we match messages to their parents based on the "references" and "in-reply-to"
headers (requiring the same base subject), and in absense of those headers we
also by only base subject (against messages received max 4 weeks ago).
we store a threadid with messages. all messages in a thread have the same
threadid. messages also have a "thread parent ids", which holds all id's of
parent messages up to the thread root. then there is "thread missing link",
which is set when a referenced immediate parent wasn't found (but possibly
earlier ancestors can still be found and will be in thread parent ids".
threads can be muted: newly delivered messages are automatically marked as
read/seen. threads can be marked as collapsed: if set, the webmail collapses
the thread to a single item in the basic threading view (default is to expand
threads). the muted and collapsed fields are copied from their parent on
message delivery.
the threading is implemented in the webmail. the non-threading mode still works
as before. the new default threading mode "unread" automatically expands only
the threads with at least one unread (not seen) meessage. the basic threading
mode "on" expands all threads except when explicitly collapsed (as saved in the
thread collapsed field). new shortcuts for navigation/interaction threads have
been added, e.g. go to previous/next thread root, toggle collapse/expand of
thread (or double click), toggle mute of thread. some previous shortcuts have
changed, see the help for details.
the message threading are added with an explicit account upgrade step,
automatically started when an account is opened. the upgrade is done in the
background because it will take too long for large mailboxes to block account
operations. the upgrade takes two steps: 1. updating all message records in the
database to add a normalized message-id and thread base subject (with "re:",
"fwd:" and several other schemes stripped). 2. going through all messages in
the database again, reading the "references" and "in-reply-to" headers from
disk, and matching against their parents. this second step is also done at the
end of each import of mbox/maildir mailboxes. new deliveries are matched
immediately against other existing messages, currently no attempt is made to
rematch previously delivered messages (which could be useful for related
messages being delivered out of order).
the threading is not yet exposed over imap.
soon, we can have multiple rejects mailboxes. and checking against the
configured rejects mailbox name wasn't foolproof to begin with, because it may
have changed between delivery to the rejects mailbox and the message being
moved.
after upgrading, messages currently in rejects mailboxes don't have IsReject
set, so they don't get the special rejecs treatment when being moved. they are
removed from the rejects mailbox after some time though, and newly added
rejects will be treated correctly. so this means some existing messages wrongly
delivered to the rejects mailbox, and moved out, aren't used (for a positive
signal) for future deliveries. saves a bit of complexity in the
implementation. i think the tradeoff is worth it.
related to discussion in issue #50
a few places still looked at the name "Sent". but since we have special-use
flags, we should always look at those. this also changes the config so admins
can specify different names for the special-use mailboxes to create for new
accounts, e.g. in a different language. the old config option is still
understood, just deprecated.
the bulk of a message is stored on disk. a message prefix is stored in the
database (for prefixed headers like "Received:"). this adds a check to ensure
Size = prefix length + on-disk file size.
verifydata also checks for this now.
and one older and one new (since yesterday) bug was found. the first when
appending a message without a header/body section (uncommon). the second when
sending messages from webmail with localserve (uncommon).
it was far down on the roadmap, but implemented earlier, because it's
interesting, and to help prepare for a jmap implementation. for jmap we need to
implement more client-like functionality than with just imap. internal data
structures need to change. jmap has lots of other requirements, so it's already
a big project. by implementing a webmail now, some of the required data
structure changes become clear and can be made now, so the later jmap
implementation can do things similarly to the webmail code. the webmail
frontend and webmail are written together, making their interface/api much
smaller and simpler than jmap.
one of the internal changes is that we now keep track of per-mailbox
total/unread/unseen/deleted message counts and mailbox sizes. keeping this
data consistent after any change to the stored messages (through the code base)
is tricky, so mox now has a consistency check that verifies the counts are
correct, which runs only during tests, each time an internal account reference
is closed. we have a few more internal "changes" that are propagated for the
webmail frontend (that imap doesn't have a way to propagate on a connection),
like changes to the special-use flags on mailboxes, and used keywords in a
mailbox. more changes that will be required have revealed themselves while
implementing the webmail, and will be implemented next.
