Oh Gosh, Trying to Find a New Email Provider in 2020

In the year 2020, I decided to move out of my GSuite account (née Google Apps for Business), which allowed me to use Gmail for my personal domain, and that I have used for the past ten years or so. It’s not that I have a problem with Gmail (I worked nearly seven years for Google now, why would it be a problem?) or that I think the service is not up to scratch (as this experience is proving me, I’d argue that it’s still the best service you can rely upon for small and medium businesses — which is the area I focused on when I ran my own company). It’s just that I’m not a business and the features that GSuite provides over the free Gmail no longer make up for the services I’m missing.

But I still wanted to be able to use my own domain for my mail, rather than going back to the standard Gmail domain. So I decided to look around, and migrate my mail to another paid, reliable, and possibly better solution. Alas, the results after a week of looking and playing around are not particularly impressive to me.

First of all I discarded, without even looking at it, the option of self-hosting my mail. I don’t have the time, nor the experience, nor the will to have to deal with my own email hosting. It’s a landmine of issues and risks and I don’t intend to accept them. So if you’re about to suggest this, feel free to not comment. I’m not going to entertain those suggestions anyway.

I ended up looking at what people have been suggesting on Twitter a few times and evaluated two options: ProtonMail and FastMail. I ended up finding both lacking. And I think I’m a bit more upset with the former than the latter, for reasons I’ll get to in this (much longer than usual) blog post.

My requirements for a replacement solution were to have a reliable webmail interface, with desktop notifications. A working Android app. And security at login. I was not particularly interested in ProtonMail’s encrypt-and-sign everything approach, but I could live with that. But I wanted something that wouldn’t risk letting everyone in with just a password, so 2FA was a must for me. I was also hoping to find something that would make it easy to deal with git send-email, but I ended up accepting right away that nothing would be anywhere close to the solution that we found with Gmail and GSuite (more on that later.)

Bad 2FA Options For All

So I started by looking at the 2nd Factor Authentication options for the two providers. Google being the earliest adopter of the U2F standard means of course that this is what I’ve been using, and would love to keep using once I replace it. But of the two providers I was considering, only FastMail stated explicitly it supported U2F. I was told that ProtonMail expects to add support for it this year, but I couldn’t even tell that from their website.

So I tried first FastMail, which has a 30 days free trial. To set up the U2F device, you need to provide a phone number as a recovery option — which gets used for SMS OTP. I don’t like SMS OTP because it’s not really secure (in some countries taking over a phone number is easier than taking over an email address), and because it’s not reliable the moment you don’t have mobile network services. It’s easy to mistake the “no access to mobile network” with “no access to Internet” and say that it doesn’t really matter, but there are plenty of places where I would be able to reach the Internet and not receive SMS: planes, tube platforms, the office when I arrived in London, …

But surely U2F is enough, why am I even bothering complaining about SMS OTP, given that you can disable it once the U2F security key is added? Well, turns out that when I tried to login on the Android app, I was just sent an SMS with the OTP to log myself in. Indeed, after I removed the phone number backup option, the Android app threw me a lovely error of «U2F is your only two-step verification method, but this is not supported here.» On Android, which can act as an U2F token.

As I found out afterwards, you can add a TOTP app as well, which solves the issue of logging in on Android without mobile network service, but by that point I had already started looking at ProtonMail, because it was not the best first impression to start with.

ProtonMail and the Bridge of Destiny

ProtonMail does not provide standard IMAP/SMTP access, because encryption (that’s the best reason I can get from the documentation, I’m not sure at all what this was all about, but honestly, that’s as far as I care to look into it). If you want to use a “normal” mail agent like Thunderbird, you need to use a software, accessible to paying customers only, that acts as “bridge”. As far as I can tell after using it, it appears to be mostly a way to handle the authentication rather than the encryption per se. Indeed, you log into the Bridge software with username, password and OTP, and then it provides localhost-only endpoints for IMAP4 and SMTP, with a generated local password. Neat.

Except it’s only available in Beta for Linux, so instead I ended up running it on Windows at first.

This is an interesting approach. Gmail implemented, many years ago, a new extension to IMAP (and SMTP) that allows using OAuth 2 for IMAP logins. This effectively delegates the login action to a browser, rather than executing it inline in the protocol, and as such it allows to request OTPs, or even supporting U2F. Thunderbird on Windows does work very well with this and even supports U2F out of the box.

