Release notes
Mailu 1.9 - 2021-12-29
Mailu 1.9 is available now. Please see the section Upgrading for important information in regard to upgrading to Mailu 1.9.
Highlights
Quite a lot of new features have been implemented. Of these new features we’d like to highlight these:
Security
A fair amount of work went in this release; In no particular order:
outbound SMTP connections from Mailu are now enjoying some protection against active attackers thanks to DANE and MTA-STS support. Specific policies can be configured for specific destinations thanks to
tls_policy_mapsand configuring your system to publish a policy has been documented in the FAQ.outbound emails can now be rate-limited (to mitigate SPAM in case an account is taken over)
long term storage of passwords has been rethought to enable stronger protection against offline attackers (switch to iterated and salted SHA+bcrypt) while enabling much better performance (credential cache). Please encourage your users to use tokens where appropriate and keep in mind that existing hashes will be converted on first use to the new format.
session handling has been reworked from the grounds up: they have been switched from client side (cookies) to server-side, unified (SSO, expiry, lifetime) accross all web-facing applications and some mitigations against session fixation have been implemented.
rate limiting has seen many improvements: It is now deployed on all entry points (SMTP/IMAP/POP3/WEB/WEBMAIL) and configured to defeat both password bruteforces (thanks to a limit against total number of failed attempts against an account over a period) and password spraying (thanks to a limit for each client on the total number of non-existing accounts that can be queried). Exemption mechanisms have been put in place (device tokens, dynamic IP whitelists) to ensure that genuine clients and users won’t be affected by default and the default configuration thought to fit most usecases.
if you use letsencrypt, Mailu is now configured to offer both RSA and ECC certificates to clients; It will OSCP stapple its replies where appropriate
Updated Admin interface
The Web Administration interface makes use of AdminLTE. The AdminLTE2 technology has been upgraded to AdminLTE3. This cost a lot of effort due to the changes between AdminLTE2 and AdminLTE3. As a result the webpage looks more modern. All tables now have a filter and columns that can be sorted. If you have many users or domains, this will be a very welcome new feature!
A language selector has been added. On the login page and in the Web Admin Interface, the language selector can be accessed in the top right.
Import/Export command on steroids
The Mailu command line has been enhanced with the new config-export and config-import command. Everything that can be configured in the Mailu Web Administration Interface can now be exported and imported via yaml files. So via YAML files, you can now bulk configure a complete new installation, without the need to access the Mailu Web Administration Interface.
It is also possible to create new users or import new users (with password hashes) using the config-import.
With this new command it is very easy to switch to a different database management system for the Mailu database. Simply dump your configuration to yaml file. After setting up your new Mailu system with the different DBMS, you can import the yaml file with all Mailu configuration.
For more information, see the Mailu command line page.
New SSO login page
A new single sign on login page is introduced which handles logins for the Mailu Web Administration Interface and webmail. It has enabled a drastic attack-surface reduction and will enable us to add support for two factor authentication in the future.
All failed login attempts are now logged to the Admin service, significantly simplifying the deployment of solutions such as Fail2ban.
See the updated Fail2Ban documentation for more information.
Semantic versioning
From Mailu 1.9, we will use semantic versioning. First we only had x.y (e.g. 1.9) releases. For every update to an existing version, we will create an additional x.y.z (e.g. 1.9.1) release.
The X.Y (1.9) tag will always feature the latest version.
The X.Y.Z (1.9.1) tag is a pinned version. This release is not updated. You can use this to update in a controlled manner. At a convenient time, you can choose to switch to a newer version (e.g 1.9.2). The X.Y.Z tag is incremented automatically when an update is pushed for the X.Y release.
The images now also contain the release it was built for.
Every docker image will have a docker label with the version.
Every docker image will have the file /version with the same version information.
Master images will contain the commit hash that initiated the built of the image.
X.Y and X.Y.Z images will have the X.Y.Z version that triggered the built.
On the github project we will automatically create releases for each X.Y.Z release. Via this release you can check what commit hash the tag is assigned to.
With this improvement in our CI/CD workflow, it is possible to be notified when an update is released via github releases. It is also possible to use pinned versions to update in a controlled manner.
New Functionality & Improvements
For a list of all the changes (including bug fixes) refer to CHANGELOG.md in the root folder of the Mailu github project.
A short summary of the new features:
Roundcube and Rainloop have been updated.
All dependencies have been updated to the latest security update
AdminLTE (used by Admin service) is updated to AdminLTE3.
