jcoffey-dev
87383440bb
The first language, and the first one where the honest thing to say is not flattering: no native speaker has read it. That is stated in the app rather than in a commit nobody reads, because it is the fact a reader needs to judge what they are looking at. Somebody told a translation is unchecked forgives an odd sentence and reports it; somebody told it was reviewed reasonably concludes the product is sloppy. The setting carries a link straight to a report, which is the whole review process here. `beta` is a property of the language, not of the catalogue's completeness. A file can be word-for-word finished and still read like a machine wrote it, and that is what the flag marks. Removing it is a person's decision. Register is "Sie", consistently, and written down in the file so the next language and the next contributor inherit the decision rather than re-take it. Thunderbird and Outlook use it; ihasmail is as often a company's mail as somebody's own, where "du" from software the workplace deployed reads as presumptuous. Where a string can dodge the question it does, which is ordinary good German UI. The glossary at the top of the file fixes the vocabulary once -- Posteingang, Papierkorb, Entwürfe, archivieren -- because inconsistency reads as amateur far more than an imperfect word choice does. "Label" and "Spam" stay English, since translating them would name things no German mail client calls that. 766 of 781 strings. The fifteen left are product names, bare URLs and example addresses, which should stay English and now do. Two things this turned up that the earlier work had hidden: Labels defined as module-level constants -- the entire settings navigation, the theme cards, the swipe choices, the date formats, the sharing permissions -- are evaluated once, before any catalogue loads, so they could only ever be English. Nothing failed; the German build simply had an English sidebar. They are translated where they render now, which keeps the constant as data and makes its English text the key. And the codemod's narrowed rule, which let it take 73 more strings last time, was too broad after all: text stranded after an inline <a> or <strong> came through as sentence fragments -- ", and what a new account starts on." Eight of them, rebuilt with tNode so the sentence stays whole and the element is a named hole a translator can move. scripts/i18n-catalog-check.mjs is new and earned itself immediately: it found three keys invented that the code never asks for, which is the silent failure in a catalogue -- a translation that looks right, is never looked up, and renders English for ever. It also had to be taught about t(variable), because it cried wolf 33 times over the constants above, and a check that cries wolf gets switched off. Verified in the browser rather than only in tests, which is where the settings sidebar being English was visible and nowhere else.
ihasmail
Immutable webmail for Stalwart Mail Server — a container with nothing to persist, and a Gmail-class client on top of it.
Mail, calendars, contacts, files and filters in a responsive single-page app
that works equally well on a desktop monitor and a phone. It talks only JMAP
(plus Stalwart's blob/upload/EventSource endpoints) — no IMAP, no SMTP, no
database, and with IMMUTABLE=1 no writable filesystem either. Everything
durable belongs to Stalwart; the container is disposable.
| 🌐 ihasmail.org | What it is, what it looks like, the full feature list |
| 📘 docs.ihasmail.org | Installing · Configuring · Using it · Shortcuts · Rebranding · Troubleshooting |
| 📋 FEATURES.md | Everything it does, feature by feature, with the capability each one needs |
| 🧪 KNOWN-ISSUES.md | What was verified live, and where Stalwart departs from a spec |
| 🛣 ROADMAP.md | What ihasmail does not do, and why |
This file is for people working on ihasmail. Everything about running it lives in the docs.
Screenshots
Taken against the built-in mock server (npm run dev:mock) with sample data — no real mailbox involved.
Inbox & conversation (dark)  |
Inbox & conversation (light)  |
Composer  |
Calendar  |
Contacts  |
Sieve filter builder  |
More, including the mobile layout, on ihasmail.org.
What's in it
- Mail — three-pane Gmail-style layout, conversation view, virtualised list, labels, undo, Gmail search operators and keyboard shortcuts, Sieve rules from a message's context menu, sanitised HTML with remote images blocked, read receipts, invitations and RSVP, multi-composer rich-text editing with signatures, scheduled send and undo send
- Calendar — JMAP Calendars / JSCalendar: month/week/day/agenda, recurrence, attendees and free-busy, colour categories
- Contacts — JMAP Contacts / JSContact: address books, groups, full editor, vCard import/export
- Files — JMAP FileNode: browse, upload, download, rename, move, delete
- Settings that follow the account, not the browser — kept in a
settings.jsonin the account's own JMAP Files, so ihasmail itself stays stateless - Runs read-only — one optional write path, and with it switched off the container needs no volume and no writable root.
