easily between my devices
• Nice look
• Have simple styling of notes
• Support simple to-do lists

And the extras:

• Self-hostable
• Encrypted
• A WYSIWYG editor
• Adapt to the screen size

I stumbled upon the brand new EteSync Notes app. After playing with it for a few minutes, I realized it didn't check all the boxes, but had a lot of potential: it was already fully functional and needed just a bit of polish. Since I was also looking into contributing to a community project at the time, I took a look at the repository and found out it was using React Native, which I was already familiar with, and I agreed with most of the feature requests in the issues. It was time to start my journey with the EteSync Notes project!

My first contribution

Since projects are not always very active, I decided to start with a small problem to see if help was welcome. It was something that was annoying me and was already mentioned in one of the issues: the FAB on the notes list would go over the dialog to create a new note when the keyboard was up. Working on an UI problem would allow me to do it quickly because I was already familiar with the framework and to familiarize myself with the code without having to dig too deeply. And here's the result:

I created a Pull Request and was amazed when it was reviewed and accepted one hour later! This motivated me even more!

Keeping it coming

Since then, I have kept going through the issues in the repository, or the ones I have encountered. That allowed me to have a better understanding of how the app worked little by little and to work on more complicated tasks. And when I had questions, I just needed to go to the IRC/Matrix Chat and ask.
Here are some notable improvements I have worked on:

What's coming next

A few things I might be working on next:

• Adaptive view on large screen with a split view
• Make the app feel more native on web with a pointer on links and visual change on hover
• Import/export notes
• Search notes
• Desktop versions?
• Improve integration with GNOME: GOA, GNOME Notes…
• Whatever you want…

I really want to thank Tom for being so approachable, available, helpful and patient with his reviews.

We are very excited to announce the release of Etebase - an open-source and end-to-end encrypted SDK and backend for applications. Etebase is the new name for the EteSync protocol, and what powers all of the EteSync apps.

We never want to use non-encrypted applications ever again, which is why we created EteSync in the first place. We believe that by enabling other developers to easily build encrypted applications, we can make this dream a reality. Etebase is therefore the direct continuation to our vision for EteSync. Let's end-to-end encrypt everything!

We already mentioned Etebase in a few previous blog posts, and it's already being used by developers and EteSync itself. So we figured it's finally time for a more official announcement. So this is it!

Already know what Etebase is? Head to the website or the docs to get started!

What is it exactly?

Etebase is a set of libraries and a server implementation (all open-source, of course) to help developers build encrypted applications. It hides away all of the encryption parts, and everything is done automatically in the background.

At the moment, it offers an easy way to save and sync user data in whatever simple or complex format your application requires. There are currently developer libraries for Rust, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java/Kotlin, Python, and C/C++, though we plan on adding more in the near future. We created place-holder repositories for a few languages we plan on supporting in the near future so you can star and watch them to sign-up for updates.

There is also easy to follow documentation for all of the above languages, including some example use cases and the first part of a formal specification.

In addition to the aforementioned capabilities, Etebase comes packed with a few additional goodies:

• Full change history (optional) - a full changed history of all your data is saved automatically.
• Integrity protections - use transactions and sync-tokens to ensure that your data is always consistent.
• Collaborative - it's easy to share the same data across different users.
• Fast and efficient - thanks to sync-tokens, only modified data is returned from the API making it very fast.
• Encrypted data de-duplication - changes to items are automatically de-duplicated. This means that if you change a small part of a very large file, only that part will need to be re-uploaded and saved.
• And much more...

Got any feedback? Please let us know!

Why are you releasing Etebase?

Over the years many developers have reached out to us about adding end-to-end encryption to their applications. We hope to enable them, and other developers to build the next-generate of applications as privacy-first and end-to-end encrypted.

Building encrypted applications comes with a myriad of challenges and requires changes to the development workflow. Good cryptography and bad cryptography look identical to the untrained eye, and the data being encrypted makes it harder for the server to maintain consistency, integrity and performance.

