gomaild2

gomaild2

Hopefully the successor to gomaild.

Requires gengen to generate some files (go get github.com/trapped/gengen).

What can it do?

With gomaild2 you can:

• send and receive email to/from most other mail servers/service providers
• force SSL/TLS encryption during mail exchange (when sending)
• safely authenticate (encrypting your credentials) when fetching email with POP3
• setup a catch-all email server for verifying throwaway accounts
• easily backup the database

Setting up

Most people only need to receive and send simple email, so we'll go over how to set gomaild2 up for that.

Building

Right now the only way to get gomaild2 is to build from source (but we plan to change that in the near future). To do that, you're gonna need the latest version of the Go programming language and set it up. I'm going to assume you can search yourself how to do that.

Next, you need to download gomaild2's source code:

go get github.com/trapped/gomaild2

If the previous command didn't install gomaild2 for you (check if $GOPATH/bin/gomaild2 exists) move into the source directory and build again:

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/trapped/gomaild2
$ go install

Preparing the configuration file

Great, so now you have a working gomaild2 binary. What now? Well, you obviously need a configuration file. We provide a "default" one, which should be fine for most purposes, but it's mostly a placeholder, so we'll go over creating a config file from scratch. You can start by creating a config.yaml file in your home directory:

$ cd
$ touch config.yaml

The boring stuff

First off you need to setup things like logging and server settings. Copy-paste this into the config file and leave everything as-is except the server name (unless you know what you're doing):

log:
  path: gomaild2.log

server:
  name: YOUR DOMAIN NAME
  smtp:
    mta:
      address: 0.0.0.0
      ports:
        - 25
      timeout: 600 # seconds
    msa:
      address: 0.0.0.0
      require_auth: true
      outbound: true
      ports:
        - 587
      timeout: 600 # seconds
  pop3:
    local:
      address: 0.0.0.0
      ports:
        - 110
      timeout: 600 # seconds

A little note about server.name: it should be the domain name that points to the machine with the email server on.

Say for example you had a VPS, and say you set up mail.foobar.com to point to its IP. Then server.name should be mail.foobar.com, although usually you can also just use foobar.com.

The transfer agent

The transfer agent (and its workers) is the small piece of code that takes the email you send and makes sure they arrive at destination. You can tweak a couple settings:

transfer:
  max_tries: 3
  worker_count: 1
  allow_unencrypted: true
  allow_insecure: true

max_tries is the amount of times workers will try to connect to the receiving email server. 3 times is usually fine.

worker_count is the amount of workers that will be available to transfer your email. If you plan on having many users and/or sending many emails very fast, you can increment this.

When allow_unencrypted is set to false, workers will refuse to transfer your email to servers that don't support SSL/TLS encryption. Generally they support it, but you never know.

allow_insecure makes workers accept to transfer your email to servers that don't have a 'valid' SSL/TLS certificate, such as those using a self-signed one.

The database

db:
  save_all_mail: false
  path: gomaild2.db

save_all_mail makes your server accept and save email belonging to addresses that don't exist (yet). If you add an account later, you'll be able to read even emails received before you created it.

path is the place where the database file is. You might find it useful when backing it up.

Encryption and accounts

It is never a good idea to let strangers read what you write. Hence why you can encrypt your email while in transit, as well as the credentials for your email accounts!

To encrypt credentials, first you need an AES256 key, which is any kind of data that is 32 bytes long (for example 123456789012345678901234567890ab). After you have one, encode it to base64 (echo -n "123456789012345678901234567890ab" | openssl base64) and set the PW_ENCRYPTION environment variable to it, then actually encrypt your password (echo -n "YOUR PASSWORD HERE" | openssl aes-256-cbc -a then type the original non-base64 password) and set the base64-encoded result in the config file.

Encrypting credentials can be complicated, though, so if you want you can disable it by NOT setting PW_ENCRYPTION.

domains:
  YOUR DOMAIN HERE:
    users:
      - YOUR USERNAME HERE@YOUR (MAYBE ENCRYPTED) PASSWORD HERE
      - ANOTHER USERNAME@ANOTHER PASSWORD

Another thing that is important to set up is SSL/TLS encryption. You first need a valid certificate (search on the internet how to get one, but I recommend Let's Encrypt).

tls:
  enabled: true
  certificate: /certificates/YOUR DOMAIN.crt
  key: /certificates/YOUR DOMAIN.key

Running the email server

It would be a good idea to have a so-called supervisor 'babysit' gomaild2 and restart it in case of crashes, as well as alert you if something goes wrong. The easy (and dangerous!) way, though, is to simply run it while into the folder containing the configuration file: $GOPATH/bin/gomaild2

You will see lots of text, lots of log lines, but you can ignore it. You will also notice you can't type into your terminal anymore. If you're not using a supervisor, you can just install screen and make a 'virtual' terminal for the server:

$ screen -S gomaild2
... a blank screen opens
$ $GOPATH/bin/gomaild2
...

You'll see log lines again, but this time you can press CTRL + A + D to detach from the virtual screen. To check on it, you can either reattach (screen -R gomaild2) or read the log file (cat gomaild2.log). Some people also like to monitor the log file in real time (tail -f gomaild2.log).

To stop it, kill it like you would with any other program: CTRL + C (or pkill, etc...).

Setting up Thunderbird

This is the easy part, since Thunderbird has a great automatic wizard that does most of the work for you; however:

• when asked to input any kind of USERNAME, use the WHOLE email address (user@domain.com, NOT user)
• if you didn't enable/setup SSL/TLS encryption, disable it in Thunderbird too
• when asked about what port to connect to, use 110 for POP3 and 587 for SMTP (unless you changed them)

Backing up and resetting the database

gomaild2 uses boltdb as the underlying database, which means that backing up is as simple as copying the database file itself (PROVIDED THE SERVER IS NOT RUNNING):

$ cp gomaild2.db gomaild2.db.backup-$(date -I)

To reset the database just delete the file (PROVIDED THE SERVER IS NOT RUNNING):

$ rm gomaild2.db

Status

• DB interface to actually store email
• YAML config
• Logging (logfmt)
• SMTP server
  • HELO
  • EHLO (implicit PIPELINING and 8BITMIME)
  • NOOP
  • MAIL FROM
  • RCPT TO
  • DATA
  • QUIT
  • AUTH
  • STARTTLS
  • DSN (Delivery Status Notifications)
• SMTP transfer agent/client (to send outbound email)
• POP3 server
  • APOP
  • DELE
  • LIST
  • NOOP
  • PASS
  • CAPA
  • QUIT
  • RETR
  • STLS
  • TOP
  • RSET
  • STAT
  • UIDL
  • USER
  • AUTH