The Hardening link merged to main changed the packaged schema, which this
branch also changes. The file is gzipped, so the two can't be merged line
by line: this takes main's schema and adds security.legacy-protocols-changed
to it again, with the hash recomputed.
The tenant switch. A tenant's administrator turns legacy mail protocols
off for its own tenant, and from then on sign-in over IMAP, POP3,
ManageSieve and SMTP AUTH is refused for every address on the tenant's
domains, while every other domain on the server carries on. No port
closes, since other tenants share them (LP-13): it is one stored fact per
tenant, read at sign-in and when client configuration is answered.
inbuxa:TenantProtocolPolicy/get and /set, one per tenant, id the tenant's:
- Inside a tenant, a principal reaches only its own tenant's switch
(MT-1): /get with no ids answers with it, another tenant's is notFound
and can't be changed. At server level /get with no ids lists every
tenant's.
- Turning it off is always allowed. Turning it back on is refused with
forbidden, naming inbuxa:ProtocolPolicy, while the server has legacy
protocols off (LP-9).
- A change raises security.legacy-protocols-changed with policy = tenant,
the tenant's id, the new value and who made it (LP-14).
- It takes sysDomainGet and sysDomainUpdate, not the two new permissions
the spec names. The switch governs sign-in on the tenant's domains, so
whoever manages those domains may turn it -- and the default Tenant
Administrator role already holds both, where new permissions would reach
no role already stored on a server (MT-12's note), leaving today's
tenant administrators without the switch until someone edited their
role by hand. The same trade inbuxa:AiLimits and inbuxa:ProtocolPolicy
made. /query is not built yet; /get with no ids covers listing.
Sign-in (LP-10 to LP-12). Before the credentials are looked at, the name
given is resolved to its domain and the domain to its tenant, so a real
account and a made-up address on the domain get the same refusal, with a
right password or a wrong one, counted as no failed sign-in (LP-11). The
words are the spec's: "Your organization allows only INBUXA webmail and
JMAP apps...", in each protocol's form. A bearer token needn't name an
account, so after authentication the account's own tenant is checked too;
a token that named nobody can't slip past.
The refusal carries policy = tenant and the domain, not the tenant's id:
IMAP answers a command's tag from the Id key, so an error holding one was
sent under the wrong tag and the mail app hung waiting for its reply. The
first live run found that; a unit test now holds the refusal to it.
Client configuration (LP-14a). Autoconfig, autodiscover, PACC and the
suggested DNS records now ask whether legacy services are off for the
domain being answered for -- the server's switch, or the domain's
tenant's -- so a tenant's domains stop offering IMAP, POP3 and
submission while others still do.
tests/e2e/legacy_protocols.py builds a tenant with its own domain, a user
and a tenant administrator, and a second tenant, and proves on a running
server: the admin sees and changes only its own tenant's switch (test 10);
turning it off is an event (test 14); the tenant's user is refused over
IMAP with the right password and a wrong one, a made-up address on the
domain the same (tests 6, 7); POP3 and submission refuse in their own
forms and JMAP still works (test 8); an account on another domain signs in
normally (test 6); autoconfig drops IMAP for the tenant's domain only; with
the server off, the tenant can't turn it back on (test 9); and once back
on, the user signs in again. All 62 checks pass.
Turning legacy mail protocols off or back on raises
security.legacy-protocols-changed (id 643, info level, also in the packaged
schema), with the scope (policy = server), the new value, who made the
change (accountId), whether listeners closed or reopened (details), which
ones (listenerId), and -- only when a listener could not be put back --
which and why (reason).
It is raised in Server::set_protocol_policy rather than by the JMAP
method, so whatever turns the switch is reported. A /set that changes
nothing -- the switch already where it was asked to be, nothing to close
or reopen -- is not a change and raises nothing.
The event is never an error, but jmap's exhaustive map from security
events to HTTP errors has to name it; it joins the other two that can't
occur there. rustfmt now also wraps LP-6's two over-long lines in
enums_impl.rs, which it flagged along with this change's.
tests/e2e/legacy_protocols.py now gives the server a stdout tracer and
reads events from the container's log: turning the switch off is exactly
one event naming the scope, value, author and listeners closed; setting it
off again raises none; turning it on is one event naming the listeners
reopened. It also proves LP-6's side: seven refused submission sign-ins
are seven auth.legacy-protocol-refused events, and there is no auth.failed
or auth.too-many-attempts among them. All checks pass.
While the switch is off, the answers that tell a mail app where to connect
stop offering what the switch closed, so a new phone or desktop app is not
sent to a port that is shut or a sign-in that will be refused:
- Thunderbird-style autoconfig (/mail/config-v1.1.xml and its other
paths) and Outlook autodiscover leave out IMAP, POP3 and SMTP
submission.
- PACC (/.well-known/user-agent-configuration.json) offers JMAP, CalDAV,
CardDAV and WebDAV, and no IMAP, POP3, SMTP or ManageSieve. The document
is rendered once per configuration load, so the JMAP-only version is
rendered beside it and chosen per request; the _ua-auto-config digest in
the suggested zone follows, since it hashes the same document.
