jcoffey-dev 7d468ad22e Specs: a migration tool, with rollback as a path rather than an appendix
INBUXA's cutover is the first run of something other operators will want:
an existing Stalwart server becoming an INBUXA one with nothing re-entered
and nothing re-issued. Accounts, passwords, app passwords, OAuth sessions,
aliases, tenants, DNS records and provider settings, certificates and ACME
state, Sieve scripts, the queue and the mail all live in the store, so a
migration that copies the store carries them.

Offered beside the fresh-install workflow, which has different questions to
ask, so §6.1 now names both.

It rolls back, which is where it parts company with stalwart-migrator:
that one upgrades in place and says outright it cannot undo a migration.
This one never writes to what it migrates from, so going back is stopping
one service and starting another. Rollback is automatic when verification
fails, available on demand while the old install stands, honest about the
mail that stays behind, and never points the old server at the store the
fork has written.

Every phase is timed, and the number to advertise is the downtime, phases
2 to 7, not the total that preflight and the copy dominate. The report
writes both as JSON so a release note quotes something measured.
2026-09-19 21:34:11 -07:00
2026-09-18 10:21:56 -07:00
2026-09-18 10:21:56 -07:00
2026-09-18 10:21:56 -07:00
2026-09-18 10:21:56 -07:00

inbuxa

A complete mail and collaboration server, every feature included, under the AGPL


INBUXA is a mail and collaboration server: JMAP, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, CalDAV, CardDAV and WebDAV, in one Rust binary, with ihasmail as its web front end. It is a fork of Stalwart. Project site: inbuxa.org (not up yet).

Stalwart ships some features only in a paid Enterprise Edition: multi-tenancy, masked email, undelete and others. INBUXA ships everything to everybody under the AGPL-3.0, rebuilding those features independently and without using any of Stalwart's Enterprise code.

Status: in development, not released. The fork builds, passes its unit tests, and runs as a working mail server. The Enterprise features are being specified and haven't been rebuilt yet. Don't run it in production.

What's different from Stalwart

  • Every feature, one edition. No license key, no edition checks, no upsell. See docs/spec/SPEC.md §4 for the features being rebuilt, and docs/spec/features/ for each one's specification.
  • Webmail and administration by ihasmail, as a separate service that can run beside the server or elsewhere. Stalwart's own web interface is removed, so there's no web front end on the mail host.
  • Clean-room rebuilds. Enterprise-only code is stripped from every upstream release before it's imported. The rebuilt features are written from specifications that use only public sources (docs/spec/SPEC.md §3).

How the fork is kept

Upstream releases arrive as stripped snapshots, never with upstream's git history, which contains Enterprise code. tools/fork/strip.py builds each snapshot on top of upstream's own ossify.py, then verifies it independently. The report for every import is in docs/fork/strip-reports/. See docs/spec/SPEC.md §2.

Building

cargo build --release -p inbuxa          # the binary is target/release/inbuxa
docker build -t inbuxa .                 # or the container image

Settings are read from INBUXA_* environment variables. An existing Stalwart install's STALWART_* variables still work, with a warning to rename them. New installs keep their data in /var/lib/inbuxa and logs in /var/log/inbuxa. Existing installs keep the paths their configuration already names, so none of their data moves.

License and credits

INBUXA is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.

It is a fork of Stalwart, copyright © Stalwart Labs LLC. Upstream's copyright notices are kept on every file they cover. Stalwart's files are dual-licensed AGPL-3.0-only or Stalwart's Enterprise License, and INBUXA takes them under the AGPL-3.0 only. A few of those files also carry code from other projects under MIT or BSD licenses, which stays under those licenses; THIRD-PARTY.md lists it with its notices. "Stalwart" is Stalwart Labs' name. INBUXA isn't affiliated with or endorsed by Stalwart Labs.

The INBUXA mark reuses ihasmail's cat-and-envelope artwork.

S
Description
Imported from github.com during the 2026-09-20 standup (local dir: inbuxa-server)
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