We already solved all of these problems (and more) in Etebase, so you don't have to. The same way that different applications don't reinvent HTTP for client-server communication, we believe they shouldn't reinvent Etebase for encryption.

EteSync Partners

Another thing we are very excited about is what we call partners. Partners build apps using Etebase using EteSync's Etebase instance, which means users just use their existing EteSync accounts. We then share the revenue from these users with the developers.

This lets developers build applications without worrying about the backend or costs at all, but also keep user data safe thanks to encryption. In addition to getting access to the large number of existing EteSync users.

More information is available on the Etebase website.

What's next?

We hope Etebase will enable a new age of privacy-first and end-to-end encrypted applications. Your data will no longer be used to track, analyze and manipulate you. Your data, yours only!

If you are a developer looking to secure your users' data: start using Etebase or come chat with us.

If you know of projects that could benefit from Etebase, please let us (and them) know!

Let's end-to-end encrypt everything!

Thank you NLnet and NGI0

The work on EteSync 2.0 is made possible with financial support from NLnet Foundation, courtesy of NGI0 Discovery and the European Commission DG CNECT's Next Generation Internet programme.

The NLnet foundation in general and the NGI0-PET in particular is funding projects to protect everyone's digital privacy, especially in the context of the "next generation" of the internet. It's an extremely important cause which we at EteSync are very much aligned with. Please help by spreading the word about them.

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.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

As you probably know EteSync is now supported natively by both KDE and GNOME. This means that you can now add EteSync accounts directly to GNOME, KDE and apps in their ecosystem such as Evolution, GNOME Calendar, Kontact and the likes.

This has been possible for a very long time using the DAV bridge, though with these integrations, the bridge is no longer needed.

As we said in the original announcement, the integrations will be released and packaged in distributions following the next GNOME and KDE releases. However, a lot of you have been asking about starting to use it now, and we can't blame you, as we wouldn't want to wait either! :)

Thanks to some hard work by daftaupe, sjolly, and others, there are now easy to use packages available for multiple distributions!

For the most up to date packaging information, please refer to the GNOME user guide and the KDE user guide. We are working on packages for more distributions every day. However at the time of this writing there are already packages for Arch (AUR), Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSuse and Mageia depending on whether you use Evolution or KDE. In addition, if your distribution isn't listed above, you can always just build the plugins from source.

Do you know how to create packages for your favourite distro and are willing to help? Need any help with setting up the modules? Please join us at the chat (IRC/Matrix/Web) and let us know!

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.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

We are very excited to announce the official release of EteSync 2.0!

This would not have been possible without the hundreds of testers that helped us make sure everything is solid! So thank you all!

If you already know what EteSync 2.0 is and just want to upgrade your account, please refer the EteSync 2.0 migration guide.

As we said in the post announcing EteSync 2.0, time flies. We still can't believe it has already been three and a half years since EteSync was first released. It started out as a simple end-to-end encrypted sync solution for Android. We have since added support for sharing data with other users, and we now have clients for the desktop (DAV bridge), the web, and iOS, built-in support in and Tasks.org, and there are add-ons being built for GNOME, KDE and Thunderbird.

What is EteSync 2.0?

EteSync uses the EteSync protocol (now Etebase protocol) behind the scenes to power all of the apps. While the existing protocol has served us well, it limited our progress and prevented us from achieving some of the things we would like to achieve for EteSync, so after three and a half years, it's finally time for a major protocol upgrade.

EteSync 2.0 is a great improvement over the 1.0 version, while still maintainig everyone's favourite features and capabilities, including, end-to-end encryption, sharing and a full version history. However, since so much has changed under the hood, EteSync 2.0 and 1.0 are incompatible, and you need to migrate your account to 2.0 in order to start using it.

What does it mean for you?

It means we are finally be able to offer some long awaited and often requested features such as notes synchronization and secure location sharing. It means that your sync is faster. It means the EteSync applications are simpler to develop, which means they are easier to improve. We are already seeing these benefits in all of the apps, which already work much better, and helped us reduce large amounts of code.