- The suggested zone publishes _imap, _imaps, _pop3, _pop3s, _submission
and _submissions with target "." -- "not offered", RFC 6186 section 3.4 --
the spec's decision, rather than dropping them: a client that looks is
told, and an automatically managed zone replaces the old records instead
of leaving them behind.
- It also drops the TLSA records for ports 993 and 995. A TLS pin for a
port the switch has closed advertises a service that is not there.
Submission's 465 keeps its record: the SMTP lock keeps that port open.
The switch is read per answer, as sign-in reads it, so every node agrees
the moment it turns. Inbound mail, MX records and the JMAP, CalDAV and
CardDAV answers are untouched.
tests/e2e/legacy_protocols.py checks all four on a running server: with the
switch on they offer IMAP, POP3 and SMTP (the control); while it is off
they offer none of them and every legacy SRV name has target "."; and once
it is back on, autoconfig and the zone read as they did before. All checks
pass.
LP-6 added auth.legacy-protocol-refused to the packaged schema, which this
branch also changes. The file is gzipped, so the two can't be merged line
by line: this takes main's schema and adds the Settings › Security ›
Hardening link to it again, with the hash recomputed.
While legacy mail protocols are off, x:NetworkListener/set refuses to
create a listener the switch would close, and refuses an update that would
turn an existing one into such a listener -- otherwise changing a
listener's protocol would walk straight past the check. The refusal is
invalidProperties on protocol (or on bind, for a submission listener once
SMTP is unlocked, since its port is what makes it one), and its description
names inbuxa:ProtocolPolicy and says to turn legacy protocols back on first.
The rule is the switch's own, listeners::closes, so what can't be added is
exactly what the switch would close: locked protocols (SMTP, LMTP, HTTP)
and the inbound port are never refused. Putting saved listeners back
(LP-5) writes through the registry, not /set, so it is unaffected.
The e2e changes with it. LP-6's check that an IMAP listener "created by
mistake" refuses sign-in can't be set up any more -- LP-4 is what stops
that listener existing -- so that step now proves test 4 instead: creating
an IMAP listener is refused, naming the policy; an SMTP listener can still
be created; and updating it to IMAP is refused. LP-6 stays proven live over
submission, and its IMAP wording by unit tests. All checks pass.
The second lock. While legacy mail protocols are off, a sign-in over IMAP,
POP3, ManageSieve or SMTP AUTH is refused for every account, so a listener
that exists by mistake -- or submission, which the SMTP lock keeps open --
still lets nobody in.
The check sits at the top of each protocol's sign-in, before the
credentials are looked at. So the answer is the same for a right password,
a wrong one and an account that doesn't exist; it isn't auth.failed, so it
counts nothing against the account and never feeds the auto-ban; and the
session stays open, since the mail app is being told, not thrown off.
Mail apps read the spec's words (LP-12, at server scope):
IMAP NO [ALERT] This server allows only INBUXA webmail and JMAP
apps. This mail app can't sign in.
POP3 -ERR [AUTH] ...the same...
ManageSieve NO "This server allows only INBUXA webmail and JMAP apps."
SMTP 535 5.7.0 This server allows only INBUXA webmail and JMAP
apps. This mail app can't send.
SMTP AUTH is refused on every SMTP listener, port 25 included: only mail
apps authenticate, so inbound delivery is untouched. LMTP is left alone.
The policy is read from the store on each sign-in rather than cached, so
every node of a cluster answers the same the moment the switch turns.
Each refusal raises a new event, auth.legacy-protocol-refused (id 642, info
level, also in the packaged schema), with the protocol as source, the
policy's scope and the domain -- never the account. The session adds the
listener and remote IP.
tests/e2e/legacy_protocols.py now also proves, on a running server: a
normal IMAP and submission sign-in works with the switch on, before and
after; while off, submission refuses the right password and six wrong ones
with the same words and without hanging up; and an IMAP listener created by
mistake while off refuses the right password, a wrong one and an account
that doesn't exist. All 33 checks pass. SMTP sign-ins in the script wait
out a second first: every connection arrives from Docker's gateway, and the
stock inbound throttle takes five a second from one IP.
Adds a link to CustomComponent/LegacyProtocols in the packaged schema's
Settings › Security, between Settings and Blocked IPs, and updates the
schema hash so admins fetch the new layout rather than a cached one.
INBUXA Admin draws the screen; this is what makes it reachable. An admin
from before that screen would show "Unknown component" here, so this
lands after the admin release that carries it.
Ports .github/workflows/ci.yml after the GitHub account was suspended and
Actions stopped being reachable. Same checks, same order, with the image
pinned by digest in place of the workflow's SHA-pinned actions.
cleanup.yml is not ported: it pruned GHCR through an action, and GitLab
keeps that as a container registry cleanup policy on the project rather
than as a pipeline. publish.yml and release.yml are larger and follow
separately.
