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Release cycle about SMTP stack

If you follow a bit my work, you should know about a huge work started few months (years?!) ago about the SMTP stack. As a MirageOS developer, I mostly want to use it to replace some usual services such as a DNS resolver, a blog or a primary DNS service.

But I really would like to replace an old but widely used service, the email service.

Mr. MIME at the beginning

One of my biggest project is mrmime. It's a little library to parse and generate an email according several RFCs. The most difficult part was to handle encoding and multipart.

This library wants to solve 2 simple problems:

How to read everything!

An email is easily understandable by a human as a rich document but it can be hard to extract useful information from it by a computer. Indeed, an email can be really complex such as a RFC822's date or, more obviously who should receive the email.

Mr. MIME wants to solve this first problem and it provides an angstrom parser to extract metadata and represent them by OCaml values. Then, the user is able to introspect them and implement something like a /filter/, an organizer, etc.

FWS and unstrctrd

The main problem about email is the folding-whitespace. It permits the user to extend a value of a field to multiple lines such as:

To: A Group(Some people)
   :Chris Jones <c@(Chris's host.)public.example>,
     joe@example.org,
 John <jdoe@one.test> (my dear friend); (the end of the group)"

As long as the next line starts with a whitespace, it's a part of the current value. At the first time, I tried to parse it with ocamllex but I failed when I got a too big automaton error. Then, I switched to angstrom but I was not really happy with results.

Recently, with @let-def, we agreed that an ocamllex still is possible. At the end, we should be more faster than angstrom. So we did unstrctrd. The project is a bit more general than emails. In fact, some formats such as some used by Debian or HTTP/1.1 headers follow the same rule. unstrctrd wants to flat kind of value.

Into details, unstrctrd is a nice mix between ocamllex and angstrom.

With this project, we handle FWS described by RFC5322 and obsolete form described by RFC822. It does some post-processes (like it removes useless comments as described by CFWS) and provides a well abstracted API to be able to parse and construct an unstructured form.

To understand the babel tower, any values available into your email as the date, email addresses or subject of your email should respect, at least, the unstructured form. Any of them will be processed, at least, by unstrctrd.

The goal is to hide such complexity to an other lower layer. In fact, before this library, 2 of mine libraries want to solve this problem:

To be able to provide as much as possible light libraries, we did unstrctrd and delete FWS handler from emile. By that, mrmime depends on both to properly parse email addresses.

An email address and emile

As you know, we use widely email addresses but the format of them is really complex. We can put more than one domain on it for example (like <@gmail.com:romain.calascibetta@x25519.net>), put a name (which must respect a special format), use special characters such as + or spaces with quoted-string. A domain can directly be an IPv4 or IPv6 or an extensible domain locally specified by the SMTP server. You can use UTF-8 of course since RFC6532.

In other words, email addresses are hard to parse.

With unstrctrd, we simplify a bit the library and emile does not handle anymore FWS. The goal is to let the user to process the input with unstrctrd at first if the input comes from an email and then try to parse the result with emile to extract the email address - and this is what mrmime does of course.

And, of course, usual user does not care about folding-whitespace. The input comes usually from a form (so, without this such token), so emile wants to provide the most easy (and correct) way to parse an email address.

UTF-8, UTF-7, latin1 or YUSCII?

An other obvious problem about email is the encoding used. We talk sometimes about charset but let keep encoding. Of course, we have several encoding such as ISO-8859. With a nice discussion with @dbuenzli with beers, the most interesting way to solve the problem about encoding is to arbitrary choose one and keep it as long as we can.

So, as the uutf author, we chosen UTF-8 of course!

However, we need to provide a way to normalize any encodings to UTF-8. The Unicode consortium provides some translation tables and I picked them to be able to translate some of them to UTF-8. Few projects was made in this goal:

All of them are merged into an other library: rosetta.

This library is used by mrmime to try to normalize any contents to UTF-8. From the point of view of the user, he does not need to know all details. The result is just to say: any contents provided by mrmime use UTF-8!

An other OCaml project to handle such things exists: Camomile. But rosetta wants to be the most easier and simpler as we want.

Base64 & Quoted-Printable

mrmime still wants to be low-level. Even if it wants to extract contents, it does not handle format of contents (this feature should be done by a new other project conan - but we will talk about it in another article).

