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add FAQ about directly accessing mailboxes through the file system

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commonly asked, again at fosdem.
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Mechiel Lukkien 2024-02-10 11:39:31 +01:00
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38
README.md
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@ -449,3 +449,41 @@ disable MTA-STS, autoconfig and the client-settings-domain for that domain.
Mox opens the key and certificate files during initial startup, as root (and
passes file descriptors to the unprivileged process). No special permissions
are needed on the key and certificate files.
## Can I directly access mailboxes through the file system?
No, mox only provides access to email through protocols like IMAP.
While it can be convenient for users/email clients to access email through
conventions like Maildir, providing such access puts quite a burden on the
server: The server has to continuously watch for changes made to the mail store
by external programs, and sync its internal state. By only providing access to
emails through mox, the storage/state management is simpler and easier to
implement reliably.
Not providing direct file system access also allows future improvements in the
storage mechanism. Such as encryption of all stored messages. Programs won't be
able to access such messages directly.
Mox stores metadata about delivered messages in its per-account message index
database, more than fits in a simple (filename-based) format like Maildir. The
IP address of the remote SMTP server during delivery, SPF/DKIM/DMARC domains
and validation status, and more...
For efficiency, mox doesn't prepend message headers generated during delivery
(e.g. Authentication-Results) to the on-disk message file, but only stores it
in the database. This prevents a rewrite of the entire message file. When
reading a message, mox combines the prepended headers from the database with
the message file.
Mox user accounts have no relation to operating system user accounts. Multiple
system users reading their email on a single machine is not very common
anymore. All data (for all accounts) stored by mox is accessible only by the
mox process. Messages are currently stored as individual files in standard
Internet Message Format (IMF), at `data/accounts/<account>/msg/<dir>/<msgid>`:
`msgid` is a consecutive unique integer id assigned by the per-account message
index database; `dir` groups 8k consecutive message ids into a directory,
ensuring they don't become too large. The message index database file for an
account is at `data/accounts/<account>/index.db`, accessed with the bstore
database library, which uses bbolt (formerly BoltDB) for storage, a
transactional key/value library/file format inspired by LMDB.

2
website/features/index.md
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@ -120,7 +120,7 @@ These are published in DNS and must also be protected with DNSSEC. If a
connection is intercepted by a different server, the TLS certificate validation
would not pass.
MTA-STS uses PKIX (pool of trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs))to protect
MTA-STS uses PKIX (pool of trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs)) to protect
both MX records and to verify TLS during SMTP STARTTLS. MTA-STS serves
existence/version of a policy at DNS record `_mta-sts.<recipientdomain>`, and
the policy itself at the PKIX-verified `https://mta-sts.<recipientdomain>`,