The Actions workflows stay in the tree as the reference.
.gitignore blanket-ignores dotfiles, so .gitlab-ci.yml is negated there the
same way .github already is.
main is protected as of today -- no force-push, no deletion, and a pull
request with a green build to merge -- and GITHUB_TOKEN is not a bypass
actor. `git push origin HEAD:main` in the cut job would have been refused
from Monday, on a scheduled run nobody watches.
GitHub would not take the obvious fix. Adding the Actions integration as a
bypass actor is rejected ("must be part of the ruleset source or owner
organization") because the organization has no app installations. The
other two routes -- an organization-level ruleset, a deploy key with write
access -- both amount to handing the release a credential that outranks
the rule, which is a worse thing to own than a slower Monday.
So the bump lands the way every other change does. It commits to
release/v<version>, opens a pull request, waits for the build the ruleset
requires, merges, and tags what came out. The waiting is not merely the
rule being satisfied: a release cut from a tree that does not compile is
the failure this whole arrangement exists to prevent, and until now
nothing checked.
Three details that would each have produced a wrong tag. The sha comes
from GitHub's merge commit, not the tip that was pushed, because a rebase
merge rewrites it. The pull request is tracked by number, not by branch,
because the branch is deleted on merge and a deleted branch no longer
resolves to its pull request. And a failed or slow build leaves the pull
request open and cuts nothing, rather than tagging whatever main happened
to hold.
Quiet weeks are unaffected: the tag still names the bump commit, so
`previous..HEAD` is still zero when nothing else has landed.
The cost is a Monday run that now takes as long as a full build -- about
25 minutes at the moment, most of it saving the cache.
main has a ruleset as of today: no force-push, no deletion, and a pull
request with a green build to merge. CONTRIBUTING said nothing about any
of it, and a contributor's first clue would have been a rejected push.
No approving review is required. A review gate nobody can pass is not a
gate, and this is a project with one maintainer; the build is the part
that has to hold.
The section also says why the rule exists rather than only what it is.
The weekly release cuts from main on a Monday and ships whatever is there,
so main is expected to be releasable continuously -- which makes "not
finished" a thing that belongs behind a default-off switch or off main
altogether, not a state main passes through on a Thursday.
Administrators can bypass. That is written down as being for correcting
the tree, not for skipping the path, because an undocumented bypass
becomes the normal route.
tests/e2e/legacy_protocols.py boots the debug binary in a container, turns
the switch off and on, and checks the ports themselves. Everything below it
was unit-tested and none of it could have told us this worked.
What it establishes: IMAP and POP3 stop answering while inbound SMTP,
submission and JMAP keep going (LP-1, LP-2, LP-3); the listeners are saved
whole (LP-1); a restart does not reopen them, which is the point of taking
the objects away rather than only the sockets; both come back on their own
without a restart (LP-5); savedListeners empties; and asking to close
submission is overruled to false and reported, with 465 still answering
(LP-21, acceptance test 18). wouldClose named imaps, pop3s and sieve, and
those were exactly the three that closed (LP-16).
One caveat about the method, because it nearly produced a false pass in
reverse. A published Docker port accepts connections whether or not
anything is listening in the container, so connecting proves nothing. The
first run of this script reported IMAP still open after the switch, and
that was the script being wrong, not the server. Each port now has to
speak: a TLS handshake on 993, 995 and 465, a greeting on 25.
It lives under tests/ because target/ is ignored and this is worth keeping.
It derives its own root, needs Docker and a debug build, and clears its
state directory first -- a half-bootstrapped one from an earlier run is no
longer in bootstrap mode and the recovery admin stops working.
Found while setting up the live check, which is the only place it could
have shown: every unit test passes without it.
spawn_restored_listeners re-parsed the listeners and spawned them, but
never bound their sockets. Binding is not part of parsing -- it happens in
bind_and_drop_priv, once, at startup -- so listen() would have failed on an
unbound socket and the port would have stayed shut while the policy
recorded it as reopened. LP-5 would have been a promise the server did not
keep, and the operator's only clue a log line.
bind() is now split out of bind_and_drop_priv and called on its own here.
It cannot be the whole of bind_and_drop_priv, because that also drops
privileges, which must happen once at startup and never again.
That split has a consequence worth stating: a listener on a port below 1024
cannot be bound again once privileges are gone. Ports 143 and 110 are the
realistic cases. Rather than leave such a listener parsed, spawned and
silently dead, the bind errors are read back and those listeners are
reported as needing a restart -- which is the "cannot be recreated" case
LP-5 already anticipated, and it stays saved for another try.
Re-parsing is also narrowed to the listeners being restored, so putting one
back cannot bind a port another listener already holds.
The fork had CI and nothing after it. v2026.9.20 was tagged and released
by hand, and there has never been an image: running INBUXA meant
building the tree yourself, or using install.sh to do it for you.
This adds the three workflows ihasmail already runs -- weekly release,
publish, prune.