Sidenote: Thunderbird seems to have something silly going on. When you add a new account to it, it has a drop-down box to let you select the authentication method (or go for “Autodetect”). Unfortunately, the drop-down does not have the OAuth2 option at all. Even if you select imap.gmail.com as the server — I know hardcoding is bad, but not allowing it at all sounds worse. But if you cheat and give it 12345 as password, and select password authentication just to go through with adding the account, then you can select OAuth 2 as authentication type and it all works out.

Anyway, neither ProtonMail nor FastMail appear to have implemented this authentication method, despite the fact that, if I understood that correctly, it’s supported out of the box on Thunderbird, Apple’s Mail, and a bunch of other mail clients. Indeed, if you want to use IMAP/SMTP with FastMail, they only appear to give you the option to use application-specific passwords, which are a shame.

So why did I need IMAP access to begin with? Well, I wanted to import all my mail from Gmail into ProtonMail, and I though the easier way to do so was going to be through Thunderbird and manually copy the folders I needed. That turned out to be a mistake: Thunderbird crashed while trying to copy some of the content over, and I effectively was spending more time while waiting for it to index anything than instructing it on what to do.

Luckily there’s alternative options for this.

Important Importing Tooling

ProtonMail provides another piece of software, in addition to the Bridge, to paying customers: an Import Tool. This allows you to login to another IMAP server, and copy over the content. I decided to use that to copy over my Gmail content to ProtonMail.

First of all, the tool does not support OAuth2 authentication. To be able to access Gmail or GSuite mailboxes, it needs to use an Application-Specific Password. Annoying but not a dealbreaker for me, since I’m not enrolled in the Advanced Protection Program, which among other things disable “less-secure apps” (i.e. those apps using Application-Specific Passwords). I generated one, logged in, and selected the labels I wanted to copy over, then went to bed, a little, but not much, concerned over the 52 and counting messages that it said it was failing to import.

I woke up to the tool reporting only 32% of around fifty thousands messages imported. I paused, then resumed, the import hoping to getting it unstuck, and left to play Pokémon with my wife, coming back to a computer stuck exactly at the same point. I tried stopping and closing the Import Tool, but that didn’t work, it got stuck. I tried rebooting Windows and it refused to, because my C: drive was full. Huh?

When I went to look into it, I found a 436GB text file, that’s the log from the software. Since the file was too big to open with nearly anything on my computer, I used good old type, and beside the initial part possibly containing useful information, most of the file repeated the same error message about not being able to parse a mime type, with no message ID or subject attached. Not useful. I had to delete the file, since my system was rejecting writes because of the drive being full, but it also does not bode well for the way the importer is written: clearly there’s no retry limit on some action, no log coalescing, and no security feature to go “Hang on, am I DoSing the local system?”

I went looking for tools I could use to sync IMAP servers manually. I found isync/mbsync, which as a slightly annoyance is written in C and needs to be built, so not easy to run on Windows where I do have the ProtonMail bridge, but not something I can’t overcome. When I was looking at the website, it said to check the README for workarounds needed with certain servers. Unfortunately at the time of writing the document, in the Compatibility section, refers to “M$ Exchange” — which in 2020 is a very silly, juvenile, and annoying way to refer to what is possibly still the largest enterprise mail server out there. Yes, I am judging a project by its README the way you judge a book by its cover, but I would expect that a project unable to call Microsoft by its name in this day and age is unlikely to have added support for OAuth2 authentication or any of the many extensions that Gmail provides for efficient listing of messages.

I turned to FastMail to see how they are implementing it: importing Gmail or GSuite content can be done directly on their server side: they require you to provide OAuth2 access to all your email (but then again, if you’re planning to use them as your service provider, you kind of are already doing that). It does not allow you to choose which labels you want to import: it’ll clone everything, even your trash/bin folder. So at the time of writing it’s importing 180k messages. It took a while, and it showed the funny result of saying «175,784 of 172,368 messages imported.» Bonus point to FastMail for actually sending the completion note as an email, so that it can be fetched accordingly.

A side effect of FastMail doing the imports server side is that there’s no way for you to transfer ProtonMail boxes to FastMail, or any other equivalent server with server-side import: the Bridge needs to run on your local system for you to authenticate. It’s effectively an additional lock-in.

Instead of insisting on self-hosting options, I honestly feel that the FLOSS activists should maybe invest a little more thought and time on providing ways for average users with average needs to migrate their content, avoiding the lock-in. Because even if the perfect self-hosting email solution is out there, right now trying to migrate to it would be an absolute nightmare and nobody will bother, preferring to stick to their perfectly-working locked-in cloud provider.

