Features

Easy to operate #

The initial installation should be easy when using the quickstart. It performs some DNS checks, generates config files, an initial admin account and an email address account, and it prints all the DNS records (quite a few!) you need to add for sending and receiving email. It also creates a systemd unit file to run mox as a service on Linux, along with commands to enable the server. When run, it fixes up file permissions. You normally only have to copy/paste text and run the suggested commands.

Upgrades are usually a matter of replacing the binary and restart mox. Mox tries hard to not make incompatible changes. After an update you may want to change a configuration file to enable new functionality or behaviour.

The configuration files that come annotated with documentation make it easy to discover and configure functionality. The web admin interface guides you even more in making runtime configuration changes. The web admin interface also writes to the runtime configuration file. So you get the power of plain files for configuration (for readability, version control/diffs), and the ease of a user interface for making changes.

Mox is an all-in-one email server built in a single coherent code base. This ensures that all functionality works well together. And that you don't have to configure lots of individual components for a fully working system.

SMTP #

SMTP is used to deliver and receive email messages on the internet. Email clients also use it to ask an SMTP server to deliver messages (called submission).

Mox implements:

SPF/DKIM/DMARC #

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are mechanisms for "message authentication". SPF and DKIM can be used to verify that a domain is indeed associated with an incoming message. This allows mail servers to keep track of the reputation of a domain, which is used during junk filtering.

SPF is a mechanism whereby a domain specifies in a TXT DNS record which IPs are allowed to use its domain in an address in the MAIL FROM command in an SMTP transaction. If a sending IP is not listed, a receiving mail server may reject the email as likely being junk. However, the decision to reject isn't made solely based on the SPF record, keep reading.

DKIM is a mechanism whereby a domain specifies public keys in DNS TXT records. Legitimate messages originating from the domain will have one or more DKIM-Signature message headers that reference a public key and contain a signature. During delivery, the signature is verified.

DMARC is a mechanism whereby a domain specifies a policy in a DNS TXT record about what to do messages that are not authenticated with "aligned" SPF and/or DKIM. These policies include "reject", or "quarantine" (put in junk mailbox), or "none" (don't treat differently). DMARC authenticates the address in the "From" header in an email message, since that is what users will typically look at and trust. For a message to pass the "aligned SPF" check, the SPF-domain must match the domain the message "From" header. For a message to pass the "aligned DKIM" check, at least one verified DKIM domain must match the domain in the message "From" header. A non-aligned verified domain is not used for DMARC, but can still be useful in junk filtering.

Mox sets up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your domain, and adds DKIM-Signature headers to outgoing messages.

For incoming messages, mox will perform SPF, DKIM and DMARC checks. DMARC policies of domains are honored by mox, though mox interprets policy "quarantine" as "reject": Mox does not claim to accept messages, only to hide them away in a junk mailbox. Mox uses reputation of SPF-, DKIM- and DMARC(-like) verified domains in its reputation-based junk filtering.

A domain's DMARC policy, as published in DNS records, can request reports about DMARC policies as performed by other mail servers. This gives you, as domain owner, insights into where both authenticated and non-authenticated messages are being sent from. The policy specifies an email address whereto such reports should be sent. Mox helps set up a policy to request such reports, automatically processes such reports, and provides access through its admin web interface. Mox also sends reports with the results of its DMARC evaluations to domains that request them.

DANE and MTA-STS #

DANE and MTA-STS are mechanisms for more secure email delivery using SMTP.

Originally, SMTP delivered email messages over the internet in plain text. Message delivery was vulnerable to eavesdropping/interception.

The SMTP STARTTLS extension added opportunistic TLS: If a server announces support, a (delivering) SMTP client can "upgrade" a connection to TLS. This prevents passive attackers from eavesdropping. But an active attacker can simply strip server support for STARTTLS, causing a message to be transferred in plain text. With opportunistic TLS for SMTP, the TLS certificate of a server is not verified: Certificates that are expired or for other host names are accepted.