Monday 10:07 UTC, and nothing on a quiet week. Last of the three, so
INBUXA Admin and the webmail release ahead of the server they talk to,
and staggered so a bad Monday names one repository rather than three.
The version is the difference from ihasmail. ihasmail derives its
version from the commit it builds, so its release only reads. INBUXA's
lives in the brand_version! macro, deliberately apart from Cargo.toml so
upstream's bumps merge without conflicts -- so the release writes it:
the bump is committed to main and the tag names that commit. The tree a
tag points at therefore reports the version the tag claims, which a tag
placed beside an unbumped macro cannot promise.
Both the bump and the read are scoped to the macro body and fail if they
do not match exactly once. branding.rs holds other string literals, and
a bump that silently edited one of those, or an image tagged from one,
would be worse than a run that stops.
The existing Dockerfile needs nothing: it cross-compiles from
BUILDPLATFORM and takes no arguments beyond TARGETPLATFORM, so each
architecture builds on its own native runner as ihasmail's does, without
docker-bake.hcl. `docker build --check` is clean.
Two things to expect from the first run. GHCR creates a package private
the first time even in a public repository, and no workflow can change
that, so the first image will refuse an anonymous pull until its
visibility is set by hand. And a full Rust build of this tree is long;
the per-platform GitHub Actions cache is what keeps the second one from
being just as long, and it is worth watching that it stays inside the
cache limit.
The switch is now reachable. /get and /set on a server-level singleton,
wired through jmap-proto the way inbuxa:AiLimits is: object, method names,
request and response variants, reference resolution and evaluation.
/set does not write the policy. It hands what was asked to
Server::set_protocol_policy, which applies the locks, moves the listener
objects and opens or closes their sockets, and reports what happened. So
the method cannot drift from what the switch actually does.
Two properties exist for the screen rather than the server. lockedProtocols
serves LP-21's locked set, so the selector renders SMTP and JMAP locked
from what the server says instead of a list the front end carries -- and
unlocking later needs no admin release. wouldClose answers LP-16: exactly
which listeners turning the switch on would close, by name and port, before
anything happens. It is computed against a hypothetical disabled policy, so
it reads the same whichever way the switch is set, and the registry is only
asked when the property was requested.
savedListeners, changedAt, changedBy and both of those are the server's to
say; a client that sets one gets invalidProperties naming it. closeSubmission
is different: locked, not immutable, so it is overruled rather than refused
and the response hands back what was really stored (false). JMAP already has
the place for that, the value beside an updated id.
Permissions reuse SysNetworkListenerGet and SysNetworkListenerUpdate rather
than adding to a schema-generated enum -- the same choice AiLimits made with
the classifier's. It also reads right: this takes listeners away and puts
them back, so whoever may edit a listener may turn the switch.
changedBy stores the account id, not the name, which survives a rename.
Still no screen, no sign-in refusal (LP-6) and no event (LP-8).
The join: the policy decides, features owns the listener objects,
ListenerControl owns the running sockets, and only Server has both.
Server::set_protocol_policy is what a click performs. It applies the locks
to what was asked before storing anything (LP-21), so what is recorded is
what the server allows. Closing removes each listener object and then stops
its socket; opening puts the object back and then spawns it. The order is
the point in both directions -- a socket stopped while its object remains
returns on the next restart, and a socket spawned before its object exists
has nothing to come back to.
saved_listeners is carried over from the stored policy rather than taken
from the request. A client never sets it, and a /set that omitted it would
otherwise lose the listeners still waiting to come back.
Putting a listener back has to bind a fresh socket, so it re-parses from
the registry -- the objects are already back by then -- rather than trying
to revive the saved one. Only main knows which session manager a protocol
wants, so it leaves a spawner behind at startup and spawn_listener is now
shared between that and the initial spawn. Without a spawner a restored
listener is reported as pending a restart rather than promised, which is
what the test servers will see.
A listener that cannot be put back does not stop the others and stays
saved for another try (LP-5).
Still nothing an operator can reach: no JMAP method calls this yet, and no
sign-in is refused. What it does do is close and reopen a port on a
running server, which is the part that did not exist this morning.
John, 2026-09-20: "SMTP and JMAP should be shown with the selector locked,
we want to prevent those two protocols from being shutdown for now."
The selector lists every mail protocol the server speaks, so the operator
sees the whole surface at once; SMTP and JMAP sit in it named and visibly
not switchable. JMAP was never closeable -- closing it locks everyone out
of their mail and the operator out of INBUXA Admin, with no way back but
the host -- and is now visibly so. SMTP is locked whole. LP-3 already
spared inbound on 25; this extends that to submission on 465 and 587,
which LP-1 would otherwise have closed by default.
So closeSubmission has no effect while the lock stands, and is forced to
false. A client that asks for true is not refused: the value is recorded,
overruled, and the overrule reported, because the field is specified and
the lock is meant to be temporary. is_locked() is consulted before
anything else in closes(), so no phrasing of a request reaches past it.