Missing Features Mayhem

At that point I was a bit annoyed, but I had no urgency to move the old email away, for now at least. So instead I went on to check how ProtonMail worked as primary mail interface. I changed MX around, set up the various verification methods, and waited. One of the nice things of migrating the mail provider is that you end up realizing just how many mailing lists and stuff you keep receiving, that you previously just filed away with filters.

I removed a bunch of subscriptions to open source mailing lists for projects I am no longer directly involved in, and unlikely to go back to, and then I started looking at other newsletters and promotions. For at least one of them, I thought I would probably be better served by NewsBlur‘s newsletter-to-RSS interface. As documented in the service itself, the recommended way to use this is to create a filter that takes the input newsletter and forwards them to your newsblur alias.

And here’s the first ProtonMail feature that I’m missing: there’s no way to set up forwarding filters. This is more than a bit annoying: there was mail coming to my address that I used to forward to my mother (mostly bills related to her house, before I set up a separate domain with multiple aliases that point at our two addresses), and there still are a few messages that come to me only, that I forward to my wife, where using our other alias addresses is not feasible for various reasons.

But it’s not just a matter of forwards that is missing. When I looked into the filter system of ProtonMail I found it very lacking. You can’t filter based on an arbitrary header. You cannot filter based on a list-id! Despite the webmail being able to tell that an email came through from a mailing list, and providing an explicit Unsubscribe button, based on the headers, it neither has a “Filter messages like these” like Gmail has, nor a way to select this manually. And that is a lot more annoying.

FastMail, by comparison, provides a much more detailed rules support, including the ability to provide them directly in Sieve language, and it allows forward-and-delete of email as well, which is exactly what the NewsBlur integration needs (although to note, while you can see the interface for do that, trial accounts can’t set up forwarding rules!) And yes, the “Add Rule from Message” flow defaults to the list identifier for the messages. Also, to one-up even Gmail on this, you can set those rules from the mobile app as well — and if you think this is not that big of a deal, just think of much more likely you are to have spare time to do this kind of boring tasks while waiting for your train (if you commute by train, that is).

In terms of features, it seems like FastMail has the clear upper hand. Even ignoring the calendar provided, it supports the modern “Snooze” concept, letting mail show up later in the day or the week (which is great when, say, you don’t want to keep the unread email about your job interviews to show up on your mail inbox at the office), and it even has the ability to permanently delete messages in certain folders on after a certain amount of days — just like gmaillabelpurge! I think this last feature is the one that made me realize I really just need to use FastMail.

Sending It All Out

As I said earlier, even before trying to decide which one of the two providers to try, I gave up on the idea of being able to use either of them with git send-email to send kernel patches and similar. Neither of them supports OAuth2 authentication, and I was told there’s no way to set up a “send-only” environment.

My solution to this was to bite the bullet and deal with a real(ish) sendmail implementation again, by using a script that would connect over SSH to one of my servers, and use the postfix instance there (noting that I’m trying to cut down on having to run my own servers). I briefly considered using my HTPC for that, but then I realized that it would require me to put my home IP addresses in the SPF records for my domain, and I didn’t really want to publicise those as much.

But it turned out the information I found was incorrect. FastMail does support SMTP-only Application Specific Passwords! This is an awesomely secure feature that not even Gmail has right now, and it makes it a breeze to configure Git for it, and the worst that can happen is that someone can spoof your email address, until you figure it out. That does not mean that it’s safe to share that password around, but it does make it much less risky to keep the password on, say, your laptop.

I would even venture that this is even safer than the sendgmail approach that I linked above, as the other one requires full mail access with the token, which can easily be abused by an attacker.

Conclusion

So at the end of this whole odyssey, I decided to stick with FastMail.

ProtonMail sounds good on paper, but it give me the impression that it’s overengineered in implementation, and not thought out enough in feature design. I cannot otherwise see how many basic features (forwarding filters, send-only protocol support — C-S-c to add a CC line) would otherwise be missing. And I’m very surprised about the security angle for the whole service.

FastMail does have some rough edges, particularly on their webapp. Small things, like being able to right-click to get a context menu would be nice. U2F support is clearly lacking: having it work on their Android app for me would be a huge step forward. And I should point out that FastMail has a much friendlier way to test its service, as the 30 days free option includes nearly all of the functionality and enough space to test an import of the data from a 10 years old Gmail.