In addition, there are a lot of user-facing improvements and changes, including:

1. EteSync 2.0 uses usernames for identification (rather than emails previously), so you will need to choose a new username. Usernames should be at least 6 characters long. Shorter usernames will probably be allowed in the future. Changing your email and username will both be possible later on.
2. EteSync 2.0 has just one password that's used for both the encryption, and the login. It uses a zero-knowledge proof to authenticate to the server making sure your password never leaves your device. This makes it more secure than before but much easier to use. Please make sure to keep it safe and don't lose it, as without it you won't be able to access your data!
3. The change log (previously change journal) used to show all of the changes in one long list. Changes are now grouped per item with only the latest changed shown. To show previous changes you need to click on an item and check the past revisions.
4. Invitations UI is a bit different, and there's now a special page for accepting or rejecting invitations, and it's now also easier to leave collections you've been invited to.
5. "Journal" has now been renamed to "Collection", which is a more accurate term and people find it less confusing.
6. You can now easily change your account's email address directly from the dashboard.

What's next

The above is just the tip of the iceberg. The biggest benefit of changing to EteSync 2.0 is not how it improves things, but rather what it enables us to do next!

Thanks to EteSync 2.0 we were already able to release EteSync Notes. Additionally, as we said in the previous post, we aren't ready to get into details just yet, but we plan on bringing in some long-awaited features such as secure location sharing. Expect a few more announcements in the coming month or two which will make EteSync a more complete solution for your data syncing needs!

We also plan on formally verifying the protocol using Verifpal and releasing a formal spec to make it easier for other developers to examine, use and improve it, and potentially making it into a standard.

Upgrade to EteSync 2.0

Upgrading to EteSync 2.0 is very easy. First thing to do is to make sure you've update all of your apps to their latest versions.

As we said above, EteSync 2.0 accounts are incompatible with EteSync 1.0 accounts, so a new account needs to be created. However, the billing for both is linked. The migration tool automatically takes care of linking the billing, so you don't need to worry about that.

For step-by-step instructions please refer to the EteSync 2.0 migration guide.

Developers: easily build end-to-end encrypted applications

Over the years many developers have reached out to us about adding end-to-end encryption to their applications. Building end-to-end encrypted applications is both hard to get right, and very time consuming, so using an existing solution makes a lot of sense, especially since EteSync is versatile and isn't limited to contacts, calendars, tasks and notes.

We are now also ready for developers. For more information, please take a look at the developer homepage (Etebase).

Thank you NLnet and NGI0

The work on EteSync 2.0 is made possible with financial support from NLnet Foundation, courtesy of NGI0 Discovery and the European Commission DG CNECT's Next Generation Internet programme.

The NLnet foundation in general and the NGI0-PET in particular is funding projects to protect everyone's digital privacy, especially in the context of the "next generation" of the internet. It's an extremely important cause which we at EteSync are very much aligned with. Please help by spreading the word about them.

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.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

We are happy to announce the first version of EteSync Notes! 🎉🎉🎉

IMPORTANT: EteSync Notes requires an EteSync 2.0 account.

EteSync Notes is the first new app to use the EteSync 2.0 protocol. As we mentioned in a previous post, a big part of the motivation behind EteSync 2.0 is what it enables for the future of EteSync. EteSync Notes is the first fruit of that effort.

Getting started

EteSync Notes depends on the EteSync 2.0 protocol, as such, it requires an EteSync 2.0 account. EteSync 2.0 is still in beta, though it has been tested by many users over the last month and it's been working very well.

To get an EteSync 2.0 beta account, please refer to the beta announcement post.

Once you've migrated your account to EteSync 2.0 (or signed up for a new one), you can start using the notes app!

You can get it from:

• Google Play
• iOS App Store
• F-Droid
• Web client
• Source Code

What's next for EteSync Notes

While this is only the first release, it's already quite stable and feature complete (even includes a dark theme!). With that being said, we are aware that some features are missing, and that there may be some issues. So please, report issues as you find them.