Both old-fashioned plain text delivery and STARTTLS don't protect against another active attack: Simply modifying DNS MX responses, causing email to be delivered to another server entirely. That other server may implement STARTTLS, and even have a certificate that can be verified. But the MX records need protection as well.

Both DANE and MTA-STS are (different) opt-in mechanisms to protect MX records, and for verifying TLS certificates of SMTP servers.

DANE protects MX records by requiring that they are DNSSEC-signed, causing changes to DNS records to be detected. With DANE, TLS certificates of an MX host are verified through (hashes of) either public keys or full certificates. These are published in DNS and must also be protected with DNSSEC. If a connection is intercepted by a different server, the TLS certificate validation would not pass.

MTA-STS uses PKIX (pool of trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs)) to protect both MX records and to verify TLS during SMTP STARTTLS. MTA-STS serves existence/version of a policy at DNS record _mta-sts.<recipientdomain>, and the policy itself at the PKIX-verified https://mta-sts.<recipientdomain>, specifying allowed MX host names. During delivery, MX targets not in the MTA-STS policy are rejected. The MTA-STS, MX, and MX target IP address DNS records are not required to be protected with DNSSEC, and often aren't. If an attacker modifies the IP address of an MTA-STS-allowed MX target, the PKIX-verification during SMTP STARTTLS will not pass. MTA-STS policies specify how long they should be cached. Attackers can suppress existence of an MTA-STS record during the first communication between mail servers, but not on subsequent deliveries.

For delivery of outgoing messages, mox will use both DANE and MTA-STS, if configured for a recipient domain. MTA-STS policies are cached and periodically refreshed.

Domains hosted by mox are both DANE- and MTA-STS protected by default. However, DANE only applies if recipient domains and their MX records are DNSSEC-signed. Mox requests certificates with ACME from Let's Encrypt by default, so TLS certificates used in SMTP STARTTLS can be PKIX-verified. Mox also serves MTA-STS policies by default.

Mox also implements the REQUIRETLS SMTP extension. It allows message delivery to specify that MX DNS records and SMTP server TLS certificates must be verified along the full delivery path (not just the next hop), and that delivery must be aborted if that cannot be guaranteed.

Mox also implements both incoming and outgoing TLS reporting, with both DANE and MTA-STS details. TLS reports have aggregated counts of SMTP connections (with failures, including about TLS, and success) and the DANE/MTA-STS policies encountered. Domains can request delivery of TLS reports by specifying a report destination address in a TLSRPT policy, specified in a DNS TXT record under a domain.

IMAP4 #

Email clients (also called Mail User Agents, MUAs) typically access messages through IMAP4. IMAP4 gives access to all mailboxes (folders) in an account, and all messages in those mailboxes. IMAP4 is a protocol with a long history, and for which many extensions have been specified. IMAP4 can be used for efficiently synchronizing an entire account for offline/local use, or used reading messages "online" (e.g. with third party webmail software).

Mox implements up to IMAP4rev2, the latest revision of IMAP4 that includes lots of functionality that used to be an extension. And mox implements commonly used extensions on top of that, such as CONDSTORE and QRESYNC, with more extensions to be implemented.

Junk filtering #

Junk email/spam/UCE (unsolicited commercial email) is still a big problem on the internet. One great feature of email, that is worth protecting, is that you can send an email to another person without previous introduction. However, spammers have the same opportunity. Various mechanisms have been developed over time to reduce the amount of junk.

Reputation-based

Most of these mechanisms have components that involves reputation. The reputation can be based on the IP address of the sending server, or the email address (or just its domain) of the sender, or the contents of the message. Mox uses the junk/non-junk classifications of messages by the user to evaluate incoming messages.

Email clients have the ability to mark a message as junk, which typically sets the junk-flag for the message and/or moves the message to the designated Junk mailbox. An email client can also mark a message as non-junk, but this isn't commonly done, so mox automatically automatically marks messages moved to certain mailboxes (like Archive, Trash) as non-junk.

