Mailinabox provides a file manager through Nextcloud.
I saw that non-supported Nextcloud extensions were disabled. This is not the case of the file manager.
Is the file manager feature officially supported by Mailinabox team?
I am planning to use Nextcloud as a compagnion of Thunderbird through the use of the https://addons.thunderbird.net/fr/thunderbird/addon/filelink-nextcloud-owncloud extension which allows me to replace large attachments by a Nextcloud file download link.
But If Nextcloud file manager is not officially supported, I will use another Nextcloud instance
Well I donât know about âofficially supportedâ but NextCloud is part of the MIAB installation as you know. It is primarily intended to provide calendar and address books. Of course, NextCloud includes file management as its core feature so that is also in MIAB. I use it as a document store myself and have done so without problems.
NextCloud is updated from time to time in MIAB. I see that there are plans to update Nextcloud to 20.0.8, contacts to 3.5.1, calendar to 2.2.0 in a future release.
I see that there has been some discussion about removing NextCloud but I think the consensus was that it might be made optional but not removed as many people rely on it.
Adding other features to NextCloud is not supported as far as I know. The script which allows admin rights necessary to add features warns " Run this at your own risk. This is for testing & experimentation purpopses only. After this point you are on your own."
Other than that, it could be argued that using MIAB to store documents adds a security risk. You will want to make you own judgement on that.
There are alternatives to MIAB which support NextCloud with extended features. I use one such to provide NextCloud documents and collaborative editing. My production email however is all on MIAB
Hope this helps.
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The files app is not officially supported. Nextcloud wonât let you disable it, which is why it remains in there.
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@JoshData Thatâs what I thought. @latinhypercube Thankâs for your answer.
To me, if Nextcloud files is not officially supported, this means that Nextcloud could possibly be replaced by another software that provide carddav / caldav support in the future and its usage should be avoided.
Two comments on this:
What does âofficially supportedâ even mean in the context of MIAB? Itâs not as if thereâs an SLA that @JoshData has with us to fix something when it doesnât work, so I would suggest that we use a different term to describe that Nextcloud is intended for contact and calendar features. Like I noted before, how people use software that is provided in a bundle like MIAB is up to them and fact is they do just that.
Secondly, if I choose to use the file storage features of Nextcloud and moreso, add plugins, it is my choice. I know many that do just that, so helping each other with what we know is exactly in the spirit of OSS, without waving the ânot officially supportedâ flag in the process every time, or am I missing something?
I love MIAB and am keen to see optional features enabled.
âOfficially supportedâ in the context of FOSS projects that do not offer paid support or SLAs means exactly the same as it does for paid products with SLAs.The difference mainly lies in the way the support is provided and how binding it is.
FOSS developers that provide their product for free are not obligated to fix any bugs, even for âsupportedâ features, although actively maintained FOSS projects usually do so anyway. In contrast, bugs in unsupported features are usually not fixed and those features are often not even tested, both in pure FOSS projects and in commercial products with SLAs.
So while you are of course free to use the software however you like, if you rely on unsupported features you are essentially on your own and should not open bug reports for them. Or in other words, if in your case the Nextcloud Files app does not work as expected and you open an issue on the Mail-in-a-Box GitHub, it would likely be treated as a feature request rather than a bug report.
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