jcoffey-dev daaa06a5fb Cutover: stopping the old server is what removes the guard, so add one
Step 2 stops stalwart.service and step 4 points the fork at a store path.
Between those two moments nothing protects the original, and the rehearsal
had already shown that one open by the fork costs the rollback for good.

What protects it until then turns out to be the running server itself:
RocksDB refuses a second opener with "While lock file: LOCK: Resource
temporarily unavailable". So the intuition that a service shutdown prevents
the mistake is backwards — the shutdown is what enables it.

Measured, in probe_guard.py, in the three states that matter: held by the
running server, the fork is refused and the rollback is intact; stopped but
read-only, the fork is refused while rotating its own log and the Enterprise
build still starts on it afterwards; stopped and writable, the fork opens,
adds its column family, and upstream never starts again.

So step 3 now makes the original read-only as soon as the copy is taken,
which turns a discipline problem into a one-line one, and the answered
section carries the table.
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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)
Readme
12 MiB
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