the webmail user interface is modeled after the mail clients i use or have
used: thunderbird, macos mail, mutt; and webmails i normally only use for
testing: gmail, proton, yahoo, outlook. a somewhat technical user is assumed,
but still the goal is to make this webmail client easy to use for everyone. the
user interface looks like most other mail clients: a list of mailboxes, a
search bar, a message list view, and message details. there is a top/bottom and
a left/right layout for the list/message view, default is automatic based on
screen size. the panes can be resized by the user. buttons for actions are just
text, not icons. clicking a button briefly shows the shortcut for the action in
the bottom right, helping with learning to operate quickly. any text that is
underdotted has a title attribute that causes more information to be displayed,
e.g. what a button does or a field is about. to highlight potential phishing
attempts, any text (anywhere in the webclient) that switches unicode "blocks"
(a rough approximation to (language) scripts) within a word is underlined
orange. multiple messages can be selected with familiar ui interaction:
clicking while holding control and/or shift keys. keyboard navigation works
with arrows/page up/down and home/end keys, and also with a few basic vi-like
keys for list/message navigation. we prefer showing the text instead of
html (with inlined images only) version of a message. html messages are shown
in an iframe served from an endpoint with CSP headers to prevent dangerous
resources (scripts, external images) from being loaded. the html is also
sanitized, with javascript removed. a user can choose to load external
resources (e.g. images for tracking purposes).
the frontend is just (strict) typescript, no external frameworks. all
incoming/outgoing data is typechecked, both the api request parameters and
response types, and the data coming in over SSE. the types and checking code
are generated with sherpats, which uses the api definitions generated by
sherpadoc based on the Go code. so types from the backend are automatically
propagated to the frontend. since there is no framework to automatically
propagate properties and rerender components, changes coming in over the SSE
connection are propagated explicitly with regular function calls. the ui is
separated into "views", each with a "root" dom element that is added to the
visible document. these views have additional functions for getting changes
propagated, often resulting in the view updating its (internal) ui state (dom).
we keep the frontend compilation simple, it's just a few typescript files that
get compiled (combined and types stripped) into a single js file, no additional
runtime code needed or complicated build processes used. the webmail is served
is served from a compressed, cachable html file that includes style and the
javascript, currently just over 225kb uncompressed, under 60kb compressed (not
minified, including comments). we include the generated js files in the
repository, to keep Go's easily buildable self-contained binaries.
authentication is basic http, as with the account and admin pages. most data
comes in over one long-term SSE connection to the backend. api requests signal
which mailbox/search/messages are requested over the SSE connection. fetching
individual messages, and making changes, are done through api calls. the
operations are similar to imap, so some code has been moved from package
imapserver to package store. the future jmap implementation will benefit from
these changes too. more functionality will probably be moved to the store
package in the future.
the quickstart enables webmail on the internal listener by default (for new
installs). users can enable it on the public listener if they want to. mox
localserve enables it too. to enable webmail on existing installs, add settings
like the following to the listeners in mox.conf, similar to AccountHTTP(S):
WebmailHTTP:
Enabled: true
WebmailHTTPS:
Enabled: true
special thanks to liesbeth, gerben, andrii for early user feedback.
there is plenty still to do, see the list at the top of webmail/webmail.ts.
feedback welcome as always.
behaviour around failing DB calls that change data (insert/update) was changed
in bstore quite some time ago. the tx state in bstore would become inconsistent
when one or more (possibly unique) indexes had been modified, but then an
ErrUnique would occur for the next index. bstore doesn't know how to roll back
the partial changes during a transaction, so it marks the tx as botched and
refuses further operations. so, we cannot just try to insert, wait for a
possible ErrUnique, but then still try to continue with the transaction.
instead, we check if the record exists and only insert it if we couldn't find
it.
found while working on webmail.
message.Part now has a ReaderUTF8OrBinary() along with the existing Reader().
the new function returns a reader of decoded content. we now use it in a few
places, including search. we only support the charsets in
golang.org/x/text/encoding/ianaindex.
search has also been changed to not read the entire message in memory. instead,
we make one 8k buffer for reading and search in that, and we keep the buffer
around for all messages. saves quite some allocations when searching large
mailboxes.
for conditional storing and quick resynchronisation (not sure if mail clients are actually using it that).
each message now has a "modseq". it is increased for each change. with
condstore, imap clients can request changes since a certain modseq. that
already allows quickly finding changes since a previous connection. condstore
also allows storing (e.g. setting new message flags) only when the modseq of a
message hasn't changed.
qresync should make it fast for clients to get a full list of changed messages
for a mailbox, including removals.
we now also keep basic metadata of messages that have been removed (expunged).
just enough (uid, modseq) to tell client that the messages have been removed.
this does mean we have to be careful when querying messages from the database.
we must now often filter the expunged messages out.
we also keep "createseq", the modseq when a message was created. this will be
useful for the jmap implementation.
when broadcasting a change, we would try to send the changes on a channel,
non-blocking. if we couldn't send (because there was no pending blocked
receive), we would wait until the potential receiver would explicitly request
the changes. however, the imap idle handler would not explicitly request the
changes, but do a receive on the changes channel. since there was no pending
blocked send on the channel, that receive would block. only when another event
would come in, would both the pending and the new changes be sent.
