If your distro is on this list, please refer to that specific document for detailed package installation instructions:
Otherwise, read the next two chapters:
You will need the following software installed on your machine:
html2text package (GPLv3) if you wish to archive HTML-only mails (remember to add the --html2text command line arg)git clone https://github.com/apache/incubator-ponymail.gittools dir:
$cd tools
$python3 setup.py
...[follow instructions in the setup script]site/js/config.js to suit your needs (usually very little editing is needed)If your ElasticSearch instance requires authentication for the importer/archiver, please
add the following lines in the elasticsearch block of ponymail.cfg once generated:
user: [username for ES] password: [password for ES]
site/ directory in Pony Mailconfigs/ponymail_httpd.conf to the virtual hostlua-apr module from your distro.site/ directory in Pony Mailconfigs/ponymail_nginx.conf to the server configFirst off, you will need both tools/archiver.py and the generated
tools/ponymail.cfg present on the machine that your mail server runs on. This
machine should also have access to the ElasticSearch backend.
If your mailing list supports feeding emails to a program, feed the incoming new
emails to python3 /path/to/tools/archiver.py and it will use STDIN as the
transport mechanism. If you are simply using aliases or dot-forwards and no ML
system, you can add (for example) "|/usr/bin/python3
/path/to/tools/archiver.py" to your alias file to enable archiving. If you are
not using a Mailing List manager, you will need to tell Pony Mail which email
header determines the list ID using the --altheader argument, for instance:
foolist: "|/usr/bin/python3 /path/to/tools/archiver.py --altheader delivered-to"
foolist-private: "|/usr/bin/python3 /path/to/tools/archiver.py --altheader delivered-to --private"
If you are using MailMan 3, you can add archiver.py as an archive by following the instructions inside the python script:
- Copy the archiver.py file to $mailman_plugin_dir/mailman_ponymail/__init__.py
- Copy ponymail.cfg to the same dir (for ES configuration)
- Enable the module by adding the following to your mailman.cfg file::
[archiver.ponymail]
# Pony Mail
class: mailman_ponymail.Archiver
enable: yes
For older mailing list systems such as Mailman 2 and ezmlm, you can also take a look at our archiving examples page for pointers.
In MailMan 3, this should be auto-detected and is not a concern.
When using other ML systems via piping to STDIN, you should add
the --private arg to the python script to mark an email as private:
foolist-private: "|/usr/bin/python3 /path/to/tools/archiver.py --private"
foolist-public: "|/usr/bin/python3 /path/to/tools/archiver.py"
Note that private lists are subject to authorisation which you should set up as noted above
See this guide for details on how to import old archives into Pony Mail.
You can use edit-list.py to perform bulk operations:
- Rename lists
- Mark entire lists are private or public
Run python3 edit-list.py --help for CLI args.
If you want people to be able to log in and reply via the Web UI, you can specify an OAuth provider.
Pony Mail comes with a few default OAuth examples in site/js/config.js, such
as ASF Oauth and Google OAuth. You can enable these by uncommenting the lines in
question, or set up your own OAuth portal to handle things. This is a standard
OAuth that expects the backend to supply the following JSON data on success:
{
"fullname": "The full name of the authed user",
"email": "The user's email address",
"uid": "(optional) The unique user ID of the logged in user (for instance, LDAP UID)",
"isMember": true/false (optional, specifies whether the person is a privileged user with access to all lists)
}
For private list browsing, Pony Mail supplies an example AAA library in
site/api/lib/aaa.lua that does LDAP lookups to determine which groups a person
belongs to, and thus which lists said person has access to. The AAA example is
modelled on the Apache LDAP structure, so you may wish to change this to suit
your need. We have several simple AAA examples in the
aaa_examples directory.
If you are looking for an OAuth portal to provide users access to private lists in the archive, you will need to add the OAuth domain to config.admin_oauth in config.lua:
admin_oauth = { 'myoauth.foo.tld', '*.oauthprovider.com', 'etc' }
If not specified in config.lua, OAuth will only provide users with a place to store settings and notifications, and - provided your mail server is set to accept this - a place to reply to emails in the archive.
If your OAuth provider requires a client secret, you can specify this in site/api/lib/config.lua, as this GitHub example shows:
oauth_fields = {
github = {
client_secret = "abcdef1",
client_id = "abcdef2",
oauth_token = "https://github.com/login/oauth/access_token"
}
}
This essentially overrides config.js but without showing the data to anyone outside the server.
To have Pony Mail accept replies done via the Web UI, you must make sure
that site/api/lib/config.lua contains the appropriate string (or array of strings) matching the domain(s) you wish to allow new email for. To allow replies to everything, set this to *(NOT RECOMMENDED).
You can also allow based on GLOBs or an array of accepted domains and sub-domains:
accepted_domains = "*" -- This would allow posts to any email address, baaaad choice.
accepted_domains = "foo.org" -- Allow only to *@foo.org
accepted_domains = "*.foo.org" -- Allow only posts to *@*.foo.org, but not *@foo.org
accepted_domains = { "foo.org", "*.foo.org" } -- Allow posts both to *.foo.org and foo.org
It is possible to set email footers in each email sent via the Web UI.
This is done by configuring the email_footer variable in site/api/lib/config.lua.
You may use the following variables in the footer:
$list: The mailing list being sent to (foo@bar.tld)
$hostname: The hostname of the server
$port: The port of the server (80, 443 etc)
$msgid: The message ID of the email (for permalinks etc)
An example footer could be:
--------
Sent via Pony Mail for $list.
To view this list online, visit: https://my.tld/list.html?$list
To view this email (and subsequent replies), visit:
https://my.tld/thread.html/$msgid
--------
By default, headers such as to/cc are not shown in the normal email view.
To enable these headers, set full_headers to true in the site/api/lib/config.lua file.
The default MID generator is called 'medium' and digests the message body, timestamp and list-ID to generate the MID. There is also a 'short' that only digests the body, and a 'full' that uses the entire message as a bytestring to generate an ID. Medium is recommended for most setups (especially clustered setups), while full can be used for single-machine setups. N.B. At present, all the generators have issues, see (#176 #177 #178) Please see this paragraph about document ID generators.
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.
