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.
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.
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.
current behaviour isn't intuitive. it's not great to have to attempt parsing
the strings as both localpart and email address. so we deprecate the
localpart-only behaviour. when we load the config file, and it has
localpart-only Destinations keys, we'll change them to full addresses in
memory. when an admin causes a write of domains.conf, it'll automatically be
fixed. we log an error with a deprecated notice for each localpart-only
destinations key.
sometime in the future, we can remove the old localpart-only destination
support. will be in the release notes then.
also start keeping track of update notes that need to make it in the release
notes of the next release.
for issue #18
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!
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.