What about auth tokens? OAuth and security

A friend asked me, after the last book review, what is my point of view on authentication tokens like OAuth gives out. In particular, it seems like lots of services nowadays allows you to login via either Facebook or Google+ without requesting explicit authorization to post for you or inspect your profile. Why should we trust them at all?

The answer is to be found in a different post of mine from a few months ago, about blogs and passwords. In that post, I was complaining about blogs and websites that require you to register even to read the content. The reason is that if you’re not careful, you risk exposing your usual passwords to what is most likely an even less secure storage than, well, Target. But I don’t want to go back to discussing the false impression of security that self-hosting gives you in this post.

If instead of requiring me to register with a new password, a website allows me to login with either Facebook, Google+ or Twitter, I have fewer doubts — while some privacy advocates will complain that this ties you with a single identity, well, I don’t care and I’d rather not have a malicious actor figuring out my password.

The first important part to understand is that while I know some people are skeptic about it, if properly implemented, OAuth 2 allows fine-grained control on what the apps that link to it have access to — this means that if you’re only trying to get a hold of a registration identity, the basic profile information (name and email address) is all you need. Of course you have to trust that the implementation on Google’s, Facebook’s and Twitter’s side is correct, but I’d rather trust that than trust some self-hosted system somewhere.

Of course it’s still possible for an attacker to get a hold of the tokens used for authentication, which gives them access to your personal information in that case — but that means very little, given that the same would have happened if the attacker got a hold of the registration data. Since the service itself would then not have my password at all, if compromised there will be at least one datum less.

There is one more interesting feature of OAuth2 that helps you in this respect: the specifications make it clear that you should never provide an unlimited-time token; instead you should provide a “refresh” token that the service can use to re-authenticate the user when the actual authentication token expires. This is a good thing: as long as you’re using the service, the token will be refreshed, but if you stop visiting the service for months, well, you don’t have to remember that it had your authorization a while back.

Yes of course there are still plenty of corner cases and situations where OAuth2 does not stop an attacker getting persistent access to a service and using said access to access your data — this is especially bad if the service has access to, say, your whole email history or your contacts’ list. But this was true before as well, so the only solution is to ensure that the OAuth2 providers have the right limited accesses, and security features such as 2FA.

So if I ever decide to work on replacing my stupid blog software I would probably use OAuth2 for authentication, against my Google account, and allow user comments through the same integration — but still allow anonymous comments, I think that works very well already. Who knows, maybe I can remake Typo into Refuso, and a nerdy, self-hosted, secure hosting platform… even though I don’t like self-hosting in general.

Derailing

I’m still not sure why I work with Rails, if it’s really for the quality of some projects I found, such as Typo, if it is because I hate most of the alternatives even more (PHP, Python/Turbogears/ToscaWidgets), or because I’m masochist.

After we all seemed to settle in with Rails 2.3.5 as the final iteration of the Rails 2 series, and were ready to face a huge absurd mess with Rails 3 once released, the project decided to drop a further bombshell on us in the form of Rails 2.3.6, and .7, and finally .8 that seemed to work more or less correctly. These updates weren’t simple bugfixes, because they actually went much further: they changed the supported version of Rack from 1.0.1 to 1.1.0 (it changes basically the whole internal engine of the framework!), the version if tmail and of i18n. It also changed the tzinfo version, but that’s almost pointless when considered in Gentoo since we actually use it unbundled and keep it up-to-date when new releases are made.

But most likely the biggest trouble with the new Rails version is implementing an anti-XSS interface compatible with Rails 3; this caused quite a stir because almost all Rails applications needed to be adapted for that to work. Typo for instance is still not compatible with 2.3.8, as far as I know! Rails-extensions and other Rails-tied libraries also had to be updated, and when we’ve been lucky enough, upstream kept them compatible with both the old and the new interfaces.

At any rate, my current job requires me to work with Rails and with some Rails extensions; and since I’m the kind of person who steps up to do something more even though it’s not paid for, I made sure I had ebuilds, that I could run test with, for all of them. This actually turned out more than once useful, and as it happens, today was another of those days when I’m glad I’m developing Gentoo.