This costs the feature nothing. Submission's ports stay open and sign-in
over them is still refused once LP-6 lands, which is the case acceptance
test 2 already described: a mail app reaching 465 is told it cannot sign
in rather than finding nothing listening. The operator also keeps a port
they may well be forwarding, which is the LP-20 problem in miniature.
The locked set is a server constant the front ends read, not a list they
carry, so unlocking later is a server change and no admin release. The
LP-3 tests stay as they are, to keep it covered if the lock is lifted.
Recorded as LP-21, with acceptance tests 17 and 18.
LP-1 and LP-5, the registry half. close() removes every listener object
the policy closes, saving each one whole first; reopen() puts them back.
The switch removes the listener objects, not just their sockets. A stopped
socket returns on the next restart, which would reopen every port the
operator had just closed, and the operator would have no way to know. A
removed object stays removed, and a server that boots with the switch on
never spawns those listeners at all -- so there is no boot-time special
case to write or to forget.
LP-3 is decided here, on the object rather than the running socket, and
sees every address a listener binds: a submission listener that also binds
25 is inbound and stays. lmtp and http are never candidates.
A listener that cannot be put back does not stop the others; it comes back
with its reason and stays saved for another try (LP-5). A delete the
registry declines is reported as not removed, so the policy never claims a
port is closed while it is still accepting.
Stopping the running socket is still a separate step in common, which owns
the listener registry. Nothing calls any of this yet.
The server-wide legacy-protocols policy: the switch, whether submission
closes with it, the listeners taken away to honour it, and who last
changed it. Stored like inbuxa:AiLimits, as JSON in the fork's subspace,
so an unset field reads as its default and an old record still loads.
closes() is where LP-3 lives. imap, pop3 and manageSieve are named
outright; smtp is not, because an SMTP listener is inbound or submission
depending on its port and nothing else can tell them apart. A listener
bound to 25 is inbound whatever it is called, including one that also
binds 465, so it stays. http and lmtp are never candidates at all.
savedListeners keeps each listener's registry object whole rather than a
few fields of it. LP-5 promises the listeners come back exactly as they
were, and a listener carries proxy networks, TLS timeouts and socket
options that no one should have to re-derive -- a field this code has
never heard of has to survive the round trip too, and a test holds that.
The module is under security/ rather than beside the rebuilt features,
because this one is not a rebuild: upstream has nothing like it.
Still only a fact. Nothing reads this policy yet, so no port closes and
no sign-in is refused; the acting code needs the listener registry and
the config store, which live above this crate.
Left over from this morning's dependabot merges: the minor-and-patch group
freed sequoia-openpgp to use base64 0.22.1, but the lockfile still pinned
0.21.7 for it. Any cargo invocation rewrites the line, so it was showing up
as spurious drift in unrelated diffs.
No manifest changed and nothing is upgraded here; this only writes down
what cargo already resolves.
The legacy-protocols switch has to close the IMAP, POP3 and ManageSieve
ports and leave everything else accepting. The server could not do that.
Two findings from the source, both now recorded in the spec. A settings
reload never closes a port: cache/reload.rs parses the listeners only to
collect configuration errors and drops the result, and sockets are bound
once at startup through init.servers.spawn in main.rs. And there is only
one shutdown signal -- Listeners::spawn makes a single watch channel and
hands every listener a clone -- so the one thing the server could do was
stop all of them at once, port 25 included. That answers the spec's open
question 1, and the answer was neither of the two it offered.
So each listener gets its own channel. ListenerControl holds the sending
ends keyed by listener id; firing one breaks that accept loop, which drops
its TcpListener and closes the socket. The accept loop itself is unchanged
-- it already did the right thing, it just had no way to be told about one
listener. stop_matching takes a predicate and a keep list, because the
inbound listener shares its protocol with submission and telling them
apart is the caller's job (LP-3), not this registry's.
spawn_with_control is a second method rather than a change to spawn. The
registry owns the senders, so a dropped registry would stop every listener
at once; the four test callers pass no registry and keep the old shared
channel exactly as it was.
Whole-server shutdown now fires the per-listener channels too, since the
returned sender no longer reaches them.
No policy, no JMAP and no screen yet: this is only the mechanism, with
seven tests over stopping one, stopping many, sparing port 25 and sparing
submission. It closes no port on its own, and it does not touch the host's
firewall or any port-forward -- that is LP-20, and stays the operator's.
decancer 4.0 changes CuredString's Deref target from String to str. That
is all it takes to break two call sites in the classifier: .as_str() used
to resolve to String::as_str through one deref, and now resolves to the
inherent str::as_str, which is still unstable (rust-lang #130366). Stable
rustc rejects it, so the whole crate fails to compile -- the two E0658s
that are currently red on the decancer bump in PR #4.
Neither call site wanted an inherent method, only a &str. Deref coercion
gives that under either target, so dropping the .as_str() fixes 4.0 and
keeps 3.3.3 building; cargo check passes against both. The result is
identical either way, so no behaviour changes here.
Committed against 3.3.3, which is still what the lockfile pins. The bump
itself stays PR #4's to carry, and rebases onto this.
