Purpose

mail2web exposes an email archive to the Web consisting of folders with RFC 5322 files. This way, you can give your mails persistent identifiers while at the same time you are able to show them – along with their thread and attachments – to others.

As an example, visit https://mails.bronger.org/zkoL7KUVtt?tokenOlder=AzE6Xw8ETg.

Security

Mails may be very sensitive, so security in mail2web is crucial. This is achieved by addressing all mail using a peppered hash like this:

https://mymails.example.com/87g46e5i78

The hash is base64-URL-encoded with 10 characters, so it has 2^{60} possible values. If you have e.g. 2^{17} ≈ 130,000 mails, attackers will have a hit each 8,796,093,022,208 tries, on average.

Let us call the mail addressed by this link the origin mail. Depending on a token… parameter in the query string of the URL, the link also exposes the thread associated with the origin mail to everyone that has that link.

There are four access modes:

single

shows only one single mail, denoted by the hash.

direct

shows the mail with all its direct ancestors. In other words, a single direct line in the thread to the mail.

older

shows the mail plus all other mails in the thread that are older than it. This is like “direct” but with side branches in the thread.

full

shows the full thread, including mails that are yet to come to it.

Server setup

All endpoints below the restricted URL path need HTTP basic authentication, with the Authorization header set to a base-64-encoded login:password. Since these endpoints (currently the “my mails” pages and the “send mail to me” feature) are not vital, you may ignore that and effectively switch off those endpoints.

Otherwise, mail2web must reside behind a proxy HTTP server which does the user authentication and sets the above header. By limiting this authentication to restricted, you can make using your mail2web instance more convenient.

Since mail2web may take a rather long inital time to walk through all mail files, there is a /healthz endpoint that returns HTTP 200 when mail2web is ready for requests.

Environment

MAILDIR

root directory where the mail folders are expected

MAIL_FOLDERS

comma-separated list of subdirectories of MAILDIR that contain the mails

M2W_LOG_PATH

Absolute path to the directory where mail2web.log is written to. If not set, /tmp is used.

SECRET_KEY_PATH

Absolute path to a text file with a secret string which is used e.g. as a pepper for hashes. All white space at the beginning and the end of the string (inclusing line breaks) is removed. The default is /var/lib/mail2web_secrets/secret_key.

ROOT_URL

URL prefix for all endpoints. It defaults to the empty string. If given, it must start with a slash and should not end with a slash.

M2W_SMTP_HOST

Host and port of the SMTP host for message submission, e.g. postfix.local:587.

M2W_SMTP_ENVELOPE_SENDER

Content of the sender field in the envelope of the mail. Note that the From: field of mails sent by mail2web always have the original From: field content, and that you MTA must be okay with that (most aren’t).

Mail archive structure

The file structure expected by mail2web is:

MAILDIR
   |
   +---> folder1
   |        |
   |        +---> 1
   |        |
   |        +---> 2
   |        |
   |        +---> 3
   |        |
   |        ⋮
   |
   +---> folder2
   |        |
   ⋮        ⋮

Directories in MAILDIR not in MAIL_FOLDERS are ignored, as are files whose file name does not consist of numbers only.

Configuration file

In MAILDIR/permissions.yaml, you can set the mail addresses of all people that might log in like so:

admin: username1

addresses:
  username1:
    - [email protected]
    - [email protected]
    - [email protected]
  username2:
    - [email protected]
    - [email protected]
    - [email protected]
  username3:
    - [email protected]

The respectively first mail address is the primary personal address of that user, which is used to send mails to them. The other mail addresses belong to mail boxes the user can read, too. They are used to compile the mails for the user in the “my mails” page.

The user name set in admin must point to a user name in addresses with at least one mail address. Otherwise, requesting mails in the “my mails” page does not work.

Getting the URLs

In order to get the URL to a mail as the owner of the mails, call mail2url.py and pass the path to the respective mail file. The scripts uses the environment variables ROOT_URL and SECRET_KEY_PATH. Additionally, it needs DOMAIN to be set to e.g. “mails.example.com”. For further information, call mail2url.py --help.