However, RFC2045 defines some standalone formats independently to the type of the content. The most know is the base64 to encode binary or large files into your email. It's when I discovered that email has his own base64 format that I to deeply update the package. decoder of this special format.

In other side, RFC2045 describes an other format: the quoted-printable format. At this time, it was not possible to safely send an UTF-8 email. We still were constrained to encode each byte of our email into 7-bits. To ensure to be able to pass 8-bits values, the quoted-printable was done to encode such byte into a special form.

From that, we did the library pecu which is able to encode and decode such contents. This library was well tested with fuzzer as we do usually to check isomorphism between encoder and decoder.

Some others formats exist and are created specially for emails such as the flowed format but they should be handle by others libraries.

How to generate everything

The major feature about mrmime is not really about all of these libraries used to parse an email. Indeed, mrmime was able to introspect emails at the beginning (from that, we can look into an old conference about it). The notable update is the safe way to emit an email.

Indeed, a large work was done about API to be able to properly emit an email and try to respect as much as we can rules such as:

From that, I think we provide a nice interface to construct and emit an email. Generation of email address for example is pretty-close to what we expect:

let me =
  Local.[ w "romain"; w "calascibetta" ]
        @ Domain.(domain, [ a "x25519"; a "net" ]) ;;

Composition with parts is also nice:

let content_type_alternative =
  let open Content_type in
  (with_type `Multipart <.> with_subtype (`Iana "alternative")) default

let header =
  Header.empty
  |> Header.add Field_name.content_type (Field.Content, content_type_alternative)

let part0 = Mt.part (stream_of_string "Hello World!")
let part1 = Mt.part (stream_of_string "Salut le monde!")
let m0 = Mt.multipart ~header [ part0; part1; ] |> Mt.multipart_as_part

let m1 = Mt.part stream_of_file
let m = Mt.(make multi (multipart [ m0; m1; ]))

Then, mrmime handles 80 columns such as when it reaches the limit, it tries to break with a FWS token the value where is permitted such as:

To: thomas@gazagnaire.org, anil@recoil.org, hannes@mehnert.org, gemma.t.gordon@gmail.com

becomes:

To: thomas@gazagnaire.org, anil@recoil.org, hannes@mehnert.org,
  gemma.t.gordon@gmail.com

SMTP then!

Of course, even if some people are really interested by mrmime mostly to pave a way to be able to create yet another email client (in OCaml!), my goal is a bit offbeat. So I mostly focused on the implementation of a SMTP server.

The first notable library is colombe - a low-level implementation of the SMTP protocol.

How to describe a state machine?!

The real goal of colombe is to provide an API which is able to let the user to describe a state machine to communicate to a peer. By this fact, colombe does not want to implement the sendmail command or does not want to implement a SMTP relay or a SMTP submission service.

It is the first stone to be able to easily create such programs/libraries.

So most of people should not care about colombe - as they mostly want to send an email. However, as a client such as ~sendmail~ or as a server such as an SMTP submission service, they should use the same ground and avoid a duplicate an implementation of how to talk SMTP with a peer.

Another point is the possibility to use colombe with MirageOS - and make an unikernel with it. From that, we started to use an other kind of abstraction of I/O (such as LWT or ASYNC - or Unix) which uses less functor as we do usually with MirageOS.

But the real good point of colombe is the ability to describe the state machine with monad which provides high-level recv and send operations:

let properly_quit_and_fail ctx err =
  let* _txts = send ctx QUIT () >>= fun () -> recv ctx PP_221 in
  fail err

let authentication ctx username password =
  let* code, txts = send ctx AUTH PLAIN >>= fun () -> recv ctx CODE in
  match code with
  | 504 -> properly_quit_and_fail ctx `Unsupported_mechanism
  | 538 -> properly_quit_and_fail ctx `Encryption_required
  | 534 -> properly_quit_and_fail ctx `Weak_mechanism
  | 334 ->
    let* () = match txts with
      | [] ->
        let payload = Base64.encode_exn (Fmt.strf "\000%s\000%s" username password) in
        send ctx PAYLOAD payload
      | x :: _ ->
        let x = Base64.decode_exn x in
        let payload = Base64.encode_exn (Fmt.strf "%s\000%s\000%s" x username password) in
        send ctx PAYLOAD payload in
    ( recv ctx CODE >>= function
        | (235, _txts) -> return `Authenticated
        | (501, _txts) -> properly_quit_and_fail ctx `Authentication_rejected
        | (535, _txts) -> properly_quit_and_fail ctx `Authentication_failed
        | (code, txts) -> fail (`Unexpected_response (code, txts)) )
  | code -> fail (`Unexpected_response (code, txts))