Translation::String going from Cow<'static, str> to CuredString, the other
breaking change in the 4.0 notes, touches nothing: the type appears
nowhere in the tree.
brand_version! goes to 2026.9.20 (SPEC.md 2.6: YYYY.M.D), the version this
release is tagged at. Verified from the built binary rather than the
source: --version prints "2026.9.20 (Stalwart 0.16.22)" and --help leads
with "INBUXA Server 2026.9.20 (Stalwart 0.16.22)".
install.sh still said "See https://inbuxa.org once it's up", which stopped
being true when the site went up this morning, and offered nothing but a
cargo line. It now names both ways to build, says what a server with no
configuration does, and points at the releases page and the docs.
The installer it stands in for is still unbuilt (SPEC.md 6.1), and the
script says so plainly: an installer trusted with a mail host is not a
thing to improvise, so it declines rather than half-doing one.
README: inbuxa.org is up, so stop saying it is not, and link the docs.
John, 2026-09-20: committed, remove it. Done the same day as the cutover and
before the certificate-renewal gate this page proposed, which is the
operator's call to make and is recorded as such.
Archived first and the archive verified off-host by checksum, then the tree,
the unit and its drop-in removed. The stalwart user stays: redis-server runs
as it, which step 0's pgrep had already shown and which is exactly the kind
of thing that makes "remove the service user" a bad reflex.
Two things the doing taught, both for migration.md. The unit does not live
inside the tree it manages, so an archive of /opt/stalwart alone is not a
restorable rollback -- stalwart.service and its drop-in had to be saved
separately, and a tool that archives before retiring has to take them too.
And retiring changes what a rollback means: up to that moment it was a
service swap against a store still on disk, minutes and no restore; after
it, an untar, a chown, a unit to reinstate and a webmail image that is no
longer on the host. Still possible, slower, and no longer what the Rollback
section describes.
INBUXA is on the fork. The window was 78 seconds, 2.2 G of store copied in
1.4, mail queued at senders and nothing lost, both front ends up within the
hour, and the rollback never needed.
The page stops being a plan and becomes the record of one, which is what
migration.md is built from. Written up by kind rather than in order, because
nobody reading it later wants the chronology.
What step 0 was worth, most of all. Reading `systemctl cat stalwart` before
touching anything found a network namespace nothing in this document knew
about, and that was two failures rather than one: a collision with nginx on
443, loud and quickly understood, and egress from the wrong address, which
would have cost the provider's port 25 exemption and failed outbound mail
at every receiver with no local symptom and no logs to find it in.
What the copied store brought with it, three times in three guises: a
tracer still writing to the old tree, Stalwart's own web interface being
served from the registry's Application entries, and — from the other
direction — a front end configured by copying variable names the fork had
renamed. A front end reporting healthy is not a front end talking to the
right server; the health check passed while it pointed at example.com.
What this document had wrong: `systemctl mask` cannot mask a unit that
lives in /etc/systemd/system; there is no "let mail flow" gate, because the
fork takes port 25 as it starts and the free-rollback window closes there;
and IMAP's INBOX is not JMAP's account, so the counts differ before and
after alike.
And the bug it found, which only exists when §5.3 is followed: INBUXA Admin
hosted off the mail server cannot fetch its schema, because that response
was publicly cacheable and immutable for a year while its CORS headers vary
by origin. Fixed in 7c4add8.
The Open section loses the two the run settled and gains the two it
created, and names the ACME date: ~28 October, because R12 renews at the
halfway point and nothing brings that forward.
INBUXA Admin, hosted off the mail server as SPEC.md §5.3 requires, signs in
and then cannot load: "Failed to load the admin panel configuration. Failed
to fetch." Every other endpoint works from the same origin with the same
token; only /api/schema fails, and it is the one thing a schema-driven
interface cannot do without.
It is Chrome's cache, not CORS. Measured from the page itself: a normal
fetch fails, while cache: "reload", cache: "no-store" and a cache-busted URL
all return 200. The server never sees the failing request, which is why the
logs had nothing to show and why it looked like a CORS fault for so long.
Two things made that possible, and both are fixed here.
The schema response was `public, max-age=31536000, immutable`. It is served
behind authenticate_headers and its CORS headers vary by Origin, so it is
neither public nor safe to freeze for a year on a hash-named URL that never
changes. It is now `private`, matching what DownloadResponse already does
for the same reason. The other caller of with_immutable_cache serves the
applications' static bundles, which really are public, and keeps it.
And `Vary: Origin` was only emitted when an origin list existed. Before the
front ends are configured that list is empty, so a response cached in that
window carries neither CORS headers nor Vary, and a cache will later replay
it to an origin that should have been allowed. Vary now goes on every
response, so entries key on the origin whatever the configuration was when
they were stored.
Verified against a bootstrapped server in restrictive CORS mode, from a
browser on a separate origin: /api/account, /api/schema and the hashed
target all return 200, with `private, max-age=31536000, immutable` and
`Vary: Origin`.