There are a few things missing that we are aware of and plan on addressing soon, namely:

• Labels (tags) for organising the notes.
• File and image attachments.
• Improved markdown support (e.g. checkboxes).
• A rich text editor
• Improve the look and feel of the web client
• Show the revision history per note

Please open a ticket if we missed anything important.

A quick tour

EteSync notes uses Markdown for note formatting. Markdown is a rich formatting language that is easy to write by hand (cheatsheet). In the future we will have a nicer rich text editor that lets you editor Markdown files using the GUI, but until then, you can just use Markdown.

Like all EteSync apps, EteSync Notes support securely sharing notes between users. In order to share a note you need to create a new notebook and share that notebook with other users. After you do that, all the notes in that notebook will be encrypted and shared automatically.

The EteSync Notes app uses the same concepts you are already familiar with from EteSync. This includes a full change history for all of your notes! The change history is not currently visible in the app, but it's all kept behind the scenes.

Thank you NLnet and NGI0

EteSync Notes is based on EteSync 2.0, and the work on EteSync 2.0 is made possible with financial support from NLnet Foundation, courtesy of NGI0 Discovery and the European Commission DG CNECT's Next Generation Internet programme.

The NLnet foundation in general and the NGI0-PET in particular is funding projects to protect everyone's digital privacy, especially in the context of the "next generation" of the internet. It's an extremely important cause which we at EteSync are very much aligned with. Please help by spreading the word about them.

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.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

We are happy to announce that EteSync 2.0 is now ready for testers! Are you interested in helping us with testing? Please read on! Not sure what is EteSync 2.0? Please read our previous post on the topic.

Introduction

We have been working on EteSync 2.0 for the last six months, though in a sense for a lot longer. It incorporates a lot of the feedback we got from you over the years, and the things we have learned in the three and a half years of running this service. As mentioned in our previous post, a lot of the changes are behind the scenes and will enable us to build on top of, though there are a few changes that are worth mentioning here again as they are important for testers.

1. EteSync 2.0 uses usernames for identification (rather than emails previously), so you will need to choose a new username. Usernames should be at least 6 characters long. Shorter usernames will probably be allowed in the future. Changing your email and username will both be possible later on.
2. EteSync 2.0 has just one password that's used for both the encryption, and the login. It uses a zero-knowledge proof to authenticate to the server making sure your password never leaves your device. Please make sure to keep it safe and don't lose it, as without it you won't be able to access your data!
3. The change log (previously change journal) used to show all of the changes in one long list. Changes are now grouped per item with only the latest changed shown. To show previous changes you need to click on an item and check the past revisions.
4. Invitations UI is a bit different, and there's now a special page for accepting or rejecting invitations, and it's now also easier to leave collections you've been invited for.
5. "Journal" has now been renamed to "Collection", which is a more accurate term and people find it less confusing.

In addition to the above, we also improved the clients while working on them. Especially the web UI which should now be faster and easier to use than ever. There may also be some other changes we forgot to mention.

How to start testing

As mentioned above, EteSync 2.0 uses usernames instead of emails and has a different authentication mechanism. This means that EteSync 2.0 accounts are internally new accounts that need to be created.

If you are new to EteSync and would like to give it a go, you can signup directly from the new web and Android clients (links below).

If you already use EteSync 1.0, there is a migration tool that automatically handles both the account creation and migrating your data over (including the full change history). It's currently only available for the web client, but will soon also be available for the Android and iOS clients.

There are migration tools available for migrating your account. The easiest is probably the web based migration tool which is available here: EteSync 2.0 migration tool. The Android app comes with its own migration tool. You can access it by clicking on the account you would like to migrate, then the top-right menu, and then "EteSync 2.0 Migration".

The migration tool only copies your data over, so if you change your mind, you can always go back to version 1.0. Just be aware that new changes made to 2.0 won't sync back to 1.0 and vice-versa, so you will have to copy them over manually if you change back to 1.0.