Much improved rate limiting.
Rate limiting small subnets instead of single IP addresses.
Rate limiting for accounts that do not exist.
Rate limiting for existing accounts (failed logon attempts).
Device-tokens are introduced to ensure genuine users are not locked out
Domain details page is enhanced with DNS client auto-configuration (RFC6186) entries.
Centralize the authentication of webmails behind the admin interface.
The new single sign on page opens up the possiblity to introduce 2 factor authentication in the future.
Add sending quotas per user (configured in mailu.env). This determines how many emails each user can send every day.
Allow specific users to send emails from any address using the WILDCARD_SENDERS setting (mailu.env.).
Use semantic versioning for building releases.
Internal improviments to improve performance of authentication requests.
Introduded a language selector for the Admin interface.
Add cli commands config-import and config-export for importing/exporting Mailu config via YAML.
Enable support of all hash types passlib supports.
Switch to bcrypt_sha256 (stronger hashing of passwords in Mailu database)/
Introduce MTA-STS and DANE validation.
Added Hebrew translation.
Log authentication attempts on the admin portal. Fail2ban can now be used to monitor login attempts on Admin/Webmail.
Remove Mailu PostgreSQL.
Admin/Webmail sessions expire now. This can be tweakers via mailu.env.
Upgrading
Upgrade should run fine as long as you generate a new compose or stack configuration and upgrade your mailu.env. Please note that once you have upgraded to 1.9 you won’t be able to roll-back to earlier versions without resetting user passwords.
If you use a reverse proxy in front of Mailu, it is vital to configure the newly introduced environment variables REAL_IP_HEADER` and REAL_IP_FROM. These settings tell Mailu that the HTTP header with the remote client IP address from the reverse proxy can be trusted. For more information see the configuration reference.
If you use Fail2Ban, you configure Fail2Ban to monitor failed logon attempts for the web-facing frontend (Admin/Webmail). See the updated Fail2Ban documentation for more information.
Please note that the shipped image for the PostgreSQL database is fully deprecated now. To migrate to the official PostgreSQL image, you can follow our migration guide.
Mailu 1.8 - 2021-08-7
The full 1.8 release is finally ready. There have been some changes in the contributors team. Many people from the contributors team have stepped back due to changed priorities in their life. We are very grateful for all their contributions and hope we will see them back again in the future. This is the main reason why it took so long for 1.8 to be fully released.
Fortunately more people have decided to join the project. Some very nice contributions have been made which will become part of the next 1.9 release. We hope that future Mailu releases will be released more quickly now we have more active contributors again.
For a list of all changes refer to CHANGELOG.md in the root folder of the Mailu github project. Please read the ‘Override location changes’ section further on this page. It contains important information for the people who use the overrides folder.
New Functionality & Improvements
Here’s a short summary of new features:
Roundcube and Rainloop have been updated.
All dependencies have been updated to the latest security update.
Fail2ban documentation has been improved.
Switch from client side (cookie) sessions to server side sessions and protect against session-fixation attacks. We recommend that you change your SECRET_KEY after upgrading.
Full-text-search is back after having been disabled for a while due to nasty bugs. It can still be disabled via the mailu.env file.
Tons of documentation improvements, especially geared towards new users.
(Experimental) support for different architectures, such as ARM.
Improvements around webmails, such as CardDAV, GPG and a new skin for an updated roundcube, and support for MySQL for it. Updated Rainloop, too.
Improvements around relaying, such as AUTH LOGIN and non-standard port support.
Update to alpine:3.14 as baseimage for most containers.
Setup warns users about compose-IPv6 deployments which have caused open relays in the past.
Improved handling of upper-vs-lowercase aliases and user-addresses.
Improved rate-limiting system.
Support for SRS.
Japanese localisation is now available.
Upgrading
Upgrade should run fine as long as you generate a new compose or stack configuration and upgrade your mailu.env.
Please note that the shipped image for PostgreSQL database is deprecated. The shipped image for PostgreSQL is not maintained anymore from release 1.8. We recommend switching to an external PostgreSQL image as soon as possible.
Override location changes
If you have regenerated the Docker compose and environment files, there are some changes to the configuration overrides.
Override files are now mounted read-only into the containers. The Dovecot and Postfix overrides are moved in their own sub-directory. If there are local override files, they will need to be moved from overrides/ to overrides/dovecot and overrides/postfix/.
