Android|BlueMail: Showing full E-Mail on the watch

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2022-06-19 by Hank

So I am using BlueMail on my Android phone to receive E-Mails. When an E-Mail arrives, I get only Subject and Sender information; but not the full text like I do with e.g. Whatsapp. In the app itself I enabled all the options to show full notifications. Any ideas?

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2022-06-19 by @fanoush

most probably the body is not part of the notification? Is the body visible in android phone notification when you pull down notification drawer? it just resends this info to the watch

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Posted at 2022-06-19 by Hank

Yes, it's actually visible.

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Posted at 2022-06-23 by Hank

Are you guys really getting the actual message on the watch? Is this actually implemented?

When firing this

GB({"t":"notify","id":1575479849,"src":"Hangouts","title":"A Name","body":"message contents"})

I get title and body of the message. When receiving an E-Mail with BlueMail or FairEmail, I only get the title. Can somebody confirm if this has been implemented (maybe only for other apps)?

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Posted at 2022-06-23 by johan_m_o

I opened the GB debug app on my watch, and when receiving messages in FairEmail it looks like this:
"t": "notify",
"id": 1655971523,
"src": "FairEmail",
"title": "name of sender",
"body": "email subject"

So, in other words, it's not strange that we're not seeing the message contents in there...

Edit: fixed a formatting mistake

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Posted at 2022-06-23 by Hank

Oh, i see. I actually get a title and a body with content in gbdebug. Looks like gadgetbridge is providing the info but the messages app doesn't show it.
Edit: NOW I get it; it's providing the subject in the body part. @gfwilliams can we change this somehow in Gadgetbridge?
The ID of BlueMail is 1656015154 by the way :)

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Posted at 2022-06-23 by johan_m_o

Yeah... I made a mistake when posting and accidentally posted empty quotes. Fixed now.

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Posted at 2022-06-28 by @gfwilliams

Hank - I believe Gadgetbridge handles all notifications the same way. You'd have to start debugging Gadgetbridge yourself and see if FairEmail does actually provide the email contents in the notification (so Gadgetbridge is able to get and forward the info)

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Posted at 2022-06-28 by Hank

Unfortunately that is some skill I cannot provide :(

So, guys, are there suggestions for highly customizable free E-Mail apps that provide the body and support IMAP of a non-standard provider like Google or Microsoft?
K9Mail is pretty deprecated; Fairemail is deprecated and doesn't provide the body and Bluemail also doesn't support the body.

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Posted at 2022-06-28 by johan_m_o

Fairemail is deprecated

Considering that M66B added a commit 3 hours ago (as of writing this), I wouldn't call FairEmail deprecated... And it does show the contents of the email in the notification, so it might be possible to get Bangle to show it with some work (outside my skill set though).

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Posted at 2022-06-29 by Hank

Fairemail has the same problem showing the body as Bluemail does.

Edit: so, I decided to give K9-Mail another try as the development seems to be resumed after a while. K9 shows the body fine on the watch.

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Posted at 2022-06-29 by @gfwilliams

Fairemail has the same problem showing the body as Bluemail does.

These are open source projects? Honestly, if you like Fairemail, rather than trying to set up a whole new system, why not have a go at making it do what you want?

I just did a quick google, and I think it's possible that notifications for received mail are created here: https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/blob/53d2151b77d0740ea54c203d6d89ac8ec9e4b098/app/src/main/java/eu/faircode/email/Core.java#L5173

Specifically if you look for .setContentText (where I think it sets the content of the notification) then it could be changed to include the message body.

... but looking at it, there seems to be some kind of setting in the app called notify_preview, and if you set that, it should include the body of the email? https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/blob/53d2151b77d0740ea54c203d6d89ac8ec9e4b098/app/src/main/java/eu/faircode/email/Core.java#L5722-L5728

So maybe it does it already, you just haven't set the setting up?

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Posted at 2022-06-29 by Hank

Jackpot!
In Fairemail under notifications the second last option is to use the Android standard notification format which needs Android Auto to run. Enabling this option causes the body to show on the watch. Thanks a lot!