QuickMail v0.8.0 Release Notes

Released July 8, 2026 — downloads for this release

Download

Two options are available for v0.8.0:

Both downloads include the .NET 8 runtime — you do not need to install .NET separately.

This release introduces theming and a visual design system: light and dark themes, app-wide text scaling and font choice, and a Theme Manager for creating, sharing, and hand-editing themes. See the Themes section of the User Guide for the full walkthrough. It also introduces automatic updates — installed copies of QuickMail now keep themselves current, with you in control throughout. And it adds an always-available Tools menu and in-app bug reporting that doesn’t require a GitHub account.

New: Automatic updates

Starting with this release, QuickMail keeps itself up to date. When a newer version is available, the installed app downloads it quietly in the background and installs it the next time you exit and reopen QuickMail — no download page, no installer to run, no security warnings. The Help menu continues to show whether you are current, offers a Restart to Update option when a new version is waiting, and the first start after an update confirms what was installed. You stay in control throughout: automatic updating and its notifications can each be turned off in Settings → Advanced, with manual updating always available. See the Installing and Updating section of the User Guide for the full walkthrough.

One-time step for existing installed users

This release uses a new installer, so getting onto the automatic-update track requires one manual reinstall:

1. Uninstall your current QuickMail from Settings → Apps. When the uninstaller offers to delete user data, choose No.
2. Download and run QuickMail-win.msi from this release page. A standard setup wizard walks through the license and installation.
3. Start QuickMail. All your accounts, settings, contacts, rules, templates, saved views, and cached mail are exactly as you left them.

Your data is safe throughout: settings and mail live in a separate location the installer never touches, and passwords stay in Windows Credential Manager. After this one reinstall, all future updates are automatic.

Notes on the new install:

• QuickMail now installs per-user (no administrator prompt). The previous option to install for all users is gone.
• A Start Menu entry is created. The first time QuickMail starts, it asks whether to add a desktop shortcut; the choice can be changed anytime in Settings → General.
• Uninstalling now asks whether to also remove your data — and unlike before, choosing Yes also clears QuickMail’s saved passwords from Windows Credential Manager.

Portable exe users

Nothing changes. QuickMail.exe remains a single-file download that you update manually; the Help menu still tells you when a new version is available.

New: Themes

QuickMail now has a color theme, chosen in Settings → Appearance. Six themes ship built in:

• System — follows the Windows light or dark setting.
• Parchment (the new default light look) — warm off-whites with a muted steel-blue accent.
• Parchment Dark — the dark counterpart.
• Ember (warm), Fjord (cool), and Heather (muted) — light variants with different accent and selection colors.

Theme changes apply immediately — no restart. An open message re-renders in the new colors without moving focus.

Understanding a theme without seeing it

Every theme carries a plain-language Theme description — a written account of its overall look, its fonts, and each individual color together with exactly where that color is used (message list, links, selection, focus outline, error and status text, and so on). Color values are translated into words like “dark muted blue” or “warm off-white,” with the nearest well-known color name for reference. The Theme Manager shows this description for whichever theme is selected, in a read-only text box you can read or hear at your own pace, so themes can be understood and compared without seeing the colors.

New: Text size, font, and vision settings

The Appearance tab also gives you:

• Text size — scale all app text using fixed stops at 100%, 110%, 125%, 150%, 175%, and 200%, independent of Windows display scaling. The chosen size flows through every window.
• Font — override the app font, or keep the theme’s own font.
• Always underline links — underline links everywhere, not just by color.
• Thicker keyboard focus indicators — widen the focus outline for easier tracking.
• Apply theme colors to message content — override a sender’s hard-to-read colors and fonts in the reading pane with your theme’s colors. Off by default, so messages render as their sender intended unless you turn it on.

New: the Theme Manager

Choose Manage Themes… from the new Tools menu, or Manage Themes from the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P), to open the Theme Manager. It is a separate, non-blocking window, so you can leave it open and try themes against real messages. From the theme list, press Tab to reach the actions:

• Apply — switch to the selected theme immediately.
• Duplicate — copy a theme as a starting point for your own.
• Rename / Delete — for your own themes.
• Export… — save a theme as a shareable .quickmailtheme file.
• Import… — load a .quickmailtheme file. If a file has a problem, QuickMail tells you exactly what is wrong (for example, which color value is not a valid hex color).
• Open themes folder — open the folder where your themes are stored, for hand-editing.