Nobody hit this before because the admin has always been served from the
mail host at /admin, where it is same-origin and no CORS applies. The first
deployment that follows §5.3 meets it immediately.
cutover-run.md step 4 says to write down what has to be true afterwards
while the old server can still be asked, and step 10 checks against it.
Done by hand it gets skipped, and skipping it turns "each mailbox holds
what was recorded" into "each mailbox holds something", which is a
different check and will not catch a partial copy.
It reuses record-compat.py's client rather than growing a second one, so
the guard that makes it safe to point at a live server — call() refuses
any method that is not a /get or a /query — covers this too. Verified
that it bites: x:Account/set is refused before anything is sent.
From the administrator alone it records every account with its address,
aliases, tenant and usedDiskQuota, which is the number that moves if mail
goes missing, plus the domains and tenants. Exact per-mailbox counts need
the mailbox's own credentials, since an administrator has reach over an
account but not always into it, so --as takes one and repeats. For a
handful of mailboxes that is worth it: it makes step 10 an equality
rather than an estimate.
Aliases are resolved to the domain's name rather than its id, because an
id is not what anyone checks against at 2am.
SPEC 2.2a says INBUXA writes its own when the repository is first published,
and it is. Until now the public repository carried Stalwart's: a security
policy telling people to report vulnerabilities to Stalwart Labs, and a
contributing guide whose policy is that pull requests from anyone not on
upstream's vouched list are closed automatically. Neither is this project's,
and both were being offered to anyone who looked.
So: a security policy that says where to send a report, and what happens if
it turns out to be upstream's bug rather than ours; a contributing guide that
says what a fork of someone else's code needs from a contributor, including
the clean-room question, since the record has to stay true; the Contributor
Covenant; and a sponsor link. Upstream's two security documents move to
.github-upstream/ beside its workflows -- kept, not used, not presented as
ours.
CI builds the server and compiles every test target, and deliberately runs
no suite. The unit tests only build with the integration crate in the graph,
and the integration suites want a STORE, fixed ports and a container apiece,
so running them here would mean a tick that skipped everything or a cross
that means "the runner has no Redis". The workflow says as much, so nobody
has to rediscover it.
Also ignores /artifact: two hand-built binaries, ~190 MB, one `git add -A`
away from a public repository.
The AGPL asks a modified version to carry prominent notices saying it was
modified, and giving a date. Publishing the source is the conveyance that
asks for it, so it wants doing before the repository is public rather than
at the release.
Every upstream file the fork changed now says so in its header, beneath the
notice it came with: 164 files, found by diffing against the upstream
snapshot branch rather than by guessing, so the list is what actually
differs. Files the fork wrote itself already carry their own copyright and
need nothing. Upstream's notices are untouched, which its licence requires
and which was already true.
The README says the same thing in prose, since the obligation is on the
work as a whole and not only its Rust files.
Builds unchanged: the server and the test binary both compile.
cutover.md is the reasoning and is too long to read at 2am. This is the
same sequence as commands, for this install: eight mailboxes, two people
and a printer.
That scale settles three things the general plan leaves open. The store is
small enough that the two-pass rsync buys nothing, so it is one cp inside
the window and a simpler sequence when it matters. "Every account still
works" is two sign-ins. And a reboot inside the window is affordable, which
is the only honest proof that the fork comes up on boot and the old unit
does not — is-enabled says what is configured, a reboot says what happens.
The rollback leads with chattr -i, because step 7's guard stops the
Enterprise build exactly as it stops the fork, and finding that out during
a rollback costs the worst ten minutes of the night.
And it names the printer as its own check. It is the one user that cannot
report a fault: a hardcoded credential and an old TLS stack, of the kind a
stricter default quietly refuses. The people will phone; the printer will
just stop, and nobody will notice for a fortnight.
Taken from the cutover page, where the reasoning is worked out: with no
filesystem snapshot to take, a single copy inside the window makes every
byte downtime. A first pass while the server still serves moves the bulk
and is deliberately inconsistent; a delta pass after the process has exited
makes it consistent and moves little, because a RocksDB store is mostly
immutable SST files.
That is the difference between a window proportional to the store and one
proportional to the delta, which is the number this tool exists to
advertise. Also carried over: hand the copy to the user the fork runs as,
and make the original unwritable before the fork starts, since the old
server's store lock was the only thing holding that line until it stopped.
AGPL section 13 starts at the cutover, not at the announcement: the fork is
a modified AGPL program and its users reach it over a network. Settled
today that the source is released after the cutover, with the links live
then, and in the meantime the server's users are the operator's household,
so the people owed an offer and the people holding the repository are the
same people.
Anyone migrating their own server inherits that obligation on their first
day and has no such overlap, so the migration tool says so at the end of a
successful run instead of leaving it to be discovered.
Two decisions §2 implied but never settled.