Recreate SECRET_KEY after upgrading
Improvements have been made to protect again session-fixation attacks. To be fully protected, it is required to change your SECRET_KEY in Mailu.env after upgrading. A new SECRET_KEY is generated when you recreate your docker-compose.yml & mailu.env file via setup.mailu.io.
The SECRET_KEY is an uppercase alphanumeric string of length 16. You can manually create such a string via
`cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'A-Z0-9' | fold -w ${1:-16} | head -n 1`
After changing mailu.env, it is required to recreate all containers for the changes to be propagated.
Update your DNS SPF Records
It has become known that the SPF DNS records generated by the admin interface are not completely standard compliant anymore. Please check the DNS records for your domains and compare them to what the new admin-interface instructs you to use. In most cases, this should be a simple copy-paste operation for you ….
Fixed hostname for antispam service
For history to be retained in Rspamd, the antispam container requires a static hostname. When you re-generate your docker-compose.yml file (or helm-chart), this will be covered.
Mailu 1.8rc - 2020-10-02
Release 1.8 has come a long way again. Due to corona the project slowed down to a crawl. Fortunately new contributors have joined the team what enabled us to still release Mailu 1.8 this year.
Please note that the current 1.8 is what we call a “soft release”: It’s there for everyone to see and use, but to limit possible user-impact of this very big release, it’s not yet the default in the setup-utility for new users. When upgrading, please treat it with some care, and be sure to always have backups!
For a list of all changes refer to CHANGELOG.md in the root folder of the Mailu github project. Please read the ‘Override location changes’ section. It contains important information for the people who use the overrides folder.
New Functionality & Improvements
Here’s a short summary of new features:
Full-text-search is back after having been disabled for a while due to nasty bugs. It can still be disabled via the mailu.env file.
Tons of documentation improvements, especially geared towards new users.
(Experimental) support for different architectures, such as ARM.
Improvements around webmails, such as CardDAV, GPG and a new skin for an updated roundcube, and support for MySQL for it. Updated Rainloop, too.
Improvements around relaying, such as AUTH LOGIN and non-standard port support.
Update to alpine:3.12 as baseimage for most containers.
Setup warns users about compose-IPv6 deployments which have caused open relays in the past.
Improved handling of upper-vs-lowercase aliases and user-addresses.
Improved rate-limiting system.
Support for SRS.
Japanese localisation is now available.
Upgrading
Upgrade should run fine as long as you generate a new compose or stack configuration and upgrade your mailu.env.
Please note that the shipped image for PostgreSQL database is deprecated. The shipped image for PostgreSQL is not maintained anymore from release 1.8. We recommend switching to an external PostgreSQL database as soon as possible.
Override location changes
If you have regenerated the Docker compose and environment files, there are some changes to the configuration overrides.
Override files are now mounted read-only into the containers. The Dovecot and Postfix overrides are moved in their own sub-directory. If there are local override files, they will need to be moved from overrides/ to overrides/dovecot and overrides/postfix/.
Update your DNS SPF Records
It has become known that the SPF DNS records generated by the admin interface are not completely standard compliant anymore. Please check the DNS records for your domains and compare them to what the new admin-interface instructs you to use. In most cases, this should be a simple copy-paste operation for you ….
Mailu 1.7 - 2019-08-22
Release 1.7 has come a long way and was really expected after the project first saw a slowdown in contributions around january then a wave of new contributors and contributions.
New functionality
Most changes are internal, main features include:
the admin UI now properly displaying on mobile
relays supporting authentication thanks to new settings
ability to create an initial admin user using environment variables
Other changes include software updates with some new features in Rainloop 1.30.0.
Back-end
One of the big tasks was upgradig to latest Alpine (3.10), which is now finished. Also, a lot was improved about the environment variables meant to provide specific hosts in custom setups.
Finally, among many bug fixes and discrete enhancements, we removed most static assets from the repository and now build the admin UI dynamically using Webpack.
Localization
The localization effort move to a hosted Weblate, that you can access at the following uri: https://translate.tedomum.net/projects/mailu/admin/
Please have a look and help translate Mailu into your home tongue.
Upgrading
Upgrade should run fine as long as you generate a new compose or stack configuration and upgrade your mailu.env.
If you run the PostgreSQL server, the database was upgrade, so you will need to dump the database before upgrading and load the dump after the upgrade is complete. Please note that the shipped image for PostgreSQL database will be deprecated before 1.8.0, you can switch to an external database server by then.
