ref: 198f12cf65a7f4730baf477972bdb94e5e7401fe
dir: /upas-theory.md/
Upas: Theory of Operation ------------------------- Upas is the Plan 9 mail system. It's used for viewing mail, sending mail, and receiving mail. It comes with clients and servers for SMTP, IMAP, etc. It also provides a powerful toolkit for spam filtering and mail processing. Upas is configured through a scattering of methods. There are a few config files, and a number of scripts which users are intended to customize. Here's a list of some important files: remotemail The script that you customize for delivering mail to remote systems. qmail Enqueues mail for later delivery, applying filters along the way. rewrite Rewrites and matches the destination of the email, deciding which mail box or smtp server to put the message into. smtpd.conf Configures the SMTP server validateaddress: Checks if we should deliver to an address on this system. There are a number of additional files not mentioned in this summary. Viewing ------- Viewing mail with upas involves very few moving parts. Upas/fs connects to most mail protocols, and provides a consistent file system interface for all of them, abstracting the storage system away from the mail clients. Upas/fs knows how to render a file system for local mailboxes, maildirs, pop, and imap, serving them up in a multi-level heirarchy in /mail/fs, with one subdirectory for each mailbox mounted: /mail/fs/$mbox/$mail/$subfiles For example, to see who sent the first email in the default mailbox, you could run: cat /mail/fs/mbox/1/from Typically, you'd access mail/fs through a client such as nedmail or acme Mail. Upas/fs only has one config file in /mail/lib, for configuring which headers are shown. Sending And Receiving --------------------- Sending and receving email via SMTP in upas is a similar operation: A mail is entered into the pipeline, is routed, and is delivered to the appropriate destination. Upas/send is the heart of the delivery pipeline. Sending invokes upas/marshal to drop an email into upas/send, while receiving does this via upas/smtpd. Sending and receiving in upas both roughly follow the same path. Both of them take an email, and dump it into upas/send, which applies the rewrite rules and sends it on to further routing depending on the destination of the email. The major difference between sending and receiving is in the starting point: When composing an email on plan 9, it gets sent to upas/marshal to drop it into the delivery pipeline. When plan 9 is set up to recieve mail directly, mail comes in through upas/smtpd. Send accepts a well formed email, and applies the rewrite rules in /mail/lib/rewrite. The rewrite rules are expected to match an email address and take an appropriate action. With a typical rewrite configuration, if the mail matches a local user, then the email will get deposited into their mailbox. Otherwise, the email is punted to /mail/lib/remotemail. With the default gateway setup, the pipeline looks something like this, where the rewrite rules that upas/send uses to interpret email enqueues it using qmail: upas/marshal => upas/send => /mail/lib/qmail => qer => /mail/lib/remotemail => upas/smtp With the example smtp setup, rewrite also handles delivering emails locally. However, because of the flexibility of the rewrite rules, everything after upas/send can be swapped out and replaced. Marshal ------- Marshal is the simpler of the two entry points into the mail system. All it does is take a message that you may type by hand, and formats it into an rfc822 envelope, and (depending on flags) passes it on to send. It's also used in the receiving pipeline, but only as an address validator, using the 'x' flag to examine whether an address is deliverable. Smtpd ----- Smtpd is the other entry point. It takes internet mail from other systems, and puts it into the delivery pipeline. It reads its config from /mail/lib/smtpd.conf. The default options for smtpd are not safe to put on the internet: Open relaying should be disabled, at minimum. It uses /mail/lib/validateaddress to check whether the user is available on the system. In the default implementation of validateaddress, upas/marshal -x $addr is used to expand aliases, and check if local delivery is possible for the address in question. If the address is locally deliverable, then send is invoked to deliver the mail. Otherwise, the mail is either relayed or rejected. Filtering --------- In addition to the config files in /mail/lib, each user can configure mail filtering by editing /mail/box/$user/pipeto. This is where. for example, spam filtering would be done. An example of spam filtering is in: /mail/lib/smtpd.example/pipeto.bayes There are some more complicated examples in /sys/src/cmd/upas/filterkit/pipeto.sample /sys/src/cmd/upas/filterkit/pipefrom.sample The scripts are run as user 'none', to protect you from any funny business. Upas ships with a number of programs designed to work with the pipefrom or pipeto setup. These include: upas/filter upas/list upas/deliver upas/token upas/vf upas/bayes There's also a utility library used by rc to make pipe scripts easier. It can be loaded like this: . /mail/lib/pipeto.lib $* The pipeto script is invoked as: rfc822-email | pipeto destaddr destmbox and isw expected to eventually invoke upas/deliver to deliver their filtered emails. Storage Formats --------------- If /mail/box/$user/$mbox is a file, then it's assumed to be in mbox format. If it's a directory, then it's assumed to be in mdir format. If the mailbox does not exist, then a new maildir is created. The Binaries ------------ Spam filtering: * upas/addhash: Merges bayes token hash tables togheter * upas/bayes: Evaluates bayes tokens * upas/msgtok: Tokenizes spam for bayesian filter * upas/isspam: Checks if a message is spam. * upas/token: Creates a message hash * upas/spf: Verifies SPF records * upas/ratfs: Spam blocklist FS * upas/vf: Virus filtering. * upas/list: Maintains and checks lists of users * upas/scanmail: Fixed-pattern spam filtering Mail filtering: * upas/aliasmail: Manages translating mail aliases * upas/deliver: Drops a message into a specific mailbox * upas/filter: Reroutes messages to different mailboxes Mail serving: * upas/imap4d: Serves imap * upas/pop3: Serves pop3 * upas/smtpd: Serves smtp Sending: * upas/marshal: Submits a message for delivery * upas/smtp: Sends a message to another mail server Mailing lists: * upas/ml: Receives and bounces mailing list messages. * upas/mlmgr: Manages mailing lists * upas/mlowner: Manages mailing list owner/control messages Internal Plumbing: * upas/qer: Enqueues commands * upas/runq: Runs and retries enqueued commands * upas/mbappend: Appends messages to mbox or mdir mailboxes * upas/send: Starts the email delivery process Utilities: * upas/msgcat: Shows message contents * upas/testscan: Dry run of scanmail * upas/spam: Marks an email as spam * upas/unspam: Reduces spam weight of message tokens * upas/tfmt: Prevents topposting * upas/unesc: Interpret =?foo?bar?=char?= escapes Clients: * upas/fs: Renders a mailbox as a file system