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Upas: Theory of Operation

Upas is the Plan 9 mail system. It’s used for viewing mail, sending mail, and receiving mail. It comes with clients and servers for SMTP, IMAP, etc. It also provides a powerful toolkit for spam filtering and mail processing.

Upas is configured through a scattering of methods. There are a few config files, and a number of scripts which users are intended to customize.

Here’s a list of some important files:

   remotemail
          The script that you customize
          for delivering mail to remote
          systems.

   qmail
          Enqueues mail for later delivery,
          applying filters along the way.

   rewrite
          Rewrites and matches the destination
          of the email, deciding which mail
          box or smtp server to put the message
          into.

   smtpd.conf
          Configures the SMTP server

   validateaddress:
          Checks if we should deliver to an
          address on this system.

There are a number of additional files not mentioned in this summary.

Viewing

Viewing mail with upas involves very few moving parts. Upas/fs connects to most mail protocols, and provides a consistent file system interface for all of them, abstracting the storage system away from the mail clients.

Upas/fs knows how to render a file system for local mailboxes, maildirs, pop, and imap, serving them up in a multi-level heirarchy in /mail/fs, with one subdirectory for each mailbox mounted:

   /mail/fs/$mbox/$mail/$subfiles

For example, to see who sent the first email in the default mailbox, you could run:

   cat /mail/fs/mbox/1/from

Typically, you’d access mail/fs through a client such as nedmail or acme Mail.

Upas/fs only has one config file in /mail/lib, for configuring which headers are shown.

Sending And Receiving

Sending and receving email via SMTP in upas is a similar operation: A mail is entered into the pipeline, is routed, and is delivered to the appropriate destination.

Upas/send is the heart of the delivery pipeline. Sending invokes upas/marshal to drop an email into upas/send, while receiving does this via upas/smtpd.

Sending and receiving in upas both roughly follow the same path. Both of them take an email, and dump it into upas/send, which applies the rewrite rules and sends it on to further routing depending on the destination of the email.

The major difference between sending and receiving is in the starting point: When composing an email on plan 9, it gets sent to upas/marshal to drop it into the delivery pipeline. When plan 9 is set up to recieve mail directly, mail comes in through upas/smtpd.

Send accepts a well formed email, and applies the rewrite rules in /mail/lib/rewrite. The rewrite rules are expected to match an email address and take an appropriate action.

With a typical rewrite configuration, if the mail matches a local user, then the email will get deposited into their mailbox. Otherwise, the email is punted to /mail/lib/remotemail.

With the default gateway setup, the pipeline looks something like this, where the rewrite rules that upas/send uses to interpret email enqueues it using qmail:

   upas/marshal => upas/send =>
   /mail/lib/qmail => qer =>
   /mail/lib/remotemail => upas/smtp

With the example smtp setup, rewrite also handles delivering emails locally.

However, because of the flexibility of the rewrite rules, everything after upas/send can be swapped out and replaced.

Marshal

Marshal is the simpler of the two entry points into the mail system. All it does is take a message that you may type by hand, and formats it into an rfc822 envelope, and (depending on flags) passes it on to send.

It’s also used in the receiving pipeline, but only as an address validator, using the ‘x’ flag to examine whether an address is deliverable.

Smtpd

Smtpd is the other entry point. It takes internet mail from other systems, and puts it into the delivery pipeline.

It reads its config from /mail/lib/smtpd.conf. The default options for smtpd are not safe to put on the internet: Open relaying should be disabled, at minimum.

It uses /mail/lib/validateaddress to check whether the user is available on the system. In the default implementation of validateaddress, upas/marshal -x $addr is used to expand aliases, and check if local delivery is possible for the address in question.

If the address is locally deliverable, then send is invoked to deliver the mail. Otherwise, the mail is either relayed or rejected.

Filtering

In addition to the config files in /mail/lib, each user can configure mail filtering by editing /mail/box/$user/pipeto. This is where. for example, spam filtering would be done.

An example of spam filtering is in:

   /mail/lib/smtpd.example/pipeto.bayes

There are some more complicated examples in

   /sys/src/cmd/upas/filterkit/pipeto.sample
   /sys/src/cmd/upas/filterkit/pipefrom.sample

The scripts are run as user ‘none’, to protect you from any funny business.

Upas ships with a number of programs designed to work with the pipefrom or pipeto setup.

These include:

   upas/filter
   upas/list
   upas/deliver
   upas/token
   upas/vf
   upas/bayes

There’s also a utility library used by rc to make pipe scripts easier. It can be loaded like this:

   . /mail/lib/pipeto.lib $*

The pipeto script is invoked as:

   rfc822-email | pipeto destaddr destmbox

and isw expected to eventually invoke

   upas/deliver

to deliver their filtered emails.

Storage Formats

If /mail/box/$user/$mbox is a file, then it’s assumed to be in mbox format. If it’s a directory, then it’s assumed to be in mdir format. If the mailbox does not exist, then a new maildir is created.

The Binaries

Spam filtering:

Mail filtering:

Mail serving:

Sending:

Mailing lists:

Internal Plumbing:

Utilities:

Clients: