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Plainva 0.4.1: one place for your cloud accounts, a lot more mail providers, and a calmer app

July 21, 2026

0.4.0 shipped a lot at once — a Pinboard, rebuilt Settings, and an early Calendar and Email. 0.4.1 is the follow-through: it takes the parts that felt scattered and pulls them together. All your cloud logins now live in one place, mail is no longer Google-only, and the whole interface got a quiet, top-to-bottom consistency pass. Still plain Markdown files, still your disk, still no format changes.

One place for your cloud accounts

Connecting a cloud used to mean hunting through separate settings — file sync in one spot, calendar in another, mail in a third, each with its own form. For Microsoft that could mean signing in three times.

Now there’s a Cloud accounts area at the top of a vault’s settings. You pick a provider, pick which services you want from it — files, calendar, mail — and sign in once. Each service shows its own status, and the individual Sync, Calendar and Email pages become slim references to the account you set up; they only appear once a service is actually connected. Nextcloud is a single form now; Google and Microsoft ask for one sign-in per account instead of one per feature. The mobile app gets the same overview.

A lot more mail providers

This is the one I’m happiest about. Mail is no longer Google-only.

There’s a provider catalog now: dedicated tiles for Apple/iCloud, mailbox.org, Fastmail, Yahoo, AOL, Zoho, Yandex, Mail.ru, Koofr and pCloud, each a single form where you enter your address and an app-specific password and Plainva fills in the servers. Behind them sit ~46 verified international IMAP presets — type your address and it auto-detects the provider, drops in the right hosts and ports, and shows a short hint plus a link to that provider’s own setup guide.

The Apple tile sets up iCloud Mail and iCloud Calendar in one step. The one thing it can’t do is iCloud Drive for file sync — Apple offers no third-party API for it, so the tile just says so rather than pretending. (If you only want the calendar, CalDAV has quietly worked for a while — a couple of testers found it before the tile existed.)

Under all that, the mail plumbing got sturdier too: STARTTLS and Proton Bridge transport (so the Proton Mail Bridge works, while every real server still verifies its certificate strictly), server-side search that returns matches from your whole mailbox instead of just the messages already loaded, delimiter-aware folders so a name like “mailbox.org Rechnungen” stays whole, and proper charset handling for non-ASCII search.

The whole app, a little calmer

Under the hood, this release is also a big design pass. Over time Plainva had grown a lot of one-off styling — slightly different field sizes here, a hand-built dropdown there. 0.4.1 puts desktop, mobile and all thirteen themes on one shared design language: the same field and chip metrics everywhere, real themed Select panels instead of bare browser dropdowns, clearer menus and selection states, and contrast that meets WCAG AA in light and dark. It’s the kind of change you don’t notice as a feature — the app just feels a bit more settled.

Calendar polish and the small stuff

The calendar picked up a round of fixes and niceties: rich Markdown event descriptions, moving a single event to another calendar, a default calendar for new events, standards-compliant HTML invitations, and faster, more autonomous background sync. The sidebar now has collapsible, reorderable sections for bookmarks and recently-opened notes above the file tree, and you can right-click an image in a note to copy or save it, in both live preview and reading mode. A handful of smaller fixes round it out — stable Pinboard ordering, clearer Drive sync errors, and Microsoft mail addressing folders by role.

macOS: signed and notarized

For 0.4.0 I could sign the macOS builds but not notarize them — Apple’s notarization service hung for hours, twice, so I shipped signed-but-not-notarized and told people to right-click → Open. That’s sorted: 0.4.1 macOS builds are signed and notarized, so they open normally. Windows signing still has to wait — for now Windows is “More info” → “Run anyway” on the first run.

If you’re on 0.2.x–0.4.0, the built-in updater will offer 0.4.1; otherwise it’s on the releases page. Plain files, no format changes — your vaults just work.

One ask: the Android app is in closed beta, and this is a good moment to try it. Google only lets it into the Play Store once 12 people test it for 14 days straight, so the single most helpful thing is to join and just leave it installed. Two steps: plainva.com/android-beta. iPhone runs separately via TestFlight — waitlist at plainva.com.

— Marco