Apache Pony Mail™

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Apache Pony Mail is a web-based mail archive browser built to scale to millions of archived messages with hundreds of requests per second. It allows you to browse, search, and interact with mailing lists including creating replies to mailing list threads.

Apache Pony Mail uses OAuth2 (Google, GitHub, Facebook etc) for authentication to allow viewing private lists, and uses ElasticSearch for storage and searching. Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

Sample Screenshot¶

Pony Mail works in both public, private and mixed-mode, allowing you to have one unified place for all your communication, both public and private.

Features include:¶

• Importing from standard mbox files, maildir directory, Pipermail or an mod_mbox-driven site
• Public and private list viewing based on auth
• Cross-list threading
• OpenSearch support for browsers (can add as search engine)
• In-browser reply to mailing lists
• Fast and intuitive searching
• Threaded, flat and tree view modes
• Multi-site, multi-list handling
• Word clouds
• Fuzzy-logic email grouping/threading (based in part on JWZ's ideas)
• Supports both custom OAuth, Google Auth and more.
• Source view and custom range mbox export

Requirements:¶

• Linux operating system (tested on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and CentOS - Windows or macOS may work)
• ElasticSearch backend
• Apache HTTP Server frontend (probably also supports nginx)
• Python 3.8+
• A mailing list system:
  • MailMan3 if you fancy that (we have a python3 archive plugin)
  • OR any mailing list system of your choice (use archiver plugin with stdin)

Development Benchmarking¶

Pony Mail has been built for and tested with the mail archives of the Apache Software Foundation, which span more than 15 million emails sent across more than 20 years. To put things into perspective, importing all this on a modern machine (2xSSD with 64GB RAM) took around 12 hours and resulted in a performance at around 100 archive search requests per second per ES node, depending on mailing list size and available bandwidth.

TODO:¶

This is a list of what we would love to get done:

• Start on the project's documentation (WIP)
• Rework JS, turn those ugly innerHTML hacks into proper DOM handling
• Set up notification system (depends on reply system) (works, but still WIP!)
• Have it work with ES with auth mode or via HTTPS