To make testing easier, billing is currently disabled for EteSync 2.0 accounts, they are all on infinite trials. We will however turn billing on for all EteSync 2.0 accounts in the next few weeks, and will automatically link your existing EteSync accounts to the EteSync 2.0 accounts using your email address so billing information will be transferred over automatically. Edit: billing is now turned on for EteSync 2.0.

Here are links for the EteSync 2.0 compatible apps:

• Android: available on the Play Store and F-Droid.
• Web
• EteSync-DAV (DAV Bridge) - Version 0.30.0 or newer
• iOS: available on the App Store
• GNOME (Evolution): ready
• KDE (Kontact and etc): ready
• External apps:
  • OpenTasks: works.
  • Tasks.org: works with the new OpenTasks-like integration.

What is there to test? Everything. A few of us already use EteSync 2.0 instead of EteSync 1.0 and it works very well, however we realise that there may be some bugs lying around. So please, report every issue you see. You can do it either in the respective bug trackers, by mail, or our chat (see links at the bottom of the post).

We are aware that not all of the strings have been updated (e.g. some dialogs still refer to 1.0 journals), and on Android we still haven't implemented restoring an item to a specific state or sending email invitations, and the signup flow needs some more work, but other than that, everything should work. So please, report every issue you encounter.

If you are self-hosting, the server is available here, though it doesn't yet have all of the easy-config stuff that EteSync 1.0 had that made self-hosting easier. We will port them over in the coming weeks.

What's coming soon

As said in the original post, EteSync 2.0 brings with it a lot of improvements, but in addition to the improvements to the existing EteSync apps, where it really shines is what it enables us to do next.

We aren't ready to get into details just yet, but we plan on bringing in some long-awaited features such as notes synchronization and secure location sharing. These, however, are just the tip of the iceberg. We have a lot more coming, so expect a few more announcements in the coming month or two which will make EteSync a more complete solution for your data syncing needs!

As for the EteSync 2.0 release itself, we don't have an exact date yet, but it's imminent. There are no major bugs that we are aware of, and everything seems to be working well. We would just like to have more people test it, so we can be extra sure that everything works as smoothly as it should.

Developers: using the EteSync protocol in your app

Over the years many developers have reached out to us about adding end-to-end encryption to their applications. Building end-to-end encrypted applications is both hard to get right, and very time consuming, so using an existing solution makes a lot of sense, especially since EteSync is versatile and isn't limited to contacts, calendars and tasks.

We are now also ready for developers. For more information, please take a look at the developer homepage (Etebase).

Thank you NLnet and NGI0

The work on EteSync 2.0 is made possible with financial support from NLnet Foundation, courtesy of NGI0 Discovery and the European Commission DG CNECT's Next Generation Internet programme.

The NLnet foundation in general and the NGI0-PET in particular is funding projects to protect everyone's digital privacy, especially in the context of the "next generation" of the internet. It's an extremely important cause which we at EteSync are very much aligned with. Please help by spreading the word about them.

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.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

Google Summer of Code 2020 has now ended and the results are amazing! We can't believe it has already been four months since the projects were accepted into GSoC, but here we are. There are now native EteSync integrations for both GNOME (e.g. Evolution) and KDE (e.g. Kontact).

What is EteSync?

EteSync is a secure, end-to-end encrypted, and privacy respecting sync for your contacts, calendars and tasks. Easy to use and open source - it seamlessly integrates with your existing apps so you won't even notice you are using it! Think CalDAV but encrypted in a way that no one but you can access it. Not hackers getting access to your servers or you server admins!

For an introduction to end-to-end encryption please take a look at our related blog post. For more information about EteSync, please head to our website.

Using the new integrations

Thanks to these new integrations, you can now use EteSync accounts directly with any apps that use the GNOME or KDE personal information management systems (Evolution, Kontact and many more), without the need for the DAV bridge.

In addition to it being much easier to setup, it's also a lot faster, more efficient, and in general just works better.

The integrations will be released and packaged in distributions following the next GNOME and KDE releases, though until then you can either build them yourself from source, or use one of our pre-built packages if you distribution has them.

