Silver

The Silver project aims to reinvent email and digital communication that is suitable for government scale deployment. We are looking to make it in two stages: 1.0 to just provide "regular" email and 2.0 to reinvent communication and collaboration.

Table of contents

• Silver
  • Table of contents
  • Documents
  • Getting Started
    • Prerequisites
    • Minimum hardware requirements
    • Software
    • DNS setup
    • Server Setup
    • Configuration
    • Adding users
    • Testing your setup
  • Open Source Software
  • Contributing
  • License
  • Miscellaneous

Documents

• Milestones
• “GitHub for Everything” Playbook
• "Email 2.0" Vision GoogleDoc
• Repo Structure - For Email Stack GoogleDoc

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• A dedicated Linux server with a static public IP address. You also require root access and port access control.
• Domain with DNS control

Minimum hardware requirements

• 4GB of memory
• 1GB of swap

Software

• Ensure you have Git and Docker Engine installed

DNS setup

You own example.com and want to send email as [email protected].

You will need to add a few records to your DNS control panel.

Note

Replace example.com and 12.34.56.78 in the below example with your domain and ip address.

DNS Record	Name	Value
A	mail	12.34.56.78
A	example.com	12.34.56.78
MX	example.com	mail.example.com
TXT	example.com	"v=spf1 ip4:12.34.56.78 ~all"
TXT	_dmarc	"v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:[email protected]"
PTR	12.34.56.78	mail.example.com

Tip

PTR records usually are set through your hosting provider.

Server Setup

• Clone the repository and navigate to the services folder.

git clone https://github.com/LSFLK/silver.git
cd silver/services

Configuration

• Open silver.yaml with a text editor.

• Enter your domain name.

• Run the init.sh

• To add more users to your email server, give permission to the add-users.sh file and run it.

# silver/services
bash init.sh

• Replace the dkim record below with the output you get after running the init.sh script

DNS Record	Name	Value
TXT	mail._domainkey	"v=DKIM1; h=sha256; k=rsa; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQDYZd3CAas0+81zf13cvtO6o0+rlGx8ZobYQXRR9W8qcJOeO1SiQGx8F4/DjZE1ggujOaY1bkt8OnUg7vG7/bk5PNe05EHJrg344krodqCJrVI74ZzEB77Z1As395KX6/XqbQxBepQ8D5+RpGFOHitI443G/ZWgZ6BRyaaE6t3u0QIDAQAB"

Important

Ensure that your dkim value is correctly formatted.

Adding users

• To add more users to your email server, open up users.yaml, and add their usernames and run the following command.

# silver/services
bash add_users.sh

• Follow the prompts to add a new user.

Testing your setup

• Now that you have a working email server, you can test your configuration using the following links/scripts.

  • mxtoolbox
    • MxToolbox is a powerful online service that provides a suite of free diagnostic and lookup tools for troubleshooting email delivery, DNS, and network issues.
  • mail-tester
    • Mail-Tester is a free online tool that analyzes the "spamminess" of your email and server configuration, providing a score out of 10 to help improve your email deliverability.

• You can also set up a Mail User Agent (MUA) like Thunderbird to send and receive emails. Follow the instructions in Mail User Agent Setup.

Open Source Software

Silver is built using opensource software.

• Postfix - handles sending and receiving email.
• Dovecot - handles the retrieval of emails.
• Thunder - Identity provider and user manager
• Rspamd - spam filtering system.
• ClamAV - virus scanning system.

Contributing

Thank you for wanting to contribute to our project. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for more details.

License

Distributed under the Apache 2.0 License. See LICENSE for more information.

Miscellaneous

• Interesting Email Products to Emerge Recently