Mailiszt

Simple Mailing List Manager written in PHP and Vue designed to be as lightweight as possible (only requirements are PHP 8.0+ with SQLite module). You can organize members into groups and organize these groups into mailing lists based on logical conditions.

Building and installing

Building

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/nilshellerhoff/mailiszt

Install composer and php dependencies

cd mailiszt
php -r "readfile('https://getcomposer.org/installer');" | php
php composer.phar update

Run the backend developer server (port can be adjusted in frontend/.env.development)

php -S 0.0.0.0:8081 index.php

Install node dependencies

cd frontend
npm i

Run the frontend development server

npm run serve

The default user is admin with password admin (change this in the Settings!).

Deploying

Build the frontend

cd frontend 
npm run build

Copy the base directory to your server (everything in frontend except the dist-folder can be ignored)

Point a cron job to the following URL in order to forward emails for all registered mailboxes:

<url of server>/api/mailbox/forward

or if you only want to forward certain mailboxes

<url of server>/api/mailbox/<id of mailbox>/forward

Usage

Members

Members (/members): add members with their email-address. Members can be set to inactive, which will mean that they won't receive any mails.

Groups

Groups (/groups): create groups and add your members to them

Mailboxes

Mailboxes (/mailboxes): add at least one mailbox in order to build a list. You only need the IMAP and SMTP credentials, so virtually any email-service can be used!

Settings:

General:

• Name: The display name used for the list, both in the interface and when sending mails
• Email Address: The mail address used for the list.
• Allowed senders: decide, who is allowed to send mails to the mailing list
  • "Everybody": every mail is accepted and forwarded to the list
  • "Registered members": only mails coming from email addresses of members registered in the members page are accepted, regardless of which groups they belong to
  • "Members of the list": only mails coming from email addresses belonging to members who are recipients of the list emails are accepted
  • "Specific people": you can customize which members are allowed to send emails to the group in the field to the right
• Reply to: customize, what the reply-to header is set to
  • "Sender": the Reply-To header is set to the original sender of the email. When recipients click "reply", they will only reply to the original sender of the mail
  • "Malinglist": no Reply-To header is set. This means that when recipients click "reply", they will reply to the entire list
  • "Sender + Malinglist": the Reply-To header is set to the original sender and the email-address of the list. If the original sender is member of the list already, only the email-address of the list is added, so that the original senders does not get replies twice
  • if a custom reply-to header is set
    • TODO

Templates: templates used when sending mails to the list. Templates are in text format and can use placeholders

• Subject header: The value to set the subject to. Defaults to the original subject
• From name header: The value which is shown as the from name. Defaults to the original sender name plus "via listname"
• Email body: The body of the message. Defaults to adding a footer.
• rejection notices: Whether to send a rejection notice, if the list receives a mail from somebody not allowed to address the list.
• rejection notice template: The template to use for the rejection notice

Server: Details on the server connection

• receiving mail:
  • IMAP server: URL of the IMAP server to be used
  • Encryption: encryption scheme (None, SSL or TLS)
  • IMAP port: port to be used
• sending mail:
  • SMTP server: URL of the SMTP server
  • **Encryption scheme (None, SSL or TLS)
  • SMTP port: port to be used
• Username: username used for logging on to IMAP and SMTP servers. Usually identical to the email address
• Password: password for username
• Only consider messages sent to this address: If this is enabled, Mailiszt will only handle those emails, which have the tomail set to the email-address of the list. Enable this option if e.g. you're using a catch-all mailbox which receives mails for multiple addresses, which you e.g. want to use for different mailing lists.

Groups: configure recipients of the list

• simple selector: select which groups receive emails sent to the list address. Everybody, who is in at least one of the selected groups, receives mails from the mailinglist
• logic selector: build a logic condition tree where you can include or exclude members based on their group memberships. Different conditions can be combined with AND or OR statements
• include inactive members: if enabled, the group selection will include members, even if they are inactive. If not enabled, only active members will receive mails.
• the "Show recipients" button will show, who would receive mails according to the settings above. Use it to check whether you got the group selection correctly!

Mails

Mails (/mails): a list of all the mails processed by Mailiszt. You can view the mails and attachments, and see in detail, to which mail addresses they were forwarded.

Settings

Configure some settings, including password change, automatic email fetching and direct access to the DB via interface.

Logs

View the server logs.

ToDos

• proper input validation
  • define validation rules serverside
  • serve validationrules through api
  • use validationrules clientside
• login for members (not only users)
• allow to compose mails from the interface
  • allow to define a mail which is to be sent to every new member of a list/group
• member registration confirmation
  • when registering members, send them email with confirmation link
• handle bounces correctly
  • parse bounce messages, and dont make them show up in the interface
  • connect bounce messages to original mail and show that the mail could not be delivered to certain members
• logging
  • frontend access to logs
  • delete logs after a certain time (maybe based on loglevel?)
• multi user functionality with customizable access levels
• allow member self-registration
• for every api action, add a human readable response and show this response in the frontend
• not only send mail once
  • but check if it has been sent and no mailer-daemon came back
    • parsing for Mailer-Daemon and Postmaster mails
  • if not, resend it x times
  • keep track of supposed and actual receivers of the mail (in the mail table?)
• change X-Mailer header to Mailiszt (maybe reduced SPAM detection)
  • change other headers if necessary
• introduce Utilities class for functions that are used in multiple places
• send a rejection email if somebody is not allowed to write to mailinglist
  • define moderator email/member for list
• modify subject and body of email
  • additional tab in mailbox
  • use placeholders for variables
• when adding member, mailbox... use the default values stored in DB
  • method for reading default values from DB (maybe through sqlite_master)
  • add API endpoint for object defaults