§2.4 said no "Stalwart" in UI text; §2.6 requires the startup banner, the
JMAP implementation string and OpenTelemetry's service.version to name the
base. Taken literally, the first would strip exactly what the second exists
to keep. Version and build metadata are now exempt, with the distinction
written down: §2.4's first bullet governs identity, the new one governs
provenance.
A second bullet covers material outside the product. The name appears with
its trademark attribution; the fork relationship is stated once in the
provenance or license section; the migration path names the server it
migrates from, because an operator searching for it has to find it. The base
version stays out of taglines, page titles and social previews, where it
reads as a source identifier rather than a fact. No comparison in either
direction: what INBUXA offers is stated on its own terms.
§2.6 said the base drops out of the version string "when it happens", which
left someone judging the moment. The trigger is now the first release that
isn't a rebase on an upstream tag. Because the reason for publishing the
base is one-way store conversion, and that outlives the string, the
amendment routes it to the upgrade documentation rather than letting it go.
§8 no longer asks whether the fork follows upstream's version numbers. §2.6
answered that on 2026-09-18: it has its own.
Monitoring, SCIM, scale-out storage and per-domain directories each say
"Built 2026-09-19" in their own implementation-status sections, and the
code is where those sections say it is. The §4 table still listed them as
specs awaiting a build, which made the whole feature set look half-finished
to anyone reading the table alone.
Each row now names where the feature landed, as rows 1 to 5 already did.
Monitoring and per-domain directories sit outside crates/features, so their
rows name the paths rather than the crate.
§2.2b already recorded that all nine were rebuilt by 2026-09-19 and every
pending-rebuild gate came off. Only the table lagged.
The section warned in general and so warned about nothing. An operator
reading "it can fail in ways it cannot undo" learns less than one reading
that the window is usually longer than guessed, that opening the source
store with the new server ends the rollback permanently, that a rollback
after mail has flowed does not bring that mail with it, and that a
certificate which stops renewing says nothing for ninety days. Each of
those has been measured or seen; each has something the operator can do
about it.
Also sharpens the part that matters most and is easiest to get wrong: the
old install is a service safety net, not a data one. One copy, same
machine, one moment. A backup is a copy elsewhere that has been restored
from, and anyone who cannot say when they last restored one does not yet
know whether they have one.
And replaces the flat line about nobody else being responsible with what
it was trying to say: the operator carries the outcome, because this is
software running against a server it has never seen, holding data somebody
else depends on.
Asked for by John, 2026-09-19. A tool that stops somebody's mail server
should say so while there is still time to stop it, rather than leaving the
licence to have said it in a file nobody opens. AGPL-3.0 §15 and §16
already disclaim warranty and liability and this narrows neither; it is the
same thing at the moment it is useful.
Specific rather than blanket, because a blanket one protects less and helps
nobody: what the tool does to the server, what a rollback does not return,
and that backups and recovery are the operator's. Keeping the source
install is not a backup — it is one copy, on one machine, of one moment,
and the same disk failure takes both.
Paired with what the tool does to earn the trust it is asking for, because
that is the half that reduces the friction: a dry run the real run refuses
to start without, never writing to the source, verification before mail
flows with automatic rollback, the old install kept, and every phase timed.
--yes skips the prompt, not the dry run.
John, 2026-09-19, on both counts. The old install is kept, shut down, not
removed: its unit installed and disabled, its store read-only, started
again if a rollback is ever wanted. When it stops being worth the disk the
tool asks — keep or delete — rather than deciding, because it does not
remove the thing its own rollback depends on.
And the new stack depends on nothing in it. That is the shape's purpose:
/opt/stalwart is a reference, everything needed is copied to new paths, and
when it goes nothing notices. Nothing in the fork works against that —
inbuxa.service substitutes its own prefix, no path names the old tree, and
certificates and ACME keys are in the registry inside the store — so a
dependency, if one appears, was made by hand during the move.
Which is worth proving rather than asserting, and reversibly: nothing open
under the old tree, then rename it and leave it a day under real traffic.
Deleting proves the same thing and cannot be undone.
Two corrections this forces. The rollback has to make the original store
writable again first: the guard of step 3 blocks the Enterprise build
exactly as it blocks the fork, and finding that out during a rollback is
the worst time. And the copy has to be chowned — rsync -a preserves
ownership, so it arrives owned by the old service user while the unit runs
as User=inbuxa.
Also drops the stale "untested" wording about carrying the data back. It
was tested; it is impossible.
The mail host is ext4 (John, 2026-09-19). There is no filesystem snapshot
to take, so the sequence as written puts the whole store inside the
downtime: stop, copy everything, start.
An rsync before the stop and a second one after it moves the bulk while
mail is still flowing and leaves only the delta in the window. The first
pass is knowingly inconsistent and exists only as a warm-up; the second,
once the process has actually exited, is what makes the copy consistent.
A RocksDB store suits this, being mostly immutable SST files: what changes
between the passes is the WAL, the MANIFEST and any compaction output.
Step 3 now says so, and says to time both during the rehearsal, because
the second pass is the window and nobody knows yet how long it is.
jcoffey-dev
dependabot[bot]