thunderbird - EteSync

EteSync 2.0 Is Now Released!

Tom Hacohen — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 09:41:14 GMT

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:

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.
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!
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.
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.
"Journal" has now been renamed to "Collection", which is a more accurate term and people find it less confusing.
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!

GNOME and KDE EteSync Projects Accepted to GSoC

Tom Hacohen — Tue, 05 May 2020 12:16:19 GMT

We are very happy to announce that two EteSync related projects have been accepted to this year's Google Summer of Code, one with GNOME and one with KDE!

In case you are unfamiliar, GSoC is a paid summer internships focused on introducing students to open source software development. The program just started and will end in August. During this period, each student will work on a programming project with a mentoring organization.

The first project is an EteSync backend for Akonadi, the KDE personal information management server, and will be worked on by Shashwat Jolly (sjolly on IRC). The second project is an EteSync module for Evolution data server, the GNOME personal information management server, and will be worked on by Nour E-Din El-Nhass (nourmat on IRC).

This means, that by the end of the summer, EteSync will be natively supported in both the GNOME and the KDE and applications using their personal information servers such as Evolution, KMail and many others. What does it actually mean? It means users of these applications will no longer need to use the EteSync DAV adapter for syncing their contacts, calendars and tasks, and can just add their EteSync accounts directly!

On related news: as you may remember, we have previously announced a similar effort being worked on for Thunderbird. Unfortunately, the effort is delayed due to COVID-19, though we hope John will be able to get back to working on it as soon as possible, and hopefully have it ready in the next few months.

Desktop DAV Bridge: Speed-Ups and Photo Support

Tom Hacohen — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 14:39:53 GMT

Even though there is a native Thunderbird client in the works, it does not mean we have forgotten about EteSync-DAV, the desktop DAV bridge. It's quite the contrary.

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.

Many people rely on it for syncing their EteSync contacts and calendars with their favourite desktop clients, and while it got the job done, there were two major issues that were affecting many users. The first was slow sync times for users that were geographically far from our servers. The second was that contact photos were not being synced. Both of these have now been fixed! You can get the latest changes by updating to version 0.13.0.

If you are interested in some more technical details, please read on.

Slow sync times

EteSync-DAV serves as a proxy between your DAV desktop clients and the EteSync server. This means, that when your desktop client (e.g. Thunderbird) initiates a sync with EteSync-DAV there are a few syncs going on behind the scenes.

Let's use Thunderbird as an example desktop client. When syncing, Thunderbird would first initiate the sync with EteSync-DAV, then EteSync-DAV would initiate a sync with the EteSync server, wait for it to finish, and only then would it send back the fresh information to Thunderbird. The sync looked something like this:

Etesync Dav Sync Before the Changes: Wait for the Slow Sync

Since EteSync-DAV is run locally, the connection between Thunderbird and EteSync-DAV is quite fast, and the connection between EteSync-DAV and the EteSync server is comparably slow. Though because EteSync-DAV was waiting for the sync with the EteSync server to finish before replying to Thunderbird, the local sync was slow too.

With the new version, we have decoupled the two syncs. The slower syncs between EteSync-DAV and the EteSync server now happen periodically in the background (are also triggered more often if requested by the Thunderbird), so the sync between Thunderbird and EteSync-DAV can be instantaneous. After the changes the sync looks more like:

Etesync Dav Sync after the Changes: No More Waiting for the Slow Sync

As you can see, the local sync is now completely independent from the slower remote sync, which makes editing events in Thunderbird and other desktop clients instantaneous.

Missing Photo field when syncing contacts

Before this change, contact photos were not synced when using EteSync-DAV. This was because EteSync uses the newer vCard version 4.0 interally, but Radicale, the Cal/CardDAV server we use to power EteSync-DAV, as well as other clients such as Apple's Contacts.app only support vCard version 3.0. In order to solve this inconsistency we transform between the two versions in EteSync-DAV. Until now, this conversion didn't include the Photo and Logo properties, but with the latest EteSync-DAV these too are now supported.

Feedback, suggestions and contributions

As usual, we would like to remind you that we rely on your feedback to make EteSync better. Do you have any suggestions or are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

In addition, your contributions are always welcome! Be it testing, design, code or helping us spread the word! Every bit helps in making EteSync better for everyone. If you are interested in contributing and don't know where to start, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Until next time!

The images above use modified icons by Freepik from flaticon.com that are licensed under CC 3.0 BY.

Native Thunderbird Add-On

Tom Hacohen — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 09:19:50 GMT

We are very excited to share that John Bieling, the author of the popular TbSync Thunderbird add-on, is working on an EteSync add-on for Thunderbird and TbSync!

With this add-on, users will be able to use EteSync directly from Thunderbird, without the need for the EteSync-DAV bridge. This plugin will drastically lower the barrier of entry, as well as improve the performance and overall experience of using EteSync on the desktop.

This add-on will make it possible for many more users, especially non-technical ones, to end-to-end encrypt and sync their contacts, calendars and tasks.

What's next?

Development has already started, the source code will be pushed to the project's repository as progress is made, and beta versions will be made available as early as possible. Please let us know if you would like to help us with the testing.

For progress updates, please follow us on Mastodon, Twitter, Facebook or RSS, or join our IRC channel at #etesync on irc.freenode.net.

NLnet foundation and NGI0

This work will be done by John with financial support from the NLnet Foundation, courtesy of NGI0 Discovery and the European Commission DG CNECT's Next Generation Internet programme. For more information about the project, please refer to the project page on the NLnet website.

NLnet have also previously supported our work on the iOS client, and it is a great privilege to have another project related to EteSync supported by them. The NLnet foundation in general and the NGI0-PET in particular are funding projects to protect everyone's digital privacy, especially in the context of the "next generation internet". It's an extremely important cause which we at EteSync are very much aligned with.

Feedback, suggestions and contributions

As usual, we would like to take this opportunity to remind you that we want to hear your thoughts. Do you have any suggestions or are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

Until next time!