we now use a channel only for signaling there are pending changes. the channel
is buffered, so when broadcasting we can just set the signal by a non-blocking
send and continue with the next listener. the receiver will get the buffered
signal. it can then get the changes directly, but lock-protected.
found when looking at a missing/delayed new message notification in thunderbird
when two messages arrive immediately after each other. this doesn't fix that
problem though: it seems thunderbird just ignores imap untagged "exists"
messages (indicating a new message arrived) during the "uid fetch" command that
it issued after notifications from an "idle" command.
and add a bit more logging for unexpected failures when closing files.
and make tests pass with a TMPDIR on a different filesystem than the testdata directory.
the mailbox select/examine responses now return all flags used in a mailbox in
the FLAGS response. and indicate in the PERMANENTFLAGS response that clients
can set new keywords. we store these values on the new Message.Keywords field.
system/well-known flags are still in Message.Flags, so we're recognizing those
and handling them separately.
the imap store command handles the new flags. as does the append command, and
the search command.
we store keywords in a mailbox when a message in that mailbox gets the keyword.
we don't automatically remove the keywords from a mailbox. there is currently
no way at all to remove a keyword from a mailbox.
the import commands now handle non-system/well-known keywords too, when
importing from mbox/maildir.
jmap requires keyword support, so best to get it out of the way now.
the backup command will make consistent snapshots of all the database files. i
had been copying the db files before, and it usually works. but if the file is
modified during the backup, it is inconsistent and is likely to generate errors
when reading (can be at any moment in the future, when reading some db page).
"mox backup" opens the database file and writes out a copy in a transaction.
it also duplicates the message files.
before doing a restore, you could run "mox verifydata" on the to-be-restored
"data" directory. it check the database files, and compares the message files
with the database.
the new "gentestdata" subcommand generates a basic "data" directory, with a
queue and a few accounts. we will use it in the future along with "verifydata"
to test upgrades from old version to the latest version. both when going to the
next version, and when skipping several versions. the script test-upgrades.sh
executes these tests and doesn't do anything at the moment, because no releases
have this subcommand yet.
inspired by a failed upgrade attempt of a pre-release version.
by default 1000 messages per day, and to max 200 first-time receivers.
i don't think a person would reach those limits. a compromised account abused
by spammers could easily reach that limit. this prevents further damage.
the error message you will get is quite clear, pointing to the configuration
parameter that should be changed.
the idea of the rejects mailbox is to show messages that were rejected. you can
look there, and if you see a message that should have been delivered, you can
move it to your inbox or archive. next time a deliver attempt by that user is
attempted, they should be accepted, because you corrected the reject. but that
wasn't happening, because the reputation-calculation is per-delivery mailbox
(e.g. Inbox) and we look at MailboxOrigID when calculating the reputation. and
that was set to the Rejects mailbox id, so the message wasn't considered. the
same applies to moving messages from Rejects to Junk (to train your filter).
we now keep track of a MailboxDestinedID, that is set to the mailbox that we
would have delivered to if we would not have rejected the message. then, when a
message is moved out of the Rejects mailbox, we change MailboxOrigID to
MailboxDestinedID. this essentially makes the message look like it was
delivered normally.
makes it easier to run on bsd's, where you cannot (easily?) let non-root users
bind to ports <1024. starting as root also paves the way for future improvements
with privilege separation.
unfortunately, this requires changes to how you start mox. though mox will help
by automatically fix up dir/file permissions/ownership.
if you start mox from the systemd unit file, you should update it so it starts
as root and adds a few additional capabilities:
# first update the mox binary, then, as root:
./mox config printservice >mox.service
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart mox
journalctl -f -u mox &
# you should see mox start up, with messages about fixing permissions on dirs/files.
if you used the recommended config/ and data/ directory, in a directory just for
mox, and with the mox user called "mox", this should be enough.
if you don't want mox to modify dir/file permissions, set "NoFixPermissions:
true" in mox.conf.
if you named the mox user something else than mox, e.g. "_mox", add "User: _mox"
to mox.conf.
if you created a shared service user as originally suggested, you may want to
get rid of that as it is no longer useful and may get in the way. e.g. if you
had /home/service/mox with a "service" user, that service user can no longer
access any files: only mox and root can.
this also adds scripts for building mox docker images for alpine-supported
platforms.
the "restart" subcommand has been removed. it wasn't all that useful and got in
the way.
and another change: when adding a domain while mtasts isn't enabled, don't add
the per-domain mtasts config, as it would cause failure to add the domain.