The message database, including junk/non-junk flags, is accessible by the SMTP server. The database allows for efficiently looking up messages by (non)-junk flags, verified SPF/DKIM/DMARC sender domain/address and originating IP address. This allows mox to quickly analyze the reputation of an incoming message, and make a decision to accept/reject a message if the sender address/domain/IP has enough reputation signal. This means messages from people you've communicated with before will reliably make it through the junk filter. At least if they have set up SPF and/or DKIM, which allows associating their messages with their domain. Only messages without reputation, "first-time senders", are subject to further scrutiny.

First-time senders

For first-time senders, there is no, or not enough, signal in the sending address/domain/IP address to make a decision. Mox does bayesian analysis on the contents of such messages: The reputation of the words in a message are used to calculate the probability that a message is junk, which must not pass a configurable threshold. The reputation of words is based on their occurrence in historic junk/non-junk messages, as classified by the user.

Delivery feedback

When an incoming message is rejected for being junk, mox returns a temporary error. Mox never claims to accept a message only to drop it (some cloud mail providers are known to do this!), or place it in a Junk mailbox, out of view of the user. The effect is that a spammer will not learn whether there is an actual temporary error, or their message is treated as junk. A legitimate sender whose message is erroneously classified as junk will receive a DSN message about the failed delivery attempts, making it clear a different means of communication should be tried.

Rejects mailbox

When mox rejects a message for being junk, it stores a copy of the message in the special "Rejects" mailbox (automatically cleaned up). If you are expecting an email, e.g. about signup to a new service, and it is rejected, you will find the message in that mailbox. By moving the message to the Inbox, and marking it as non-junk (e.g. by moving it to the Archive or Trash mailbox), future messages by that sender will be accepted due to the now positive reputation.

Reputation is per account

In mox, all reputation is per account, not shared among accounts. One account may mark all messages from a sender as junk, causing them to be rejected, while another account can accept messages from the same sender.

DNSBL

Mox can be configured to use an IP-based DNS blocklist (DNSBL). In other software, these are typically employed early in the SMTP session, to see if the remote IP is a known spammer. If so, the delivery attempt is stopped immediately. Mox doesn't use DNSBLs in its default installation. But if it is configured to use a DNSBL, it is only invoked when the other reputation-based checks are not conclusive. For these reasons:

  1. If a sender with positive reputation finds their IP listed in a DNSBL, the email communication channels that have always worked will keep working (until the user marks a few of their messages as junk).
  2. As little reliance on centralized parties (which DNSBLs typically are) as possible.
  3. No leaking of IP addresses of mail servers a mox instance is communicating with to the DNSBL operator.

Mox can also monitor DNSBLs for its own IPs only, without using those blocklists to analyze incoming deliveries. The status is exported in metrics.

Greylisting

Greylisting is a commonly implemented mechanism whereby the first delivery attempt from a first-time sender is rejected with a temporary error. The idea is that spammers don't implement delivery queueing, and will never try again. A legitimate mail server would try again, typically within 5-15 minutes, and the second or third attempt will be accepted. Mox does not implement greylisting in this manner:

Mail servers typically send from multiple IP addresses. At least both an IPv4 and IPv6 address, and often multiple of each to reduce impact of a negative reputation for an IP address (e.g. being listed in a DNSBL). IP-based reputation incentivizes mail servers to use a different IP address for delivery retries after encountering a failure. Greylisting incentivizes mail servers to use the same IP address for retries. These incentives conflict, and mox regards IP-based reputation as more (long-term) valuable. Due to delivering from different IP addresses, greylisting can cause very long delays, or cause delivery failures altogether.

Mox does employ mechanisms to slow down possible spammers: SMTP transactions of first-time senders and for messages classified as junk are slowed down. This reduces the rate at which junk mail would be received, and consumes resources of the spammer. First-time senders are delayed for 15 seconds, making it possible to wait for expected messages, such as for signups.

