Chat mail relay Federation

Mutual Help
1

The question is, how to enable federation in chat mail relay, so that it would be possible, for example, with nine.testrun.org send an email to other repeaters and vice versa.

2

this should just be the default!? the whole point of chatmail is that it’s using the already federated email protocols under the hood :thinking:

3

I agree, it must be. But this is not the case.

4

Maybe I didn’t fully set up something, or didn’t turn it on. But at the moment, I can’t log out of the server, meaning I can’t connect to anyone, even using a qr code. In general, my server is isolated for some reason. Contact is only possible inside chatmail relay.

5

Everything turned out to be much simpler, I’m a fool, I didn’t have an MX DNS record on my domain name, therefore the other mail servers didn’t understand what I wanted from them, everything is working now. I’m sorry for my stupidity.

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6

Did scripts/cmdeploy test not catch that?

7

I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you, what did you mean?

8

Have you tried to execute scripts/cmdeploy test? What was the output? Did it not report the issue?

9

@WofWca ,

I didn’t run scripts/cmdeploy test.
I just checked my domain’s DNS records and noticed that I was missing the A record for mail.example.ru pointing to 87.234.10.3 and also the MX record.
After adding those, I was able to connect with bots from testrun.org and with my other accounts on classic email providers.

Digging into the server scripts, I found that Chat Mail Relay works like this:

  1. Federation is enabled by default — all that’s required is a proper A and MX DNS record.
  2. It authenticates users even if they don’t yet exist on the server, as long as the input matches the criteria defined in chatmail.ini (like minimum address and password length).
    This means you can migrate servers quickly: just spin up a new one with the same domain, and users will reconnect automatically.

Overall, everything important is in chatmail.ini, and honestly — that’s all you really need.
The server runs fast, stable, and that’s a huge plus.
Federation and the ability to create your own accounts make it even better. Just brilliant.

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10

For other readers, here is a follow-up discussion:

Also there is a related issue:

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