IMMUTABLE=1is checked at startup rather than trusted, so a half-applied switch refuses to boot instead of failing quietly. See Running immutably - On a phone — swipe a message to archive or delete it (either direction, your choice), hold one to select it, hold a folder for its menu, pull the list to refresh, swipe back from a conversation
- Platform — installable PWA, Web Push with ihasmail closed,
mailto:handler, no credentials in the browser, strict CSP, SSRF-safe image proxy
The long version is on ihasmail.org; how to drive each one is in Using ihasmail.
Requires Stalwart 0.16 or newer
Sign-in refuses anything older, by name. 0.16 replaced the REST management API
with JMAP registry objects, changed the shape of FileNode, split its rights up
and moved configuration into the store; supporting both generations meant a
wrong guess had somewhere to fall back to, so it failed quietly — and that
reached production. With one supported generation a wrong guess is a loud error
on the first call.
- Still on 0.15? The last release that runs on it is tagged
stalwart-0.15-support. - Upgrading? stalwart-migrator does it in place, checkpointing every phase and validating afterwards. The live instance moved 0.15.5 → 0.16.19 with eight seconds of downtime and nothing lost.
Quick start (Docker)
cp .env.example .env
# edit: STALWART_URL=https://mail.example.com and APP_SECRET=$(openssl rand -base64 48)
docker compose up --build -d
# → http://localhost:8080 (put Caddy/nginx in front for TLS; see Caddyfile.example / nginx.example.conf)
Users sign in with their Stalwart mailbox credentials. An account with two-factor authentication needs an app password, created in Stalwart's own settings — Stalwart accepts a TOTP code only through an OAuth flow and offers no password grant, so no client holding a username and password can exchange them plus a code for a token.
Full instructions, TLS, and every environment variable: Installing · Configuring.
Running immutably
The server writes to exactly one path, the optional SESSION_FILE. Clear it
and there is nothing left to write, so the container can run with no writable
filesystem at all:
docker run --read-only --tmpfs /tmp -e IMMUTABLE=1 -e SESSION_FILE= ...
IMMUTABLE=1 is an assertion the server checks at startup rather than a switch
that changes what it does: it refuses to start if SESSION_FILE is still set,
or if the filesystem it is installed on turns out to be writable after all.
Without it the same misconfiguration is silent — sessions are held in memory
and persisting them is best-effort, so a read-only /data costs one warning at
the first sign-in and nothing else until the instance is replaced and everyone
is signed out.
That sign-out is the standing cost of this mode today, since sessions have nowhere to live across a restart. Removing it means moving the session upstream into a token Stalwart itself issues and can revoke, which is what the OAuth work in ROADMAP.md is for.
Architecture
browser ──(same-origin /api/*)──► ihasmail server (Node + Hono) ──(JMAP over HTTPS)──► Stalwart
React SPA • session cookie ⇄ Basic auth
JMAP client + stores • /api/jmap, /api/blob, /api/upload, /api/events (SSE), /api/image
web/— Vite + React 19 + TypeScript SPA.src/jmap(client, push, types),src/store(zustand: session, mail, compose, contacts, calendar, files, sieve, settings),src/views,src/lib(sanitiser, search parser, Sieve codec, locale-aware dates, vCard, …).server/— Node/Hono backend: authenticates against Stalwart's JMAP session endpoint, seals the credentials with a key derived from the cookie secret, proxies JMAP/blob/SSE, serves the SPA under a strict CSP.src/mock/is an in-memory fake Stalwart for development and demos.
Capabilities used: core, mail, submission, vacationresponse, sieve,
contacts(+parse), calendars(+parse), principals(+availability),
quota, blob, filenode, EventSource push, plus Stalwart's own
urn:stalwart:jmap (read-only). Features degrade gracefully when one is
missing.