Webmail #

Mox includes a webmail client, still in early stages. Despite its looks, and missing features like composing messages in HTML, it is surprisingly usable, featuring:

The webmail benefits from having access to the message database, allowing for new functionality that wouldn't be easy to implement with SMTP/IMAP4. For example, mox keeps track of REQUIRETLS support of MX hosts (mail servers) of recipient domains. The webmail show this information when composing a message, and can enable REQUIRETLS by default.

See webmail screenshots.

Webapi and webhooks #

The webapi and webhooks make it easy to send/receive transactional email with only HTTP/JSON, not requiring detailed knowledge of and/or libraries for composing email messages (internet message format, IMF), SMTP for submission, and IMAP for handling incoming messages including delivery status notifications (DSNs).

Outgoing webhooks notify about events for outgoing deliveries, such as "delivered", "delayed", "failed", "suppressed".

Incoming webhooks notify about incoming deliveries.

The webapi can be used to submit messages to the queue, and to process incoming messages, for example by moving them to another mailbox, setting/clearing flags or deleting them.

Per-account suppression lists, automatically managed based on SMTP status codes and DSN messages, protect the reputation of your mail server.

For API documentation and examples of the webapi and webhooks, see https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/mjl-/mox/webapi/. Earlier mox versions can be selected in the top left (at the time of writing).

The mox webapi endpoint at /webapi/v0/ lists available methods and links to them, each method page showing an example request and response JSON object and lets you call the method.

Internationalized email #

Originally, email addresses were ASCII-only. An email address consists of a "localpart", an "@" and a domain name. Only ASCII was allowed in message headers. With internationalized email, localparts can be in UTF-8, domains can use internationalized domain names (IDN/IDNA: unicode names with both an UTF-8 encoding, and an ASCII encoding for use in DNS with domains starting with "xn--"), and message headers are allowed to contain UTF-8 as well.

With internationalized email, users of scripts not representable in ASCII can use their native scripts for their email addresses.

Mox implements internationalized email.

Automatic account configuration #

To configure an email account in an email client, you typically need to specify:

  1. Email address and full name.
  2. Submission (SMTP) server address, port, TLS mode, username, password and authentication mechanism.
  3. IMAP4 server address, port, TLS mode, username, password and authentication mechanism.

This can be cumbersome to configure manually. Email clients can choose from several autoconfiguration mechanisms to automatically find (some of) the right settings, given an email address:

SRV DNS records
The domain of the email address is used for looking up DNS SRV records, which point to the submission (SMTP) and IMAP servers, ports (with implied TLS mode). Not specified: username, authentication mechanism. Only secure when used with DNSSEC. Mox prints SRV records to add for a domain.
Thunderbird-style autoconfig
The domain of the email address is used for looking up an XML config file at https://autoconfig.<domain>, protected with WebPKI. The configuration file holds all settings. Mox serves autoconfig profiles on its webserver.
Autodiscover-style autodiscovery
The domain of the email address is used to look up a SRV record that points to an PKIX-protected HTTPS webserver that serves an XML configuration file with all settings. Only secure when the SRV lookup is DNSSEC-protected. Mox serves autodiscover profiles on its webserver.
Apple device management profile
A configuration file with all settings must be transferred to the device manually. Mox lets users download these profiles in the account web interface, and shows a QR code to easily download the profile.

Even though email clients have many options to automatically find the correct settings, many still prefer to guess incorrect legacy settings.

ACME for automatic TLS #

A modern email server needs a PKIX TLS certificate for its own hostname, used for SMTP with STARTTLS. Each domain with a "mail" CNAME for IMAP4 and SMTP submission, with MTA-STS and with autoconfiguration needs three more PKIX/WebPKI TLS certificates. Manually preventing your email infrastructure from automatic periodic expiration is cumbersome, but an option. With ACME, TLS certificates are retrieved and refreshed automatically.

