Post by @algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 2 hours ago

Hmm. A random thought: one of the blockers of migrating my email into my homelab is webmail, something my Mom currently depends on.

There ain't a lot of decent webmail clients. I tried setting up roundcube, but ran into all kind of stupid issues I don't really want to debug.

So I was thinking: what if I set her up with notmuch, and notmore as her local webmail? She only uses webmail from her miniPC anyway - she has K9/Thunderbird on Android. Or I could just... see if she's fine with Thunderbird, or Geary, or something other than webmail?

4censord :nfp:

@4censord@unfug.social 2 hours ago

@algernon for webmail I had looked into alps at some point, that seemed quite decent.
I havent touched it in a few years though

alps: Alps Webmail

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 1 hour ago

@4censord Looks interesting, thanks! Bookmarked it.

Though, their AI policy does not spark joy. Could be worse, but could be a lot better too.

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 2 hours ago

I should maybe explore Stalwart too at some point. I don't remember why I abandoned my last experiment, forgot to document that properly.

I probably made a small tootstorm, though. Wonder if I can find it?

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 2 hours ago

Hmm. But the current script doesn't seem that bad, and other issues I've heard about Stalwart seem to have been resolved.

Maybe I should give it a try. I do have an experiments domain, afterall. I can use that for this purpose.

come-from.mad-scientist.club - GoToSocial

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 2 hours ago

Stalwart also has a "No AI-Generated Code" contributing policy. That's a great boon, because Dovecot and rspamd have slop, and postfix has no such policy.

So... looks like there's another Stalwart experiment in my future!

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 2 hours ago

Though, unlike last time, I will likely not try to do declarative users. That was a painful part in my first Stalwart experiment.

The original idea was that a declarative configuration alone would set up a usable system. Since then, I relaxed that: declarative config + restored backup would.

There are some things that aren't worth doing declaratively.

~8 more replies

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 2 hours ago

Aight, that's enough of a side quest! I'll add it to my TODO list.

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 1 hour ago

Now, there are downsides to Stalwart: it does not allow drive-by contributions, and contributors need to sign a Fiduciary Contributor License Agreement. So I can't really patch it, not even if I'd wanted to: I will not be signing the FLA, nor will I go out of my way to become a "vouced contributor", so any change I make, would be local.

But it's also AGPL, so I'd have to publish those changes. Which is fine-ish, but... I don't like publishing changes that I do not want to see merged, or derived from.

But then, the chances of wanting to patch Stalwart is pretty darn low, so this is something I can probably live with.

Vysogota

@petko@social.petko.me 1 hour ago

@algernon a couple of notes from a person that has had their primary mail address on a self-hosted stalwart:

1. Their kv store is undebuggable from my PoV. Make sure to have regular backups of *exports* of it just in case something goes wrong.

2. The same goes for their blob storage.

3. Upgrades are hit and mostly miss. The suggested approach is to export all data from the old version (both kv and blob), create a new empty instance, and then import. That's why I suggest waiting for 1.0.

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 1 hour ago

@petko Bummer. That's not very encouraging. Does that all still apply if I configure the data store to be backed by Postgres and blob as S3 (Garage)?

Vysogota

@petko@social.petko.me 1 hour ago

@algernon if you configure the data store to be backed by postgres you only tell stalwart to use postgres to store its kv store in instead of whatever the popular Rust homebrew db was... rocksdb? The issue is with the structure of the kv store itself -- it is *not* human readable (the keys are numeric), it is not documented apart from digging in the source code. It uses absolutely nothing of the toolset of PG apart from a table with two columns. And it needs to be migrated upon upgrade.

LilaHexe

@LilaHexe@fedi.lilahexe.top 29 minutes ago

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club strange... Because their website looks very vibe-coded and has a CLAUDE.md: https://github.com/stalwartlabs/website

1 more replies

Vysogota

@petko@social.petko.me 2 hours ago

@algernon @stalwartlabs is working on a webmail for their 1.0 release (I'd advise waiting for the 1.0 release before trying it)

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club 2 hours ago

@petko Does it / will it work with servers other than @stalwartlabs's own? Because I have no plans to run stalwart at this time.