Development
Requirements: Node ≥ 20.10 (22 recommended), npm ≥ 10.
npm install
npm run dev # real Stalwart (STALWART_URL in .env) — server :8080, Vite :5173
npm run dev:mock # built-in mock Stalwart ([email protected] / demo), mock on :8788
npm run dev:mock:no-future-release # mock that advertises FUTURERELEASE and drops every hold
npm run typecheck # tsc for both packages
npm test # vitest (web) + node:test (server)
npm run build # web/dist + server/dist
npm start # serve the production build
Open http://localhost:5173 in dev, or http://localhost:8080 for the production build. Running it for real is covered in Installing and Configuring.
The mock
An in-memory fake Stalwart 0.16 — enough JMAP to develop and demo against
without a real mailbox. It reproduces the things a naive fake would get wrong,
because each cost a live debugging session: urn:stalwart:jmap advertised
per-account rather than session-level, identity signatures capped at 2047
bytes, and CalendarEvent/set speaking Stalwart's vocabulary rather than
RFC 8984's. Two switches: MOCK_NO_FUTURE_RELEASE=1 advertises FUTURERELEASE
and then drops every hold; MOCK_NO_REGISTRY=1 omits the Stalwart capability so
the sign-in refusal can be tested.
Version numbers
ihasmail v2026.8.30+pr129 — the date of the commit this was built from, and
the pull request that commit arrived through. A commit that did not arrive
through one carries its short SHA instead: 2026.8.30+g1fa6578. It all comes
from git at build time; nothing writes a version into the tree, and
package.json sits at 0.0.0 because it is no longer the source of anything.
The date is the commit's own rather than today's, so rebuilding an old commit gives the version it had the first time.
node scripts/version.mjs # the version for the current checkout
docker build --build-arg IHASMAIL_VERSION="$(node scripts/version.mjs)" -t ihasmail:2026.8.30 .
.dockerignore excludes .git deliberately, so an image build cannot work this
out for itself — pass it in. Left out, the build reports 0.0.0, which is meant
to look wrong: a version with no +pr or +g means whoever built the image did
not pass one.
The version says nothing about Stalwart, deliberately. It used to: 2.16.x had
16 for the 0.16 generation it targeted, which leaves nowhere to go once
Stalwart reaches 1.0 — 2.1 sorts below the 2.16 already deployed, so every
image and About screen would read as a downgrade. Which Stalwart a build needs is
stated where it can be precise, in the badge at the top of this file and in
KNOWN-ISSUES.md, rather than compressed into one digit.
The pull request lives after the +, as build metadata, because it is
provenance rather than a rank: at the rate they merge here it climbs without
bound and says nothing about how new a build is. Everything after the + is
ignored when versions are compared, which is the right reading — two builds from
the same day differ in where they came from, not in age. Nothing here depends on
that comparison: images are pruned oldest-first by creation time, and a rollback
names a git ref.
Deploying
deploy.example.sh is a single-host Docker deploy: it
fetches, refuses anything held back by .deploy-hold, shows what is about to be
introduced and asks, rebuilds with the right version baked in, replaces the
container, waits for healthy, then prunes all but the newest
IHASMAIL_KEEP_VERSIONS images — never the one actually running.
./deploy.sh # origin/main, asks before shipping new commits
./deploy.sh --dry-run # run the guards and stop
./deploy.sh v2026.8.30 --yes # a named ref, no prompt (there is no tty over ssh)
--yes does not override a hold; clearing one means deleting its line.
Contributing
CONTRIBUTING.md · CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md · SECURITY.md — please report vulnerabilities privately.
License
Copyright (C) 2026 Coffey Labs — AGPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.
ihasmail was relicensed from GPL-3.0 to AGPL-3.0 on 2026-08-25: webmail is nearly always run as a network service rather than handed to anyone as a binary, and the AGPL's section 13 closes that gap.
That offer has to point at your source, not this one. If you run a modified
ihasmail, set SOURCE_URL to your own repository — the sign-in page and
Settings › About both show it. See
Rebranding.