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README.md

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+# Crockery - simple email hosting
+
+## What
+
+* SMTP + IMAP email, plus bundled HTTP webmail client
+* Devoted to the task of serving email for a single domain
+* Can get its own valid TLS certificates via LE, or use supplied ones
+* Built-in anti-spam & anti-virus measures
+* Built-in DKIM support
+* Built-in DMARC support
+* Can tell you what DNS records you need, and check them for validity
+* Multiple email accounts for your domain
+* A "master" wildcard account (if desired)
+* Simple import from GMail, etc
+* Simple export to GMail, etc
+* Nice fast search
+* Interact with crockery with simple, natural-ish emails to do things
+  * SMTP TLS verification - enabled by default
+  * Try to email foo@shady.net - verification fails, email marked pending, fail in 7 days
+  * Crockery emails user, "Yo. We can't send this email securely. Here are your options:"
+  * User hits reply-to (goes to unique email address on same domain) saying what to do:
+    * Cancel
+    * Retry
+    * Send just this email
+    * Whitelist shady.net (pins certificate)
+  * What other interactions might we like?
+
+## What not
+
+* JMAP. Not today.
+* Maildir/mbox support. Imports and exports via IMAP, backups by "copy this file"
+* Bring your own X (where X is MTA, IMAP server, database, etc, etc)
+* Multiple-domain support (maybe later)
+* CalDAV/Carddav (yet)
+* Externally sourced accounts (yet)
+* Sending email without having an account
+* Managesieve (for now)
+
+## Why
+
+Email architecture is really complicated, and setting up a mail server of your
+own is painful. Various projects exist to try to make it easier, eg:
+
+* iRedMail
+* docker-mailserver
+* symbiosis
+* ...
+
+(Personally, I had some ansible recipes: )
+
+Even among people who run their own websites, it's rare to run your own email.
+It's just too painful. Much of this pain is caused by ultra-configurable
+components that need to be orchestrated. Each has its own (remarkably obtuse)
+configuration language, and each can do far more than the common case for a
+small, single-domain site.
+
+So, let's make a single binary where all you have to do is:
+
+* Register a domain
+* Upload some DNS records
+* Run the binary
+
+and it gives you a sensible email setup without any additional configuration!
+
+If it has to share the domain with a HTTP server (quite common), allow the
+HTTP-specific parts of mail to be served via reverse proxying. This includes:
+
+* activesync push notifications
+* autodiscovery
+
+Probably other stuff. Email is big, and just keeps getting bigger.
+
+## How
+
+### Initialize a new database
+
+```
+crockery init -domain example.com
+```
+
+You'll be prompted to enter a password for the `postmaster@example.com` master
+account, or you can provide on the command line: `-adminPassword x`, or in an
+environment variable: `CROCKERY_PASSWORD=x`.
+
+You can provide a custom database name with `-db <filename>`
+
+### Run the server
+
+```
+./crockery
+```
+
+Again, you can use `-db <filename>` if the default of `./crockery.db` doesn't
+suit.
+
+### Configuration
+
+Mostly non-existent, aside from that listed above.
+
+We'll need to have a few *offline* commands baked into the `crockery` binary,
+apart from `init` as detailed above. Some ideas:
+
+```
+$ crockery change x y z (domain, user password, etc)
+$ crockery reindex (throw away existing indexes, regenerate)
+$ crockery whitelist tls <domain> (allow the domain to be sent to with insecure/no TLS)
+$ crockery whitelist receipt <domain> (bypass antispam for this domain)
+$ crockery blacklist receipt <domain> (no emails to be permitted from this domain
+```
+
+It's inconvenient for some of these functions to require the server to be
+offline, so we'll need to provide another configuration interface too.
+
+I like sending emails to it.
+
+Since we're going to need a HTTP server anyway, we could expose admin functions
+using that, if logged in as postmaster. It could also expose an API that the
+`crockery X` commands could connect to, rather than hitting the store directly.
+We can use the `.well-known` integration to avoid the need to configure there,
+too.