Mailu 1.6 - 2019-01-18
Its been more than a year since the release of 1.5! And what a year it has been… More then 800 commits are done since 1.5, containing thousands of additions. We had the honor of welcoming more and more contributors and we actually established a dedicated team of trusted contributors.
With new review guidelines we now allow the project to grow without dependence on any single person. And thus merging pull requests at much shorter time. On top of that we finally got around to creating a simple test suite on TravisCI, which is doing some e-mail sending and receiving. This greatly helps the reviewing process.
For a complete overview of changes, see our changelog. Here we’ll try to give you the highlights.
New functionality
We offer a lot new functions in the user experience. Some of the highlights would be quota support from the admin interface, optional user sign up with recaptcha, auto-reply start date, and a client setup page.
Mailu now also offers a setup utility. This utility helps users to generate a docker-compose.yml and mailu.env through guided steps.
Documentation
Quite some efforts were done in expanding the documentation of Mailu. We’ve added support for Kubernetes setup, Docker Swarm and a Frequently asked questions section. There is now also a section on running the Mailu web interfaces behind Traefik as reverse proxy.
We now also Dockerized the documentation, allowing for easy local running and versions management on our web server.
Back-end
Lots and lots of hours went in to the back-end. Work on numerous bugs, increased the general performance and allowing for better maintainability.
We’ve reworked the complete interface with the database. All queries are now done through the Admin container, with that being the single point of contact with the database. Now we also support the usage of MySQL and PostgreSQL databases and Mailu comes with its own PostgreSQL image! This allows for Mailu to be used in larger scaled operations.
Main software versions
Alpine 3.8.2
Python 3.6.6
SQLite 3.25.3
Postfix 3.3.0
Dovecot 2.3.2.1
Radicale 2.1.10
Rspamd 1.7.6
ClamAV 0.100.2
Nginx 1.14.2
Rainloop 1.12.1
Roundcube 1.3.8
Fetchmail 6.3.26
Unbound 1.7.3
Postgresql 10.5
Upgrading
We’ve done some pretty intrusive works on the DB migrations scripts. Although thoroughly
tested, we would recommend users to create a backup copy of /mailu/data/main.db somewhere.
Use the setup utility to obtain new docker-compose.yml and mailu.env files.
For this upgrade it is necessary to bring the project down and up, due to network definition changes:
docker-compose pull
docker-compose down --remove-orphans
docker-compose up -d
After everything runs successfully, /mailu/certs/dhparam.pem is no longer needed and can be deleted.
It’s included in the Mailu distribution by default now. Also the old .env can be deleted.
Mailu 1.5 - 2017-11-05
It has been two years since this project started, one year since it was renamed to Mailu and took a more serious path toward building a proper email server distribution. The experience has been extremely interesting and we as contributors should be quite proud of what was accomplished in that time.
Mailu started as a random project of administration interface for Postfix, it is now running thousands of mail servers, has reached over half a million pulls on Docker hub and contributions from very different and frankly interesting people.
Version 1.5 is about bringing the features that were intended for the late version 2.0. It includes many new concepts like:
alternative domains, a way to configure a domain that is semantically equivalent to another;
domain relays, a way to relay emails to a separate server;
authentication tokens, a way to let users generate passwords for their various clients and restrict authentication per IP address.
The release also includes some structural changes to the project. Nginx is now the main frontend container and terminates all connections, performing TLS and authentication directly. Letsencrypt support is now more complete, with various TLS “flavors” for all kinds of setup.
Finally, a big change about how versions are managed: the stable branch
will be deprecated with the end of branch 1.4. Mailu will now only publish
branches per version, as any version jump requires manual updates anyway. This
will avoid confusion about which branch is currently considered the stable
one. End of support for branches will happen after 2 version changes (e.g.
end of support for branch 1.4 will happen when branch 1.6 is released).
Finally, intermediary versions backporting some important features will be
branched as subversions first (branch 1.5.1 for instance), then merge in
the branch version once enough testing has happened.
More details about the changes are available in the changelog, and this release will be followed by a short-term upgrade including some more features and bug fixes.
If you are upgrading, please go through the setup guide and download the
latest docker-compose.yml and .env, then update them with your
sepcific settings, because more than 50% of these templates was rewritten.
You should then be able to pull and start your new e-mail stack with
no issue, simply remove orphaned container, since some were renamed and others
were removed (e.g. rmilter):
docker-compose pull
docker-compose up -d --remove-orphans
If you experience problems when upgrading, feel free to post issues and contact us on our chat channel for emergency support.
