This document exists to extend the general install guide provide examples on how to archive emails.
Note: If you plan on importing old emails from an archive, please set up the archiver first so as to create an overlap of new emails coming in and old emails being imported. The system is designed to handle this without creating duplicate entries in the archive.
Set up a Pony Mail mail account/alias on a machine. This can be your local mail server, it can be the machine that Pony Mail is on (install sendmail or postfix etc there), or it can be any other machine with access to the ElasticSearch database that Pony Mail uses.
If this is not the machine Pony Mail was installed on, you'll need to copy the
tools/ directory from your Pony Mail installation to this machine and adjust
ponymail.cfg to point to the right place for the database. You will also need
Python 3 and the helper libraries installed
(pip3 install elasticsearch formatflowed netaddr)
Set up a mail alias for public and private lists in /etc/aliases or similar method,
and point them at the archiver script in tools/:
# You may need to add "--altheader delivered-to" to these commands, it varies foo-public: "|/usr/bin/python3 /path/to/tools/archiver.py" foo-private: "|/usr/bin/python3 /path/to/tools/archiver.py --private"
Once done, run newaliases to update your alias DB.
Use the mailman UI or CLI to subscribe foo-public@ to your public lists and foo-private to your private lists. Don't worry, the contents of private lists are hidden by default till the correct AAA scripting is set up.
First, see the general introduction in the MM2 example, as this applies here as well.
Set up a dot-forward file for a public and a private alias:
.qmail-archive-public:
"|/usr/bin/python3 /path/to/tools/archiver.py"
.qmail-archive-private:
"|/usr/bin/python3 /path/to/tools/archiver.py --private"
Use the ezmlm CLI to subscribe your new aliases to the lists:
ezmlm-sub foolist/ archive-public@yourhost.tld
ezmlm-sub secretlist/ archive-private@yourhost.tld
If you have an custom OAuth2 provider and a binary approach to private access
(either/or), you can enable private access to people by having a key/value pair
called isMember set to true in your JSON response from the OAuth server,
provided it is set as an authority in config.lua. This will provide anyone
defined as a member via OAuth full access to all private lists.
If you use LDAP, you can modify the LDAP queries in the example AAA file to suit your organization.
Pony Mail relies on ID generators to produce a unique document ID for each email. Depending on the setup of your installation, we recommend using one of two generators:
full generator. This generator
uses the full message body, including MTA trails (Received headers etc), to generate an ID.cluster generator. This will use as many unique traits in an email as possible, but
discard the MTA trail (which differs from machine to machine).We do not recommend using the older generators (medium and short)
for new installations, as they are theoretically prone to create
duplicate IDs (See issues #176 #177 #178).
Should you need to import HTML-only emails into the archive, you may enable this
with the --html2text command line arg. This requires that the html2text Python3 package
is installed beforehand.
If you need to rewrite list IDs on the fly as emails come in, you can use the debug.cropout
setting for this (in ponymail.cfg).
You can either use it to just crop away something:
[debug] # Remove 'foo' from all list IDs cropout: foo
Or you can use it as a regex substitution:
[debug] #Replace '*.bar.tld' with '*.blorg.bar.tld' cropout: <([a-z]+)\.bar\.tld> <\1.blorg.bar.tld>
Apache Pony Mail (Incubating) is an effort undergoing incubation at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), sponsored by the Apache Incubator. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.
