d1ced / jwebmail

JWebmail

This is based on concepts of oMail by Oliver Müller [email protected].

JWebmail is a webmail server build on top of Mojolicious.

This includes:

• Using a Perl web framework and leave the deprecated CGI behind. You can still use it in a CGI setup if you like but you now have the option of plack/psgi and fcgi as well as the build in server hypnotoad.
• Set up a MVC architecture instead of a single file.
• Improve security by only running a small part of the model with elevated privileges.
• Make sure it works well with sqmail and its authuser authenticator and maildir but also permit other setups (currently not supported but adding more should be easy). Maybe I even add a POP or IMAP based back-ends instead of reading them from disk.

License

JWebmail is available under the GNU General Public License version 3.

JWebmail-webmail - INSTALL

You need a moderately new version of Perl (v5.22+) You need access to CPAN. You need to install sqmail. It is recommended to use an external web server like Apache or Nginx.

Posts

• Complain about IPC::Open2 ignoring 'open' pragma
• Complain about undef references causing errors, and non-fine granular switch no strict 'refs'
• Thank for perldoc.org

I18N patch url_for

I have taken the monkey patching approach that was taken by Mojolicious::Plugin::I18N. I used can to get the old method for looser coupling and used the Mojo::Util::monkey_patch instead of manually doing it. This is probably overkill.

I'm desperately looking for a different approach. Yeah the monkey patching works great, but it violates the open-closed principal. But I cannot find an appropriate alternative. Extending the controller and overriding url_for does not work cleanly as the user directly inherits from Mojolicious::Controller. Also going the 'better' approach of solving at the root by using an extension of Mojolicious::Routes::Match->path_for and supplying it to the controller by setting match does not work as it is on the one hand extremely difficult to inject it in the first place and the attribute is overwritten in the dispatching process anyways. One issue when taking the Match approach is that it needs knowledge of the stash values which can cause cyclic references.

I thought of three approaches injecting the modified Match instance into the class:

1. Extending the Mojolicious::Controller and overriding the new method. This has the issue that inheritance is static but one can use Roles that are dynamically consumed.
2. Overriding build_controller in Mojolicious. To make this cleanly it needs to be monkey patched by the plugin which is exactly what we want to avoid. :(
3. The matcher can be set in a hook relatively early in its lifetime and hooks compose well.

A completely different option is to use the router directly and register a global route that has the language as parameter. But omitting the language leads to problems.

One can use a redirect on root. Very easy but also not very effective.

I am now using a global route containing the language after the changes to matching have been published. No need to monkey_patch and it works well enough.

Concepts

Router                        Mojolicious build-in 
Configuration                 INI via Config::Tiny
Middleware (auth)             Mojo under
Controller/Handler            Mojolicious::Controller
Templates                     Mojo format ep
Template helpers              Mojolicious->helper
i18n (url rewriting)          see 'I18N patch url_for'
Sessions (server side)        self developed plug-in
Flash                         Mojo
Pagination                    self developed
Validation                    Mojo
Logging                       Mojo::Log
Debug printing                Data::Dumper
Development server            Mojo
MIME handling

Dependencies

• M & V
  • Mojolicious
  • Config::Tiny
  • Crypt::URandom
• C
  • Mail::Box::Manager
  • Email::MIME

Architecture

Webserver <--> Application
                 Server
                   |
               Application <--> Extractor

The Webserver acts as a proxy to the Application Server.

The Extractor is a stateless process that reads mails from a source.