53d5542402
A 60 second/1 minute ban time is not long enough to counter brute force attacks which is the main purpose of fail2ban for mail in a box. The default bantime of 10 minutes is still sane and I think we have proven fail2ban is reliable enough not to cause problems in general. It is not worth sacrificing security for the rare case where an admin locks themselves out for 10 minutes. |
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|---|---|---|
| conf | ||
| management | ||
| ppa | ||
| setup | ||
| tests | ||
| tools | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| CHANGELOG.md | ||
| CONTRIBUTING.md | ||
| LICENSE | ||
| README.md | ||
| Vagrantfile | ||
| security.md | ||
README.md
Mail-in-a-Box
By @JoshData and contributors.
Mail-in-a-Box helps individuals take back control of their email by defining a one-click, easy-to-deploy SMTP+everything else server: a mail server in a box.
Please see https://mailinabox.email for the project's website and setup guide!
I am trying to:
- Make deploying a good mail server easy.
- Promote decentralization, innovation, and privacy on the web.
- Have automated, auditable, and idempotent configuration.
- Not make a totally unhackable, NSA-proof server.
- Not make something customizable by power users.
This setup is what has been powering my own personal email since September 2013.
The Box
Mail-in-a-Box turns a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit machine into a working mail server by installing and configuring various components.
It is a one-click email appliance (see the setup guide). There are no user-configurable setup options. It "just works".
The components installed are:
- SMTP (postfix), IMAP (dovecot), CardDAV/CalDAV (ownCloud), Exchange ActiveSync (z-push)
- Webmail (Roundcube), static website hosting (nginx)
- Spam filtering (spamassassin), greylisting (postgrey)
- DNS (nsd4) with SPF, DKIM (OpenDKIM), DMARC, DNSSEC, DANE TLSA, and SSHFP records automatically set
- Firewall (ufw), intrusion protection (fail2ban), system monitoring (munin)
It also includes:
- A control panel and API for adding/removing mail users, aliases, custom DNS records, etc. and detailed system monitoring.
- Our own builds of postgrey and dovecot-lucene distributed via the Mail-in-a-Box PPA on Launchpad.
For more information on how Mail-in-a-Box handles your privacy, see the security details page.
The Security
See the security guide for more information about the box's security configuration (TLS, password storage, etc).
I sign the release tags on git. To verify that a tag is signed by me, you can perform the following steps:
# Download my PGP key.
$ curl -s https://keybase.io/joshdata/key.asc | gpg --import
gpg: key C10BDD81: public key "Joshua Tauberer <jt@occams.info>" imported
# Clone this repository.
$ git clone https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox
$ cd mailinabox
# Verify the tag.
$ git verify-tag v0.11
gpg: Signature made ..... using RSA key ID C10BDD81
gpg: Good signature from "Joshua Tauberer <jt@occams.info>"
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg: There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: 5F4C 0E73 13CC D744 693B 2AEA B920 41F4 C10B DD81
The key ID and fingerprint above should match my Keybase.io key and the fingerprint I publish on my homepage.
The Acknowledgements
This project was inspired in part by the "NSA-proof your email in 2 hours" blog post by Drew Crawford, Sovereign by Alex Payne, and conversations with @shevski, @konklone, and @GregElin.
Mail-in-a-Box is similar to iRedMail and Modoboa.
The History
- In 2007 I wrote a relatively popular Mozilla Thunderbird extension that added client-side SPF and DKIM checks to mail to warn users about possible phishing: add-on page, source.
- In August 2013 I began Mail-in-a-Box by combining my own mail server configuration with the setup in "NSA-proof your email in 2 hours" and making the setup steps reproducible with bash scripts.
- Mail-in-a-Box was a semifinalist in the 2014 Knight News Challenge, but it was not selected as a winner.
- Mail-in-a-Box hit the front page of Hacker News in April 2014, September 2014, and May 2015.
- FastCompany mentioned Mail-in-a-Box a roundup of privacy projects on June 26, 2015.