based on report from setting up mox on openbsd from mteege.
and based on issue #3. thanks for the feedback!
import does its own batched junkfilter training, so the deliver function
doesn't have to do it one message at a time, writing the updated filter each
time. however, if the message cannot be parsed, it isn't trained during import,
and deliver would try to train it again. it would try to open the junk filter
to do so, but that would fail because the import function already has the
junkfilter open (and the timeout is reached). a missing error check would
continue with a nil junkfilter, resulting in the nil pointer deref.
this adds the missing error check, and makes sure the deliver function does not
also try to train unparseable imported messages.
report from Jens Hilligsøe
so users can easily take their email out of somewhere else, and import it into mox.
this goes a little way to give feedback as the import progresses: upload
progress is shown (surprisingly, browsers aren't doing this...), imported
mailboxes/messages are counted (batched) and import issues/warnings are
displayed, all sent over an SSE connection. an import token is stored in
sessionstorage. if you reload the page (e.g. after a connection error), the
browser will reconnect to the running import and show its progress again. and
you can just abort the import before it is finished and committed, and nothing
will have changed.
this also imports flags/keywords from mbox files.
ideally both account & admin web pages should be on non-public ips (e.g. a
wireguard tunnel). but during setup, users may not have that set up, and they
may want to configure the admin/account pages on their public ip's. the auth
rate limiting should make it less of issue.
users can now also only put the account web page publicly available. useful for
if you're the admin and you have a vpn connection, but your other/external
users do not have a vpn into your mail server. to make the account page more
easily findable, the http root serves the account page. the admin page is still
at /admin/, to prevent clash with potential account pages, but if no account
page is present, you are helpfully redirected from / to /admin/.
this also adds a prometheus metric counting how often auth attempts have been
rate limited.
the previous default, marking the messages as junk had the interesting effect
of training the junk filter. rejecting could have been the result of the
sending IP being in the DNSBL. so the DNSBL helped to automatically train the
junk filter. perhaps we can keep that in the future and just not take messages
from the rejects mailbox into account when evaluating the reputation for
incoming deliveries.
before, we used heuristics to decide when to train/untrain a message as junk or
nonjunk: the message had to be seen, be in certain mailboxes. then if a message
was marked as junk, it was junk. and otherwise it was nonjunk. this wasn't good
enough: you may want to keep some messages around as neither junk or nonjunk.
and that wasn't possible.
ideally, we would just look at the imap $Junk and $NotJunk flags. the problem
is that mail clients don't set these flags, or don't make it easy. thunderbird
can set the flags based on its own bayesian filter. it has a shortcut for
marking Junk and moving it to the junk folder (good), but the counterpart of
notjunk only marks a message as notjunk without showing in the UI that it was
marked as notjunk. there is also no "move and mark as notjunk" mechanism. e.g.
"archive" does not mark a message as notjunk. ios mail and mutt don't appear to
have any way to see or change the $Junk and $NotJunk flags.
what email clients do have is the ability to move messages to other
mailboxes/folders. so mox now has a mechanism that allows you to configure
mailboxes that automatically set $Junk or $NotJunk (or clear both) when a
message is moved/copied/delivered to that folder. e.g. a mailbox called junk or
spam or rejects marks its messags as junk. inbox, postmaster, dmarc, tlsrpt,
neutral* mark their messages as neither junk or notjunk. other folders mark
their messages as notjunk. e.g. list/*, archive. this functionality is
optional, but enabled with the quickstart and for new accounts.
also, mox now keeps track of the previous training of a message and will only
untrain/train if needed. before, there probably have been duplicate or missing
(un)trainings.
this also includes a new subcommand "retrain" to recreate the junkfilter for an
account. you should run it after updating to this version. and you should
probably also modify your account config to include the AutomaticJunkFlags.
and change thunderbird autoconfiguration to use it.
unfortunately, for microsoft autodiscover, there appears to be no way to
request secure password negotiation. so it will default to plain text auth.
cram-md5 is less secure than scram-sha-*, but thunderbird does not yet support
scram auth. it currently chooses "plain", sending the literal password over the
connection (which is TLS-protected, but we don't want to receive clear text
passwords). in short, cram-md5 is better than nothing...
for cram-md5 to work, a new set of derived credentials need to be stored in the
database. so you need to save your password again to make it work. this was
also the case with the scram-sha-1 addition, but i forgot to mention it then.
the idea is that clients may not support SCRAM-SHA-256, but may support
SCRAM-SHA-1. if they do support the 256 variant, they'll use it.
unfortunately, thunderbird does not support scram-sha-1 either.