The first problem appeared when it came time to update to the new (minor) version of oauth2 (required to implement proper Facebook-connected login with their changes last April); for ease of use with their Javascript framework, the new interface uses almost exclusively the JSON format; and in Ruby, there is no shortage of JSON interpreters. Indeed, beside the original implementation in ActiveSupport (part of Rails) there is the JSON gem, which provides both a “pure ruby” implementation and a compiled implementation (to be honest, the compiled, C-based implementation, was left broken in Gentoo for a while by myself, I’m sorry about that and as soon as I noticed I corrected it); then there is the one I already discussed briefly together with the problems related to Rails 2.3.8: yajl-ruby. Three is better than one, no? I beg you to differ!

To make it feasible to choose between the different implementations as wanted, the oauth2 developers created a new gem, multi_json, that allows to switch between the different implementations. No it doesn’t even try to give a single compatible exception interface, so don’t ask, please. It was time to pack the new gem then, but that caused a bit of trouble by itself: beside the (unfortunately usual) trouble with the Rakefile demanding RSpec to even just declare the targets (so also to build documentation) or the spec target having a dependency over the Jeweler-provided check_dependencies, the testsuite failed on both Ruby 1.9 and JRuby quite soon; the problem? It forced testing with all the supported JSON engines; but Ruby 1.9 lacks ActiveSupport (no, Rails 2.3.8 does not work with Ruby 1.9, stop asking), and JRuby lacks yajl-ruby since that’s a C-based extension. A few changes later and the testsuite reports pending tests when the tested engine is not found as it should have from the start. But a further problem appears in the form of oauth2 test failures: the JSON C-based extension gets identified and loaded but the wrong constant is used to load the engine, which results in multi_json to crap on itself. D’oh!

This was already reported on the GitHub page, on the other hand I resolved to fix it in a different way, possibly more complete; unfortunately I didn’t get it entirely right because the order in which the engines are tested is definitely important to upstream (and yes it seems to be more of a popularity contest than an actual technical behaviour contest, but nevermind that for now). Fixed that, another problem with oauth2 appeared, and that turned out to be caused by the ActiveSupport JSON parser; while the other parsers seems to validate the content they are provided with, AS follows the “Garbage-in, Garbage-out” idea: it does not give any exception if the content given is not JSON; this wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t that the oauth2 code actually relied on this to be able to choose between JSON and Form-Encoded parameters given. D’oh! One more fix.

Speaking about this, Headius if you’re reading me you should consider adding a pure-Java JSON parser to multi_json just for the sake of pissing off MRi/REE guys… and to provide a counter-test of a not-available engine.

At least, the problems between multi_json and oauth2 had the decency to happen only when non-standard setup were used (Gentoo is slightly non-standard because of auto_gem), so it’s not entirely upstream’s fault to not have noticed them. Besides, kudos to Michael (upstream) who already released the new gems while I was writing this!

Another gem that I should be using and was in need of a bump was facebooker (it’s in the ruby-overlay rather than in main tree); this one was already bumped recently for compatibility with Rails 2.3.8, but keeping itself compatible with the older release, luckily. Fixing the testsuite for the 1.0.70 version has been easy: it was forcing Rails 2.3.8 in the lack of multi_rails, but I wanted it to work with 2.3.5 as well, so I dropped that forcing. With the new release (1.0.71) the problem became worse because the tests started to fail. I was afraid the problem was in dropped 2.3.5 compatibility but that wasn’t the case.

First of all, I worked out properly the problem of forcing 2.3.8 version of Rails by making it abide to RAILS_VERSION during testing; this allows me not to edit the ebuild for each new version, as I just have to tinker with the environment variables to get them right. Then I proceeded with a (not too short) debugging session, which finally catapulted me to a change in the latest version. Since one function call now fails with Rack 1.1.0 for non-POST requests, the code was changed to ignore the other requests; the testsuite on the other hand tested with both POST and GET requests (which makes me assume that it should work in both cases). The funny part was that the (now failing) function above was only used to provide a parameter to another method (which then checked some further parameters)… but that particular argument was no longer used. So my fix was to remove the introduced exclusion for non-POST, remove the function call, and finally remove the argument. Voilà, the testsuite now passes all green.

All the fixes are in my github page and the various upstream developers are notified about them; hopefully soon new releases of all three will provide the same fixes to those of you who don’t use Gentoo for installing the gems (like, say, if you’re using Heroku to host your application). On the other hand, if you’re a Gentoo user and want to gloat about it, you can tell Rails developer working with OS X that if the Ruby libraries aren’t totally broken is also because we thoroughly test them, more than upstream does!