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Messages : Collaborative Inbox

Messages is the all-in-one collaborative inbox for La Suite territoriale.

Why use Messages ❓

Messages is a full communication platform enabling teams to collaborate on emails through shared or personal mailboxes.

It features a MTA based on Postfix, a custom MDA built on top of Django Rest Framework and a frontend using Next.js and BlockNote.js.

Familiar messaging features

• 📝 Receive, draft and send emails.
• 🧵 Smart threading
• 📎 Upload and download attachments. Also works with Drive!
• 📩 Import emails from MBOX or IMAP
• 🔎 Full-text search with advanced filters
• ⏳️ Asynchronous, pluggable email processing (antispam, antivirus, ...)

Collaboration at the core

• 👥 Share any inbox with multiple users
• 🧶 Share threads with other users
• (soon) 🕶 Private messages between users
• (soon) 💎 Realtime text editing
• (soon) 👉 Assign threads to specific users

Based on standards

• 🔑 OpenID Connect for all user accounts. Plug any identity provider, including Keycloak.
• 📬 SMTP in and out.
• ❌ No POP3 or IMAP client support, by design. We're building for the future, not the (unsecure) past!
• ✅ JMAP-inspired data model. Full support could be added.

Self-host

• 🚀 Messages is designed to be installed on the cloud or on your own servers.
• 🛠️ Configuration through environment variables for most settings

Getting started 🔧

Prerequisite

To test Messages on your own machine, you only need a recent version of Docker and Docker Compose:

$ docker -v
  Docker version 27.5.1, build 9f9e405

$ docker compose version
  Docker Compose version v2.32.4

⚠️ You may need to run the following commands with sudo but this can be avoided by assigning your user to the docker group.

Project bootstrap

The easiest way to start working on the project is to use GNU Make:

$ make bootstrap

This command builds all required containers, installs dependencies, performs database migrations and compiles translations. Later it's a good idea to run make update each time you are pulling code from the project repository to avoid dependency-related or migration-related issues.

Your Docker services should now be up and running 🎉

You can access the project by going to http://localhost:8900.

You will be prompted to log in. The default credentials are:

email: user{1,2,3}@example.local
password: user{1,2,3}

This means you can use user1@example.local / user1 for instance and switch users later to test collaboration.

In your development workflow, the main commands you should use are:

# Stop all containers
$ make stop

# Start all containers, without full bootstrap
$ make start

# View all available commands
$ make help

Development Services

When running the project, the following services are available:

Service	URL / Port	Description	Credentials
Frontend	http://localhost:8900	Main Messages frontend	user1@example.local / user1
Backend API	http://localhost:8901	Django REST API and Admin	admin@admin.local / admin
Keycloak	http://localhost:8902	Identity provider admin	admin / admin
Celery UI	http://localhost:8903	Task queue monitoring	No auth required
Mailcatcher	http://localhost:8904	Email testing interface	No auth required
MTA-in (SMTP)	8910	Incoming email server	No auth required
MTA-out (SMTP)	8911	Outgoing email server	user / pass
PostgreSQL	8912	Database server	user / pass
Redis	8913	Cache and message broker	No auth required
OpenSearch	8914	Search engine	No auth required
OpenSearch PA	8915	Performance analyzer	No auth required

OpenAPI client

The frontend API client is generated with Orval. It consumes the OpenAPI schema generated from the backend through drf-spectacular.

The JSON OpenAPI schema is located in src/backend/core/api/openapi.json.

To update the schema then the frontend API client, run:

$ make api-update

You can also generate the schema only with:

$ make back-api-update

And the frontend API client only with:

$ make front-api-update

Sending test emails 📨

There are a couple ways of testing the email infrastructure locally.

These examples use swaks, a simple command-line SMTP client.

# First, make sure services are running
make start

# Send a test message to the MTA-in, which will relay it to the Django MDA.
# The domain must be MESSAGES_TESTDOMAIN (default is example.local) if you want the mailbox created automatically.
# You can then read it on the frontend at http://localhost:8900/ (login as user1/user1) and reply to it there.
# The replies will then be sent through the MTA-out to the mailcatcher on http://localhost:8904/
swaks --to=user1@example.local --server localhost:8910

# Send a message manually to the MTA-out, which will then relay it to mailcatcher on http://localhost:8904/
swaks -tls --to=test@example.external --server localhost:8911 --auth-user user --auth-password=pass

⚠️ Most residential ISPs block the outgoing port 25, so you might not be able to send emails to outside servers from your localhost. This is why the mailcatcher is so useful locally.

Feedback 🙋‍♂️🙋‍♀️

We'd love to hear your thoughts, and hear about your experiments, so come and say hi on Matrix.

License 📝

This work is released under the MIT License (see LICENSE).

While Messages is a public-driven initiative, our license choice is an invitation for private sector actors to use, sell and contribute to the project.

Contributing 🙌

This project is intended to be community-driven, so please, do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any question related to our implementation or design decisions.

We also have a public roadmap.

If you intend to make pull requests, see CONTRIBUTING for guidelines.

Gov ❤️ open source

Messages is currently led by the French ANCT for use in La Suite territoriale.

We are welcoming new partners and contributors to join us in this effort! So please get in touch if you want to help!