crabmail

🦀Crabmail🦀

self-hosted / github mirror

A static mail HTML and Gemini archive for the 21st century, written in Rust. Includes helpful "modern" features that existing solutions lack, like:

• Responsive UI
• Single-page threads
• Working mailto: links
• Thread-based Atom feeds

Not implemented yet / designed:

• Attachment handling?

EMAIL FOREVER!

• lists.flounder.online demo
• gemini://lists.flounder.online On gemini!

Installation and usage

To use crabmail to host your own public inbox archive-first mailing list, check out Self-hosted Public Inbox in 2022

To install:

git clone git://git.alexwennerberg.com/crabmail/
cd crabmail && cargo install --path .

Copy crabmail.conf and set the variables as needed.

Get a maildir folder, for example, via mbsync. Crabmail will create sub-lists for each folder inside this maildir.

Run crabmail [maildir root] -c [config-file.conf].

For more thorough documentation, run man doc/crabmail.1. You can also move these wherever your docs manpages may live

If you want to use an mbox file (for example, to mirror another archive), use mblaze to import it into a maildir. Mblaze also has some tools that you may find supplementary to crabmail.

For example:

mkdir -p lists/mylist/cur lists/mylist/tmp lists/mylist/new
mdeliver -M lists/mylist < mylist.mbox
crabmail lists

Open site/index.html in a web browser

NOTES

This is only tested on Linux. Notably: Any character other than "/" is allowed in filenames used in message-id. Make sure this doesn't break anything or cause a security vuln on your filesystem.

Contributing

For patches, use git-send-email or git-format-patch to send a patch to the crabmail public inbox

git-format-patch is preferred for non-trivial or multi-commit changes

Etc

Crabmail is AGPLv3 licenses, but some files are licensed under 0BSD or other more permissive licenses. I call this out when I can.

For a similar project, check out bubger

Consider supporting me and my projects on patreon