To get started, please check out the respective user guides:

• The GNOME user guide.
• The KDE user guide

Thank you

Huge thanks to both Shashwat Jolly (sjolly on IRC) and Nour E-Din El-Nhass (nourmat on IRC), the two GSoC participants who did all of the work and made it happen. To the mentors from GNOME (Milan Crha), and KDE (Daniel Vrátil, Volker Krause and Adriaan de Groot). To the GNOME and KDE GSoC admins who made GSoC sucha breeze. To the GSoC team for running this great program. And last, but definitely not least: to all of the testers from the community who helped make sure everything works as smoothly as it should, and is ready to be merged and used.

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.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

Time flies. It has already been three and a half years since EteSync was first released. It started out as a simple end-to-end encrypted sync solution for Android. We have since added support for sharing data with other users, and we now have clients for the desktop (DAV bridge), the web, and iOS, built-in support in vdirsyncer and Tasks.org, and there add-ons being built for GNOME, KDE and Thunderbird.

All of the above was made possible thanks to the EteSync protocol, which remained mostly unchanged during this whole period. However, while the existing protocol has served us well, it limited our progress and prevented us from achieving some of the things we would like to achieve for EteSync, so after three and a half years, it's finally time for a major protocol upgrade.

What does it mean for you?

It means we will finally be able to offer some long awaited and often requested features such as notes synchronization and secure location sharing. It means that your sync will be faster. It means the EteSync applications will be simpler to develop, which means they will be easier to improve.

We will also change the EteSync usernames to be actual usernames instead of based on the email addresses. This will make it easier to support changing the email addresses you use with EteSync.

The above improvements are just the tip of the iceberg. We have a lot more coming, so expect a few more announcements in the coming month or two which will make EteSync a more complete solution for your data syncing needs!

In addition, the new version of the protocol will be formally verified using Verifpal and will be based on the widely used and audited libsodium, which together will provide very high confidence that everything is as secure as it should be. We also plan on releasing a formal spec of the protocol to make it easier for other developers to build implementations in other languages.

What's next?

The new version of the protocol is essentially ready, and the server side is fully implemented. We now need to upgrade all of the existing applications to use it. We have already made quite a bit of progress on this front, and we hope to have the web, Android, iOS and DAV bridge all ready for testing within the next few weeks.

After we are certain everything works as expected, we will add migration tools to each of the clients that will easily upgrade your EteSync accounts to EteSync v2.

Until then, we would love to get some help with making sure everything works as expected, if you are interested in helping out please reach out to us at the community chat (IRC/Matrix/Web), or email us at v2-testing@etesync.com. Edit: testing is now open for everyone! More information at the new blogpost.

Using the EteSync protocol in your app

Over the years many developers have reached out to us about adding end-to-end encryption to their applications. Building end-to-end encrypted applications is both hard to get right, and very time consuming, so using an existing solution makes a lot of sense, especially since EteSync is versatile and isn't limited to contacts, calendars and tasks.

With this new version of the protocol, the client libraries have been designed with 3rd party developers in mind, making it easier than ever to use the EteSync libraries in your apps. If you are interested, please let us know by emailing us at contact@etesync.com.

Thank you NLnet and NGI0

The work on EteSync 2.0 is made possible with financial support from NLnet Foundation, courtesy of NGI0 Discovery and the European Commission DG CNECT's Next Generation Internet programme.

The NLnet foundation in general and the NGI0-PET in particular is funding projects to protect everyone's digital privacy, especially in the context of the "next generation" of the internet. It's an extremely important cause which we at EteSync are very much aligned with. Please help by spreading the word about them.

If you are working on such a project and think you can make a big difference with some financial help, I suggest you apply here.

More specifically, if you have any cool project ideas related to EteSync please apply, or reach out to discuss it. We will be happy to help you with the application, and do our best to help with your actual project.

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.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

Since we've had a lot of new visitors from the GNOME and KDE community getting to this blog post we've added a short introduction section.

What is EteSync?