Regarding statistics, Mailu has gone from “no tracker at all” to a tracker that
we find is designed to preserve privacy and security as much as possible. Your
admin container will now perform DNS requests for a domain that we hold,
including information about your “instance id” (a unique and random string)
and Mailu version. If your mail server performs direct DNS queries instead
of going through a DNS recursor, you might want to opt-out of statistics if
you would prefer the server IP address not be included anywhere (we do not log
it, but our hosting provider might). This can be accomplished in the .env
file directly.
Mailu 1.3 - 2016-11-06
First a warning as TL;DR. Following the project rename, please read the migration guide carefully if you were already running Freeposte.
Renaming the project was a critical step in its life and we certainly hope that it will help gain even more traction and collaborate every day to add new features and improve Mailu.
This new release introduces mostly bugfixes and a couple of enhancements. It was however the most complicated to prepare and publish because we had to deal for the first time with multiple active contributors, sometimes diverging points of view, a solid user base that would prefer their production not break, and some major upstream issues.
The release itself was delayed a month, partly due to these changes, partly due to upstream issues. One of them for instance, a bug in Dovecot, took us a couple of long nights debugging low-level memory management code in Dovecot in order to fix the vacation message in Mailu! This lead to humble contributions to Dovecot and Alpine Linux and we are still proud to be contributing to a larger software environment.
Among the major changes that we introduced, Rainloop is now officially supported as a Webmail and we are open to contributions to add even more alternatives to the next release.
Also, Mailu admin interface now has built-in internationalization and we will initiate a localization campaign to add at least French and German to the list of supported languages. Please contact us if you would like to contribute another translation.
Finally, we hardened Postfix configuration both for security reasons (preventing address usurpation upon existing SPF) and to prevent spam. We found that the already effective antispam filter now blocks more that 99% of junk messages on our test servers.
A more detailed list of changes is available in the project changelog.
Please read the Setup Guide if you plan on setting up a new mail server. Mailu is free software, you are more than welcome to report issues, ask for features or enhancements, or contribute your own modifications!
Freeposte.io 1.2 - 2016-08-28
The past few weeks have been very productive thanks to multiple contributors and reporters. A hundred commits later, Freeposte.io release 1.2 is ready.
Most changes in the release are security-related: we eventually added CSRF checks, applied most security best practices including TLS hardening based on the great documentation by BetterCrypto, and started a discussion about how the mail server stack should be secure-by-default while maintaining as many features as possible.
Additional great change is the new ability to declare catch-all aliases and wildcard aliases in general.
When creating an alias, one may now enable the “SQL LIKE” syntax then use
standard SQL wildcards % and _ to specify matches for a given alias.
For instance :
%@domain.tldwill match any uncatched email sent to that domain (catch-all)support-%@domain.tldwill match any email sent to an address starting withsupport-_@domain.tldwill match any email sent to a one-character addressco_tact@domain.tldwill match bothcontact@domain.tldandcomtact@domain.tldalong will all other combinations to make up for any usual typing mistake.
Finally, the update process changed with Freeposte.io 1.2: you do not have to
manually setup an installed branch anymore. Instead, you may simply use the
default docker-compose.yml file and the :latest tag that will now
point to the latest stable version. Those who know what they are doing and
still want to use continuous builds from the Git repository may switch to the
:testing Docker images.
A more detailed list of changes is available in the project changelog.
Please read the Setup Guide if you plan on setting up a new mail server. Freeposte.io is free software, you are more than welcome to report issues, ask for features or enhancements, or contribute your own modifications!
Freeposte.io 1.1 - 2016-07-31
When we started the Freeposte.io adventure back in December, we weren’t quite sure the project would lead to anything but a bunch of scripts to manage our mail server at TeDomum.
About 6 month later, we have got word from a dozen individuals and half a dozen nonprofits that have started setting up Freeposte.io or are using it for production emails. All mailboxes at TeDomum have been running on top of Freeposte.io for the past 5 months and happily received thousands of emails.
Release 1.0 was definitely not ready for production: the anti-spam services were unstable, lots of junk messages still got through, there was still no support for outgoing DKIM and thus no way to properly setup DMARC. These have been addressed and we are really enthusiastic about releasing 1.1 and expecting some feedback and contributions.
Please read the Setup Guide if you plan on setting up a new mail server. Freeposte.io is free software, you are more than welcome to report issues, ask for features or enhancements, or even contribute your own modifications!