Skip to main content

4 posts tagged with "jmap"

View All Tags

· 4 min read
Mauro D.

We’re happy to announce that Stalwart Labs has been awarded a new grant from the NGI0 Core Fund, established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme. This funding will support the development of essential collaboration features, marking a major milestone in Stalwart’s evolution from a modern email server into a complete, self-hosted collaboration platform.

This is the second grant Stalwart has received from NLnet, following the initial support we received in March 2023 from the NGI0 Entrust Fund. We are deeply grateful to the NLnet Foundation for their continued trust in our mission to modernize and decentralize communication infrastructure.

Expanding the Vision: From Email to Collaboration​

Stalwart Mail Server was created to address the challenges of self-hosting email by offering a secure, easy-to-maintain, and high-performance solution. With native support for JMAP, IMAP4, POP3, and SMTP, it already serves as a powerful alternative to traditional email solutions, giving individuals and organizations full control over their email systems.

With the help of this new grant, we are now expanding the Stalwart platform beyond email. Development is officially underway on the Stalwart Collaboration Server, a new component that will integrate seamlessly with Stalwart Mail Server. This addition will provide support for calendaring through CalDAV and JMAP for Calendars, contact management using CardDAV and JMAP for Contacts, and file storage and sharing using WebDAV and JMAP for File Management. Together, these features will form the foundation of a fully integrated, open-source collaboration suite.

Our goal is to offer a privacy-focused, vendor-neutral alternative to platforms like Microsoft Exchange. By consolidating email, calendar, contacts, and file sharing into one unified system, Stalwart will give users the ability to self-host their entire collaboration stack without sacrificing modern functionality, scalability, or security.

What the Grant Will Fund​

The new funding will support a series of developments that will be released gradually throughout the year under the AGPL-3.0 license:

  • A full-featured CalDAV and CardDAV server will be implemented, allowing users to manage their calendars and contacts directly within Stalwart. This means there will be no need to rely on external software to provide these functions. Users will be able to keep all of their collaboration data in one place, within a single, tightly integrated platform.

  • In addition, we will extend Stalwart’s existing JMAP implementation to support JMAP for Calendars and JMAP for Contacts. This will involve developing parsers for JSCalendar and JSContact, as well as creating bidirectional converters between JSCalendar and iCalendar, and JSContact and vCard.

  • File storage and management will also become a first-class feature of the platform. A WebDAV-based file storage system will be built on top of Stalwart’s internal blob store. Alongside this, we will implement support for JMAP for File Management, allowing users to upload, organize, and share files using either standard WebDAV clients or JMAP-based applications. The JMAP support will align with the ongoing efforts to standardize file management within the JMAP ecosystem.

  • Finally, the grant will fund the implementation of the three most requested features by the Stalwart community. These include support for the IMAP XAPPLEPUSHSERVICE extension, which enables push notifications on iOS devices; automatic DKIM record updates via RFC2136, making it easier to manage DNS records dynamically; and support for exporting Maildir mailboxes with nested folders, improving compatibility and backup workflows.

Acknowledgements​

We would like to express our sincere thanks to the NLnet Foundation and the European Commission for making this work possible. The project is funded through the NGI0 Core Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology, as part of grant agreement No. 101092990.

This support plays a vital role in advancing open-source infrastructure and helps ensure that secure, decentralized alternatives remain viable and accessible to everyone.

Looking Ahead​

As we roll out these new features throughout the year, we remain committed to the core values that drive Stalwart’s development: privacy, performance, transparency, and user empowerment. The Stalwart Collaboration Server will transform the platform into a comprehensive, modern collaboration suite — one that is open, scalable, and fully self-hosted.

We look forward to sharing more progress soon. In the meantime, we invite developers, testers, and curious users to follow our work, contribute ideas, and help shape the future of self-hosted collaboration.

Stay tuned, and thank you for your continued support.

· 2 min read
Mauro D.

We're thrilled to announce the release of Stalwart Mail Server, our biggest leap forward yet. This version combines the powerful capabilities of Stalwart JMAP, Stalwart IMAP, and Stalwart SMTP servers into one easy-to-install binary, offering you a unified, highly efficient mail server solution.

Here are some of the exciting new features:

  • LDAP and SQL authentication support was added, giving you more flexibility and options to integrate Stalwart with your existing infrastructure.
  • We've incorporated support for disk quotas to provide better control over your storage resources.
  • Subaddressing and catch-all addresses are now supported. These features make the email handling process more flexible and efficient.
  • Storage options have been extended with the inclusion of S3-compatible storage. Now you can store your emails and blobs using reliable and scalable solutions such as MinIO, Amazon S3, or Google Cloud Storage.
  • In response to user feedback, we've replaced RocksDB with SQLite. Our community told us they wanted an open, trusted database technology with easier access to their data, and we listened!
  • For those operating in distributed environments, you can now opt for the FoundationDB backend, supporting millions of users without sacrificing performance.
  • Stalwart IMAP is no longer an IMAP-to-JMAP proxy, instead, it now provides direct access to the message store. This significant change has brought a tremendous improvement in performance, reducing latency, and making your mail operations faster than ever.
  • We've also made significant strides in enhancing performance by rewriting the JMAP protocol parser and the storage API.
  • Lastly, we've made the decision to switch from Actix Web Server to Hyper. This change has allowed us to reduce memory footprint and increase performance, resulting in a more optimized and efficient mail server.

With Stalwart Mail Server, we're delivering a more unified, powerful, and efficient solution that meets your growing email infrastructure needs. We're excited to see how you'll leverage these new capabilities, and as always, we're here to support you every step of the way!

· 2 min read
Mauro D.

Sieve (RFC5228) is a scripting language for filtering email messages at or around the time of final delivery. It is suitable for running on a mail server where users may not be allowed to execute arbitrary programs as it has no user-controlled loops or the ability to run external programs. Sieve is a data-driven programming language, similar to earlier email filtering languages such as procmail and maildrop, and earlier line-oriented languages such as sed and AWK: it specifies conditions to match and actions to take on matching.

Today Stalwart JMAP v0.2 was released including support for the for JMAP for Sieve Scripts draft. Additionally, ManageSieve support was added to Stalwart IMAP v0.2.

Stalwart JMAP safely runs Sieve scripts in a controlled sandbox that ensures that programs do not exceed or abuse their allocated system resources.

Unlike other mail servers that offer limited support for Sieve extensions, Stalwart JMAP supports all existing Sieve extensions including:

· One min read
Mauro D.

We are happy to announce Stalwart JMAP, an open-source JSON Meta Application Protocol server written in Rust that aims to be scalable, robust and secure.

Some of its key features are:

  • JMAP Core, JMAP Mail and JMAP over WebSocket full compliance.
  • IMAP4 rev2/1 support via Stalwart IMAP, an imap-to-jmap proxy.
  • Scalable and fault tolerant: consensus over Raft, node autodiscovery over gossip and read-only replicas.
  • RocksDB backend with full-text search support in 17 languages.
  • OAuth 2.0 authorization code and device authorization flows.
  • Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) message signing.
  • Written in Rust.
  • No third-party software required to run or scale.

Currently Stalwart JMAP requires an SMTP server such as Postfix in order to receive e-mails. However, the next item on the roadmap is to release an SMTP server in Rust with the goal of making self-hosting an e-mail server much simpler without sacrificing any security.