A theme is a plain, documented JSON text file: duplicate a built-in theme, open the themes folder, and edit the copy in any text editor. Any color you leave out is filled in from the built-in Light or Dark theme.

The Command Palette also offers Next Theme and Previous Theme, and a Theme: [name] command for each theme. None of these carry a default shortcut — assign one in Settings → Keyboard if you want direct access.

New: the Tools menu

The main window now has an always-available Tools menu, grouping the commands used less often than day-to-day mail actions: Manage Themes…, Next Theme, Previous Theme, Address Book… (Ctrl+Shift+B), Rules… (Ctrl+Shift+L), and Command Palette… (Ctrl+Shift+P). Address Book, Rules, and Command Palette moved here from their previous menus, so each command now lives in exactly one place; their keyboard shortcuts are unchanged.

Windows High Contrast

When Windows High Contrast is on, QuickMail steps aside entirely — every color comes from your Windows High Contrast palette, QuickMail’s own control styling is withdrawn so the system’s High Contrast controls take over, and the reading pane defers to the browser’s forced-colors handling. Your theme choice is remembered and returns automatically when High Contrast is turned off. Font and text-size settings continue to apply.

New: Report a Bug

Help → Report a Bug opens a report window without requiring a GitHub account. Fill in a summary and, optionally, what happened, what you expected, and steps to reproduce — a Preview area always shows exactly what will be sent. QuickMail submits the report directly to GitHub Issues using its own narrowly-scoped, app-owned credential, and shows a link to the created issue on success. If sending isn’t possible (no credential available, or the request fails), Copy report and open GitHub copies your report to the clipboard and opens a pre-filled issue page in your browser instead. By deliberate design, the only things sent are what you type plus a short Environment section of non-sensitive details — currently the QuickMail version, your Windows version, the .NET runtime version, the active theme, the current view (message grouping, plus the saved view name if one is applied), and the message sort order. No message content, email addresses, account settings, credentials, or log file content is ever collected — and the Preview shows the whole report so you can confirm before sending.

Accessibility

• The update dialogs are small native dialogs: focus lands on the primary action, Escape always dismisses, and closing them returns focus to the message list. A found update is announced once; the background check itself is silent when you are already current.
• Theme switching never moves focus, collapses trees, or clears selection; the only thing that re-renders is the open message.
• Every custom announcement continues to respect your Screen Reader Announcements settings; theme and High Contrast changes are announced as status, and Theme Manager outcomes as results.
• Every built-in theme meets the WCAG contrast policy (4.5:1 for text, 3:1 for indicators and status colors) — enforced automatically by a unit test, so a theme that would fail contrast cannot ship.
• The Report a Bug preview is a genuine editable TextBox (edits blocked in code, not by making it read-only), so arrow-key navigation through the preview behaves the same as any other text field instead of losing character-by-character review. Its window title reads and announces as “Report a Bug - QuickMail”.

Thank You to Contributors

Thank you, as always, to everyone who contributes to QuickMail through code, bug reports, feature suggestions, and other feedback.

Internal

Automatic updates (issue #156, PR #200)

• Velopack 1.2.0 replaces the Inno Setup installer. App.xaml.cs declares an explicit Main that runs VelopackApp.Build().Run() before WPF initializes — vpk pack verifies this via IL inspection and refuses to pack without it (App.xaml compiles as Page).
• UpdateCheckService branches by runtime: installed copies use UpdateManager + GithubSource (silent background download; applied on exit, or immediately via the Restart to Update dialog, which is cancellable — dismissing the dialog retracts a restart waiting on a slow download); the portable exe keeps the original GitHub API notification-only check. The AutoUpdate setting switches installed copies to notification-only.
• The shipped installer is the WiX 5 MSI (vpk --msi) with welcome/license/conclusion pages; Velopack’s one-click Setup.exe and -Portable.zip are deliberately not published. --framework webview2 preserves WebView2 install-on-demand; --instLocation PerUser keeps updates elevation-free (per-machine installs are deliberately unsupported).
• Desktop shortcut is owned by the app (first-run offer + Settings → General checkbox, targeting the update-stable current\QuickMail.exe path); uninstall offers data removal via a detached prompt from OnBeforeUninstallFastCallback (hook processes are killed after 30 seconds), including Credential Manager cleanup, with diagnostics in %TEMP%\quickmail-uninstall.log.
• Release workflow: the tag must equal the csproj Version, AssemblyVersion, and FileVersion; vpk download github enables delta packages from the second release onward; fail_on_unmatched_files fails the release if expected assets are missing. A --updateFeed <path> startup flag allows full offline update-cycle testing against local vpk pack output (see docs/INSTALLER.md).
• An independent multi-angle review of the PR confirmed 10 findings, all fixed before merge — including a cancellable restart path, accurate failure messaging when a download fails, and elimination of a phantom “update installed” notice when portable and installed copies share a profile. Full test suite passing; complete update cycles verified live against a local feed.

