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About

❗ This repository runs with the Postal version 2.1.2. It should be fine for version 2.1.x maybe 2.x

The Postal mail delivery platform does not offer encrypted services in the basic installation. That is certificate management, HTTPS interface, mail submission via oportunistic TLS (StartTLS) and implicit TLS. Deploying this repository via Docker Compose will provide these services.

Components of the deployment:

  • Caddy 2 web server used for automated certificate management and HTTPS reverse proxy.
  • Stunnel for implicit TLS termination on port 465. This is the preferred method of mail submission, see RFC8314
  • Socat for mirroring ports 587 and 25, which is running StartTLS directly from Postal.

Pre-requisites

Installed Postal according to the official instructions with working web interface on port 80 and SMTP on port 25. No HTTPS reverse proxy, no certificates management.

Installation procedure

  1. Suppose the directory for installed Postal is /opt/postal. Edit configuration file /opt/postal/config/postal.yml adding FQDN of the Postal host (for example postal.example.com) instead of <HOST> in the smtp_server section:
smtp_server:
  port: 25
  tls_enabled: true
  tls_certificate_path: /caddy-data/caddy/certificates/acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org-directory/<HOST>/<HOST>.crt
  tls_private_key_path: /caddy-data/caddy/certificates/acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org-directory/<HOST>/<HOST>.key
  1. Suppose the directory for postal-tls will be /opt/caddy-tls. Change the working directory cd /opt. Fetch the install repository sudo git clone https://github.com/zdeneksvarc/postal-tls.git. Jump to the new working directory cd /opt/postal-tls
  2. Set the FQDN of the Postal host in the files .env and Caddyfile. Also set your e-mail address in the Caddyfile instead of [email protected] which is used to identify the owner of the certificate.
  3. Still in the /opt/postal-tls now run docker compose up https and wait a while until Caddy gets the certificates. Then exit via CTRL-C
  4. Create a symlink sudo ln -s /opt/postal-tls/caddy-data /opt/postal/caddy-data and set permissions of directory sudo find /opt/postal-tls/caddy-data -type d -exec chmod 755 {} + and set permissions of files sudo find /opt/postal-tls/caddy-data -type f -exec chmod 644 {} +
  5. Add the volume with certificates /opt/postal/caddy-data:/caddy-data to the Postal smtp service in /opt/postal/install/docker-compose.yml.
  6. This step is not necessary, but for the sake of clarity we can delete the Caddyfile offered by Postal sudo rm /opt/postal/config/Caddyfile and link a working one sudo ln -s /opt/postal-tls/Caddyfile /opt/postal/config/Caddyfile and remove .git directory sudo rm -r /opt/postal-tls/.git and .gitignore file sudo rm -r /opt/postal-tls/.gitignore
  7. Stop Postal via postal stop and start Postal via postal start, which will now start with StartTLS support on port 25.
  8. Still in the working directory /opt/postal-tls start the postal-tls Docker Compose project via docker compose up -d and you're done 🎉

Services testing

  • For StartTLS on port 587 or 25 you can try openssl s_client -starttls smtp -connect <host>:<port>
  • For implicit TLS on port 465 you can try openssl s_client -connect <host>:465
  • The Postal SMTP container log can be accessed via docker compose -p postal logs -f | grep smtp_1
  • You can use Swaks to send test emails and testssl.sh for TLS checks.

A few notes

  • There is a small glitch because the implicit TLS on port 456 also advertises 250-STARTTLS. This is an obvious behavior, since the decrypted communication from port 465 goes to port 25. There are no known issues that this should cause in production.
  • Follows the recommendations of RFC8314 use implicit TLS on port 465 instead of StartTLS on port 587 due to the possibility of strip SSL attack.
  • As you can see, the service on ports 25 and 587 is identical because it is mirroring.
  • Postal does not support ECC certificates, but these are default for Caddy v2. Therefore, an explicit { key_type rsa4096 } directive is used in the Caddyfile to force Caddy to use RSA certificates.
  • Postal internal services also run as Docker Compose project, but are handled by the /usr/bin/postal wrapper.
  • It's okay to be cautious about the trustworthiness of public docker images. If you consider it better, you can build the image of each of the three services used yourself.