- chatmail
- Jonathan Haack
- Haack's Networking
- webmaster@haacksnetworking.org
chatmail
This tutorial contains my setup notes for creating my chatmail instance.
- Official docs: Chatmail
- Ticket for Trixie: Trixie Status
- Chatmail Relay: Haacknet Chatmail Server
Set up Debian 12 machine and a dedicated non-root user that will ssh into the root user and deploy the instance. Exchange keys etc., and make sure to use a ed25519 key. Once that's done, setup all DNS before starting and make sure all required packages are installed:
sudo apt install git rsync python3-venv python3-dev gcc libcrypt-dev
Make sure the following DNS records are established to begin with:
- A
- AAAA
- MX
Then, as worker
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "worker@$(hostname)" -f ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 chmod 700 ~/.ssh chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
Let's now create a config file for ssh so we don't go out and back in but instead ssh directly into localhost:
su - worker nano ~/.ssh/config
Inside that, put the following:
Host mail.haacknet.org HostName 127.0.0.1 User root IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 IdentitiesOnly yes
When exchanging keys, you will need to use the -f flag. Okay, now let's set perms and start configuring the instance.
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config git clone https://github.com/chatmail/chatmail.git cd ~/relay scripts/initenv.sh scripts/cmdeploy status mkdir -p ~/Repositories cd ~/Repositories git clone https://github.com/chatmail/relay cd relay scripts/initenv.sh scripts/cmdeploy init mail.haacknet.org
This creates chatmail.ini for you so that when you run cmdeploy it knows where to ssh and which instance to control, etc. Now, we setup the instance:
scripts/cmdeploy run
I had to run this twice. The second time it created the LE records. After that, run its DNS checker and then create all the records it requests
su - worker cd ~/Repositories/relay scripts/cmdeploy dns
After setup, run the status and test commands to check everything:
su - worker cd ~/Repositories/relay scripts/cmdeploy status scripts/cmdeploy test
To upgrade (in progress), probably:
cd ~/Repositories/relay git pull origin main --rebase --autostash scripts/initenv.sh scripts/cmdeploy run
You can see new accounts here:
find /home/vmail/mail/mail.haacknet.org -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d
If a flood of new accounts comes in and/or you suspect bots, then disable public reg:
touch /etc/chatmail-nocreate
The primary page I used for setup was here:
— oemb1905 2026/09/08 02:12