EteSync is a secure, end-to-end encrypted, and privacy respecting sync for your contacts, calendars and tasks. Easy to use and open source - it seamlessly integrates with your existing apps so you won't even notice you are using it! Think CalDAV but encrypted in a way that no one but you can access it. Not hackers getting access to your servers or you server admins!

For an introduction to end-to-end encryption please take a look at our related blog post. For more information about EteSync, please head to our website.

The rest of the post

As readers of this blog you are probably aware that there are two EteSync related projects in this year's Google Summer of Code. The first project is an EteSync backend for Akonadi, the KDE personal information management server. The second project is an EteSync module for Evolution data server, the GNOME personal information management server.

We have previously written here about the great work both sjolly and nourmat have been doing, though this post is different. It is finally time for beta testing! Both of the modules have been thoroughly tested locally, and have been reviewed by the maintainers of GNOME, KDE and EteSync and are ready for some real-life testing by real users.

Are you a GNOME or KDE user and willing to give the modules a try? Please come join us at the community chat (IRC/Matrix/Web), or email us at gsoc-testing@etesync.com for instructions on how to get started with the testing.

Your help will be much appreciated and will help us catch bugs and fix them sooner rather than later!

Thank you for your help!

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.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

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.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

When you first login into your account, the different EteSync apps automatically create a few default collections for you to use. One for calendar, one for contacts and one for tasks.

Until very recently, the default name for each of these collections was "Default". Many users found it confusing over the years, though we never got around to fixing it. This has finally changed thanks to a user that reminded us of how confusing it is. We rely on your feedback to make the service better, so please, keep it coming!

The name names for the collections are now as follows: "My Calendar", "My Contacts", and "My Tasks". This is how it looked before vs now:

Do you have anything else you think we should improve? Or do you think the naming is not great? Please let us know!

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.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

We have been working hard on a few projects we can't wait to release and share with you. Though until then, here are a few recent updates regarding the web client:

Dark Mode!

Dark mode has gained a lot of popularity in the last few years, and accordingly, a lot of you have been asking for it. We first introduced it to the web client more than a month ago, so if you happened to browse the settings page you might have noticed it.

Here is how it looks:

To enable it, just open the web client, go to Settings and enable dark mode. It's still not perfect so if you notice any issues, please report them at the issue tracker.

Support for tagging tasks

You can now add arbitrary tags to tasks in order to classify them to your liking. There's also autocomplete for a pre-configured list of tags, though we will soon improve it to autocomplete to any of your existing ones.

Significant performance improvements for lists

Some users were reporting slow rendering of address books and journal entries for very long journals. This was happening because we were rendering the long lists all at once instead of loading them gradually. This has now been fixed, and the lists load as needed.

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.

Come chat with us on IRC/Matrix, or follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook, reddit or RSS for the latest updates and privacy-related content!

As discussed in a previous post, there are two EteSync related projects in this year's Google Summer of Code. The first project is an EteSync backend for Akonadi, the KDE personal information management server. The second project is an EteSync module for Evolution data server, the GNOME personal information management server.

The summer of code coding period has officially started only a week ago, but both the students have already made some really nice progress that we just had to share. Using the modules they wrote, you can now add EteSync accounts natively (no need for the DAV bridge) to both GNOME and KDE and have them fetch and display your EteSync address books and contacts!

Here is how it looks when adding an EteSync address book to KAddressBook (KDE):

And here is how the address books and contacts look:

Here is how the address books and contacts look in Evolution (GNOME):

This is just the first step towards seamlessly using EteSync in GNOME and KDE, and things are far from ready, but it's already a pleasure to see!

For more information on how their progress and how to try out the code, please check out Shashwat Jolly's blog post about his progress with the EteSync module for KDE (Akonadi), and Nour E-Din El-Nhass's blog post about his progress with the EteSync module for GNOME (Evolution).

We will continue to cover their progress as they go along and hit noteworthy milestones, but if you'd like to follow their progress as they go along, you should probably follow them on social media, and follow their respective blogs. In addition, they are both on the EteSync IRC/Matrix channel, so come and join us there to chat with the developers directly!