As you can see, we use monadic operators to simplify the lecture of the code. send and recv take values described by the user with a GADT:

type 'x send =
  | QUIT : unit send
  | AUTH : auth send
  | PAYLOAD : string send

type 'x recv =
  | PP_220 : string list recv
  | PP_221 : string list recv
  | CODE : (int * string list) recv

Then, the user just needs to describe how to process such commands with a given ctx:

Of course, this where colombe comes. It already defines few primitives to emit and parse such commands into the ctx.

At another layer (which needs syscalls), a composition between the ctx and a fiber (like authentication) returns a process t such as:

type ('a, 'err) t =
  | Read   of { buffer : bytes
              ; off : int
              ; len : int
              ; k : int -> ('a, 'err) t }
  | Write  of { buffer : string
              ; off : int
              ; len : int
              ; k : int -> ('a, 'err) t }
  | Return of 'a
  | Fail   of 'err

let run socket username password =
  let ctx = Context.create () in
  let fiber = authentication ctx username password in

  let rec go = function
    | Read { buffer; off; len; k; } ->
      let len = Unix.read socket buffer off len in
      go (k len)
    | Write { buffer; off; len; k; } ->
      let len = Unix.write socket buffer off len in
      go (k len)
    | Return v -> Ok v
    | Fail err -> Error err in
  go m

And you have a fully implemented and available way on Unix to communication with a SMTP peer - and be authenticated.

Implement sendmail, the client side

At least, from this core, it should be easy to implement sendmail command. And of course, the distribution of colombe provide such library:

All of them wants to provide the most easy way to send an email. Indeed, it exists 2 ways to submit an email:

facteur

From all of that, we developed a little proof-of-concept to see if colombe and sendmail correspond to what we expect: facteur.

This is a simple tool which wants to send an email as the sendmail command but the complete stack is in OCaml! It's a merge of mrmime and sendmail to be able to produce a well formed email with file attachments.

It still is an experimental software and it requires a bad dependency libmagic to be able to recognise MIME type of file attachments. However, I started to implement something else, conan, to automatically do this job and be MirageOS compatible.

Server side

Finally, I started to implement the server side. colombe handles both side. It can parse response and emit request and /vice-versa/. From the same ground, we try to implement 2 servers into a single project: ptt.

It provides two libraries:

The final goal of them is to provide a full stack to be able to create email addresses from a given domain. An example is may be more interesting, we will take my x25519.net.

We will provide a first SMTP relay which will receive any incoming emails. It will be the server notified by my primary DNS server with the MX record.

$ dig +short MX x25519.net
0 163.172.65.89

The goal of it is to transmit incoming email to the real destination. For example, you want to send me an email to romain@x25519.net from your gmail.com address. Google will speak with this server. Internally, I associated romain@x25519.net to romain.calascibetta@gmail.com. Finally, mti-gf will retransmit your email to Google (to romain.calascibetta@gmail.com).

The second server let us to use our x25519.net email address to send email. The goal is to properly configure your MUA to be able to be authenticated to our lipap server. Then, it is able to communicate to others SMTP servers such as Google and send your email to them (with your x25519.net address).

So from my experiments, all should work and I started to deploy some others unikernels mostly to get automatically let's encrypt certificates - and provide 163.172.65.89:587 and 163.172.65.89:465.

Other projects

Along my way, I surely developed some others tools (which need an update with new interfaces or are really experimental) such as:

Conclusion

The stack is huge and it is not really finished. But I believe that I reached a point where all libraries compose nicely and let me to provide something much more complex such as an SMTP server!

All of that is possible of course with the work from others peoples such as ocaml-tls or, more generally, MirageOS people.

I believe that this year will be the year where such service will be exist as a MirageOS unikernel! And may be do an anarchist revolution and do a self re-appropriation of the means of production.