Synapse 1.66 released

Hey all, we've just released Synapse 1.66! Let's have a look at what's inside this release.

Removal of email verification delegation

Before Synapse 1.66, homeserver administrators had the possibility to configure Synapse to delegate verifying email addresses to an identity server (using the account_threepid_delegates.email configuration setting). This feature relied on old APIs from the Matrix specification that have since been removed from it.

Synapse 1.64 announced the deprecation of this feature, and the addition of a warning at startup when the configuration setting is in use.

As of Synapse 1.66, support for this feature has been fully removed, and Synapse will refuse to start if the configuration setting for it is in use.

If this has not already been done, administrators of servers that were previously using this feature are encouraged to configure an SMTP server that Synapse can use to verify email addresses on its own. See the configuration guide for more information.

Also see the upgrade notes for more information.

Planned removal of support for TCP replication

Most server administrators already know that Synapse can be made to scale horizontally by deploying workers. Workers are processes running alongside Synapse's main process to allow offloading some of the work it would otherwise be doing, load balancing some of the traffic, etc.

In a deployment of Synapse that uses workers, these processes use replication to share information between themselves. One of the earliest protocols Synapse used for replication was built on top of TCP.

Synapse 1.18 introduced a new Redis-based replication protocol for workers to use and deprecated the TCP-based protocol, without specifying a removal date.

This week we're announcing that support for TCP replication will be removed from Synapse in version 1.67, which is expected to come out around Sep 13th. See the release notes for more details.

Everything else

Synapse 1.66 also includes some improvements to validation on endpoints using User-Interactive Authentication.

This version of Synapse also adds compression support for federation traffic. See the configuration guide for more information on how to compress HTTP traffic.

Furthermore, Synapse 1.66 improves the Room Details admin API and allows administrators to see if all local users have marked a given room as "forgotten".

See the full changelog for a complete list of changes in this release. Also please have a look at the upgrade notes for this version.

Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including (in no particular order) Dirk Klimpel and Antonin Loubiere, as well as anyone helping us make Synapse better by sharing their feedback and reporting issues.