jcoffey-dev
80972695b9
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.
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.
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, anddocs/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, modified by Coffey Labs in 2026. Upstream's copyright notices are kept on every file they cover, and every upstream file this fork changed says so in its header, under the notice it came with. 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.