kaiyou/mailu-stats repository overview

⁠Mailu statistics server

Mail statistics are generated while avoiding all uses of intrusive trackers, especially to protect users privacy and avoid collecting information that could help build a comprehensive list of all mailu setups.

To accomplish this, Mailu uses DNS and relies on the fact that the vast majority of servers do not run a local resolver but rely on recursors instead, thus masking the true originating address from a query.

Unless the admin disables statisics upload in the configuration, Mailu instances run a DNS query (try and download a HTTP URI) for a name composed as follows:

<version>.<instanceid>.stats.mailu.io

The version is the Mailu version string. The instanceid is a unique id persisted per instance, stored in a file next to the main database. instance ids are UUIDv4.

The statistics server stores the timestamp, version and instance id everytime it receives a request.

⁠Running

⁠Docker

If you use Docker, getting it running to serve stats.mailu.io is very easy:

docker build -t mailu-stats --rm .
docker run -p 53:53/udp -it --rm --name mailu-stats mailu-stats

All environment-variables listed below can also be set in Docker via the -e/--env flag:

docker run -p 53:53/udp -it -e DOMAIN=stats.mydomain.com --rm --name mailu-stats mailu-stats

⁠Manual

If you want to build the service manually you should set some environment-variables, here is a list of all, their defaults and what's their purpose:

And then you can simply build and run it with:

go build -v
./Stats