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MailMate makes HTTP request for external links

#3062

When following an external link, it seems MailMate makes an HTTP request to the link URL a swell as handing it to the default browser.

I'm not sure the reason for this but it causes Little Snitch to pop up with a port 443 request to the link domain every time a link is clicked.

Reported by James Cooksey · April 22nd, 2022 @ 11:56 AM

State: reproduced
Milestone: none
Assigned to: benny benny

Activity

  1. Ngoc Pham
    Ngoc Pham

    This is very interesting as I just filed a bug report to another app on similar behavior, and according to the owner, it's because of the WKWebView, which is being used now by Mailmate. https://github.com/glushchenko/fsnotes/issues/1330

    April 22nd, 2022 @ 04:43 PM

  2. benny
    benny
    • State changed from new to closed

    This is actually new to me. Does it happen when hovering the link or when clicking it?

    In the latter case then I think NSWorkspace is involved (and not WKWebView).

    In any case, I've changed the code to use a newer API to open URLs on macOS 10.15+. This might make a difference. I don't think there's anything else I can do.

    April 27th, 2022 @ 12:37 PM

  3. Ngoc Pham
    Ngoc Pham

    Yeah this is when clicking the link And yes it's still happening with latest build 5892. Thanks for looking into this though. This is just weird.

    April 27th, 2022 @ 01:56 PM

  4. James Cooksey
    James Cooksey

    I can confirm that it's only when clicking the link and still present in 5892.

    Is this something to do with OpenGraph? Is the OS trying to grab a sample image in the background or some meta data about the link?

    April 27th, 2022 @ 07:21 PM

  5. James Cooksey
    James Cooksey

    On a side note, thanks to Ngoc for mentioning FSNotes. I've been looking for a new notes app for ages and it looks great. Was going to jump into Obsidian but this looks more open. Thanks!

    April 27th, 2022 @ 07:24 PM

  6. James Cooksey
    James Cooksey

    Would still be great to work on this if possible. Still there.

    June 24th, 2022 @ 10:42 AM

  7. benny
    benny

    @James: I'm not sure what else I can do unless the NSWorkspace theory is wrong. Also, I just tried installing Little Snitch and I only seem to get Safari-requests and not MailMate-requests when clicking on links. This is on macOS 12.2 (and MailMate r5907). Seems I haven't updated for a while :)

    July 15th, 2022 @ 08:37 AM

  8. Ngoc Pham
    Ngoc Pham

    Based on the date of this post, and from my memory, this started happening recently for both Mailmate and that app FSNotes, so my theory is it's probably since macOS 12.3 (released on March 14th according to Wikipedia). Unfortunately I do not have another mac with lower version of OS to check (I tend to update as soon as one is out).

    July 15th, 2022 @ 04:25 PM

  9. benny
    benny

    When I have time, I'll update to 12.5 and see if I can reproduce it.

    July 16th, 2022 @ 08:18 AM

  10. benny
    benny
    • State changed from closed to reproduced

    I can reproduce this on 12.5, but I haven't looked into any workarounds yet. (I'm also interested in knowing if the behavior is the same on 13.x.)

    August 4th, 2022 @ 09:09 AM

  11. James Cooksey
    James Cooksey

    Glad you've spotted it too! Thanks Benny.

    August 4th, 2022 @ 11:11 AM

  12. Hans Kuhn
    Hans Kuhn

    I can confirm that this still happens on MacOS 13.6.1.

    It's likely not relevant, but Little Snitch 5.7.1 (6292) and MailMate 1.14 (5964).

    November 6th, 2023 @ 04:53 PM

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