Theming system (issue #177, PR #179)

• Twenty-six semantic color tokens plus typography and focus-thickness are published as Theme.* DynamicResources; Theming/ThemeKeys.cs is the single source of truth for their names.
• ThemeService publishes tokens by atomically replacing one merged dictionary rather than mutating in place, so DynamicResource listeners never see a transient missing-resource state. Under High Contrast every token is rebuilt from live SystemColors and Styles/ThemedControls.xaml is withdrawn so WPF’s built-in High-Contrast templates return. The service is IDisposable; App.OnExit disposes it and detaches the static OS-change handlers.
• ThemeStore keeps built-ins as embedded resources and user themes as one JSON file each under {profile}\themes\; corrupt files are skipped with a log line and never block startup. Parsed user themes are cached and invalidated on save/delete.
• The reading pane and compose preview consume theme colors through a --qm-* CSS-variable bridge; with no theme CSS the documents fall back to CSS system colors, so no-theme rendering is unchanged.
• Helpers/ThemeDescriber.cs generates the plain-language Theme description: it converts each hex color to a spoken descriptor (lightness, chroma-gated saturation, hue) plus the nearest documented CSS/X11 color name, and lays out where each token is used.
• The ThemeRegressionGuard test rejects new hardcoded colors or numeric font sizes in Views/, Controls/, and Styles/ XAML outside a reviewed allowlist, so future work keeps everything token-driven.
• Two independent code reviews (logic and UI/accessibility) were run against the branch; findings were fixed, including a case where applying a theme from the Theme Manager could be silent when the selection resolved to the palette already showing. Full test suite: 1017/1017 passing.
• Post-merge screenshot review of the dark theme found three controls with a local Style lacking BasedOn, which silently discarded the themed background/foreground and reverted to WPF’s default light chrome: the message list and the Conversation/Sender/Recipient tree views (severe — white background made dark-theme Conversation view unreadable), Rules Manager text boxes and dropdowns (moderate), and the compose formatting toolbar (minor). All now chain BasedOn to the themed implicit or keyed styles.
• Theme files are a shareable, attacker-influenced artifact (Export/Import, dropped into {profile}\themes\), so their parse path was hardened per issue #183: fontFamily/monoFontFamily are validated to plain family names (a raw WPF FontFamily string allows # to mean baseUri#familyName, which could otherwise point the font loader at an attacker-controlled file/UNC/pack URI); theme files over 256 KB are rejected before being read; and PathForId asserts the resolved path stays a direct child of the themes folder as defense-in-depth against path traversal.

Bug reporting (issue #186)

• IBugReportService submits directly to the GitHub Issues API using an app-owned, repo-scoped (Issues:Write only) token stored through the existing ICredentialService — no user GitHub sign-in. BuildFallbackUrl uses Uri.EscapeDataString (correct percent-encoding) and truncates the body so the pre-filled fallback URL can’t exceed what ShellExecute will open; the full report is always available via the clipboard regardless.
• ReportBugViewModel collects only what the user types plus a fixed Environment block (QuickMail version, Windows version, .NET runtime version, active theme, current view/grouping, and message sort — captured as a BugReportContext snapshot when the window opens). It never reads quickmail.log, an explicit product decision recorded in docs/planning/bug-reporting-pm-dev-spec.md, not an oversight.
• ReportBugWindow is opened modeless (.Show(), not .ShowDialog()) per this codebase’s modal-dialog rules, since it has editable text fields and can be opened over a window with a live WebView2 reading pane. Its event subscriptions use named handlers so OnClosed can unsubscribe all of them, preventing a Send still in flight from touching the window after it closes and is disposed.

Version

• Bumped to 0.8.0 (Version, AssemblyVersion, FileVersion).