joshperry/couchauthnode repository overview

⁠Couch Mail

I first played with CouchDB as I was evaluating nosql tech for a new project. This was my first foray into nosql, I immediately fell for CouchDB's HTTP ethos.

In fact, it sent me off on my first exploration into functional programming with Erlang as I wanted to understand how it worked.

About the same time I was also jonesing for a unified multi-domain mail exchange system for personal and small business use.

I decided to use CouchDB to drive the realtime data persistence story of this stack, ipso facto the name.

⁠Project

This project is a set of opinionated applications and configurations for deploying a multi-domain capable Postfix and Dovecot stack with user, alias, and routing scripts stored in CouchDB.

It at first began as a blog posts on ways describing ways to configure a mail exchange stack, that was a mistake. This is a complicated undertaking, it would be nice to get some help keeping it fresh and limber.

As an output we want to provide one-button deployable, securely configured IMAP and SMTP services, with bad email mitigation (greylisting, trainable bayesian filtering, blacklists), and a user-scriptable routing engine in Pigeonhole Sieve⁠. Just run the stack, then route IMAP and SMTP ports, and configure DNS.

⁠Data Model

⁠Domain

⁠Mailbox

⁠Alias

⁠Sieve

⁠Authentication

Dovecot all the things!!

⁠Data Flow

⁠SMTP Receive

⁠SMTP Client Send

⁠IMAP Client

⁠Filtering and Routing

⁠Devops

⁠Data Persistence

⁠SMTP

⁠Greylisting

⁠SpamC

⁠Blacklisting

⁠IMAP

⁠LDA

⁠XMPP with Prosody

⁠The Pile of TODOs

• Arrange for the /var/run/couchmail/ directory to exist before start
• Kickass management UI that's not Futon
• Add webmail client
• Containerize, duh
  • couchmail
  • Dovecot
  • Postfix
  • spamassassin
• Docker compose config
• Automate PKI config with letsencrypt.org
• Can we automate the DNS config in common deployment target environments?
• Kubernetes configs