Single node email tutorial

This tutorial walks you through the initial process of creating and deploying a minimal email service provider. Please first complete the Quick Start Tutorial. This tutorial will pick up where that one left off.

Our goal

We are going to create a minimal LEAP provider offering email service.

Our goal is something like this:

$ leap list
    NODES       SERVICES                       TAGS
    wildebeest  couchdb, mx, soledad, webapp

Where ‘wildebeest’ is whatever name you chose for your node in the Quick Start Tutorial.

Add email services to the node

In order to add services to a node, edit the node’s JSON configuration file.

In our example, we would edit nodes/wildebeest.json:

{
  "ip_address": "XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX",
  "services": ["couchdb", "webapp", "mx", "soledad"]
}

Where “XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX” should be replaced by your IP provider.

Here, we added mx and soledad to the node’s services list. Briefly:

• mx: nodes with the mx service will run postfix mail transfer agent, and are able to receive and relay email on behalf of your domain. You can have as many as you want, spread out over as many nodes as you want.
• soledad: nodes with soledad service run the server-side daemon that allows the client to synchronize a user’s personal data store among their devices. Currently, soledad only runs on nodes that are also couchdb nodes.

For more details, see the Services overview, or the individual pages for the mx and soledad services.

Deploy to the node

Now you should deploy to your node.

workstation$ leap deploy

Setup DNS

There are several important DNS entries that all email providers should have:

• SPF (Sender Policy Framework): With SPF, an email provider advertises in their DNS which servers should be allowed to relay email on behalf of your domain.
• DKIM (DomainKey Identified Mail): With DKIM, an email provider is able to vouch for the validity of certain headers in outgoing mail, allowing the receiving provider to have more confidence in these values when processing the message for spam or abuse.

In order to take advantage of SPF and DKIM, run this command:

workstation$ leap compile zone

Then take the output of that command and merge it with the DNS zone file for your domain.

CAUTION: the output of leap compile zone is not a complete zone file since it is missing a serial number. You will need to manually merge it with your existing zone file.

Test it out

First, run:

workstation# leap test

Then fire up the bitmask client, register a new user with your provider, and try sending and receiving email.