The quickstart sets mox up with ACME using Let's Encrypt. Other ACME providers can be defined and configured. Mox supports external account binding (EAB) for ACME providers that require association with an existing non-ACME account. Mox also suggests DNS CAA records, explicitly allowlisting Certificate Authorities (CAs) allowed to sign certificates for a domain. Mox recommends CAA records that only allow the account ID that mox has registered, preventing potential MitM attempts.

ACME is also used for TLS certificates for the webserver, see below.

Webserver #

Mox includes a configurable webserver. This may seem to add unnecessary complexity and functionality to an email server, but contemporary email already requires the complexity of an HTTP stack due to MTA-STS and automatic account configuration. Not to mention webmail and an admin web interface. Luckily, mox can build on the proven HTTP client and server stack of the Go standard library.

Mox mostly adds configuration options for:

Incoming requests are handled by going through the list of configured handlers. The first matching handler takes care of the request, matching on:

Handlers can specify additional behaviour:

These settings can all be configued through the admin web interface.

TLS certificates for configured domains are managed automatically if ACME is configured.

You may be tempted to install mox on a server that already runs a webserver. It is possible to configure mox to work with an existing webserver, but it will complicate the configuration significantly: The mox configuration has to be modified for autoconfig and MTA-STS and the existing webserver needs to be configured to forward. You will likely manage TLS certificates outside of mox and have to configure the paths to the keys and certificates, and refresh them timely, restarting mox. Also see the -existing-webserver option in the quickstart command.

Localserve #

The mox localserve command starts a local mox instance with a lot of its functionality: SMTP/submission, IMAP4, Webmail, account and admin web interface and the webserver. Localserve listens on the standard ports + 1000, so no special privileges are needed.

Localserve is useful for testing the email functionality of your application: Localserve can accept all email (catchall), optionally return temporary/permanent errors, and you can read messages in the webmail. Localserve enables "pedantic mode", raising errors for non-standard protocol behaviour.

Admin web interface #

The admin web interface helps admins set up accounts, configure addresses, aliases/lists, and set up new domains (with instructions to create DNS records, and with a check to see if they are correct). Changes made through the admin web interface updates the domains.conf config file.

Received DMARC and TLS reports can be viewed, and cached MTA-STS policies listed.

DMARC evaluations for outgoing DMARC reports, and SMTP (TLS) connection results for outgoing TLS reports can be viewed, and removed. Suppression lists for addresses for outgoing reports can be managed as well. Some domains don't accept reports at the addresses they configure, and send DSNs. The suppression list helps reduce operational noise.

See Admin web interface screenshots.

Metrics and logging #

Mox provides prometheus metrics for monitoring. A standard set of application metrics are exposed: Open file descriptors, memory/cpu usage, etc. Mox also exposes metrics specific to its internals. See the example prometheus rules in the repository.

Mox has configurable log levels, per functional package. Mox logs in structured logfmt format, which is easy to work with (parse, filter, derive metrics from). Mox also includes three trace-level logs, for SMTP and IMAP4: trace, traceauth (logs sensitive authentication data, like passwords), tracedata (logs (bulk) message content).

Security #

Mox aims to be a secure mail server. Many email-security features have been implemented. Mox comes with a automated test suite, which includes fuzzing. Mox is written in Go, a modern safer programming language that prevents whole classes of bugs, or limits their impact.

Reusable components #

Most non-server Go packages mox consists of are written to be reusable Go packages.

There is no guarantee that there will be no breaking changes. With Go's dependency versioning approach (minimal version selection), Go code will never unexpectedly stop compiling. Incompatibilities will show when explicitly updating a dependency. Making the required changes is typically fairly straightforward.

Incompatible changes compared to previous releases are tracked in the git repository, see apidiff/.

Roadmap #

There are many smaller improvements to make as well, search for "todo" in the code.

Not supported/planned #

There is currently no plan to implement the following. Though this may change in the future.

Also see the Protocols page for implementation status, and (non)-plans.



feedback?
2024-11-06, commit 68c130f