GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 728764
Options for network settings (SOCKS, IMAP proxy)
Last modified: 2018-10-28 22:26:12 UTC
Hi, It would be good to have network settings as options that can be changed, to allow for proxies, etc. This could be in 'preferences', or in 'accounts', when you edit the settings for each account. At the moment it has to use the default network/proxy settings.
Do you mean that each account should have separate network settings? What situation would that be necessary?
That would probably not be necessary for most people, so maybe isn't worth it - but at the moment you can't even set the network settings for geary as a whole (other than modifying system-wide settings). An example case where it might be useful for some people, is when someone has multiple emails, and they have specific security needs, and so want to access one of their email accounts through tor or another method of connecting to the network privately. If they connect all their accounts through tor, it could potentially undermine some of the security of it, by associating a known account with a hidden one - also some services make problems for people connecting through tor, because of the high traffic, and so it might be desirable to have some accounts connected, and others not.
> but at the moment you can't even set the network settings for geary as a whole > (other than modifying system-wide settings). I guess I see that as a feature, not a bug. As someone who lived through a time when I had to configure each application's network settings, having a system-wide setting that networking libraries use (i.e. GIO) is a good thing. > If they connect all their accounts through tor, it could > potentially undermine some of the security of it, by associating a known > account with a hidden one - also some services make problems for people > connecting through tor, because of the high traffic, and so it might be > desirable to have some accounts connected, and others not. I can appreciate that. As I understand Tor, it can be used as a SOCKS proxy, meaning that GNOME networking can be configured to send everything through Tor. (I've never tried it, so perhaps it's more complicated than I'm saying.) But I could a user wanting account-level control over that decision, i.e. have Geary go through a SOCKS proxy while all other apps, and even other Geary accounts, use through un-anonymizing network access. I would want this to be an advanced setting, though, not something the average user should have to deal with.
I agree, the default should be the system-wide network settings, and changing it should be more advanced settings - but I think this should be possible through the GUI, which at the moment it isn't (its not possible at all). Having different settings for each account is probably too much.
This would have to be a plugin, so depending on Bug 714883.
*** Bug 786434 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I just wrote up a tracking bug for the plugin system over at gitlab that collects all of the requirements for feature requests that should be implemented as plugins in the one place, so closing this bug in favour of that ticket: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/geary/issues/155