LambdaMail/docs/OPERATIONS.md

Operating LambdaMail

What to watch, what the alerts mean, and how to recover. For the initial install see DEPLOYMENT.md.

Health

GET /health on the protocols service answers three ways, and the difference matters:

Response	Meaning
200, X-LambdaMail-Health: ok	Healthy
200, X-LambdaMail-Health: degraded	Running, but something needs an operator. The body says what.
503	A dependency is down — usually Postgres.

Degraded is deliberately not a failure: restarting cannot fix a certificate the proxy never issued, and a restart loop would only hide it.

Container health

Every long-running service carries a Docker healthcheck, so docker compose ps is a real answer rather than a list of processes that have not exited:

docker compose ps --format 'table {{.Service}}\t{{.Status}}'

migrate is the one service without a probe, on purpose: it applies the migrations and stops. Everything that needs it waits on service_completed_successfully, which is a stronger guarantee than a probe — a healthcheck there would report unhealthy exactly when the job had succeeded.

The probes are shallow by design. web checks only that Next can route a request; it does not reach through to auth or protocols, because a blip in one backend should not mark the frontend unhealthy and take the site down with it. Those services have probes of their own.

Certificates

Under TLS_MODE=traefik the mail listeners read the certificate Coolify's proxy manages. Two failure modes are worth understanding.

No certificate for the mail host. The proxy only holds certificates for hosts it routes, so mail.example.com needs a router even though nothing is served over HTTP there. docker-compose.yaml declares one; if you removed it, the listeners fall back to a self-signed certificate and /health reports degraded.

A certificate that stopped renewing. The watcher re-reads the store every 60 seconds and reports:

• WARNING when the soonest expiry is under 7 days
• CRITICAL under 24 hours, or when it has already expired

Watch for these in docker compose logs protocols. The admin console's TLS panel shows the same state, including when the watcher last managed to read the store — a timestamp that stops advancing means it has gone blind, which is the failure that shows up 90 days later as an expired certificate.

Backups

Two things must be backed up, and they must not live in the same place:

1. The database. pg_dump covers mailboxes, messages metadata, DKIM keys (encrypted), sessions and the queue.
2. LAMBDAMAIL_MASTER_KEY. Every DKIM private key, TOTP secret and provider token in that dump is encrypted with it. A backup you cannot decrypt is not a backup.

Message bodies live in the mail_storage volume (or S3, with STORAGE_DRIVER=s3). The database references them by hash; restoring one without the other leaves rows pointing at blobs that are not there.

# Database
docker compose exec -T db pg_dump -U "$POSTGRES_USER" "$POSTGRES_DB" | gzip > lambdamail-$(date +%F).sql.gz

# Message bodies
docker run --rm -v lambdamail_mail_storage:/data -v "$PWD:/backup" \
  alpine tar czf /backup/mail-$(date +%F).tar.gz -C /data .

Restoring has not been rehearsed in this repository. Before relying on it, restore into a scratch environment and confirm a message opens — an untested restore is a hypothesis.

Accounts

make create-admin EMAIL=… PASSWORD='…'     # first admin, or --force for another
make reset-password EMAIL=… PASSWORD='…'   # recovers a lockout, ends its sessions
make reset-mfa EMAIL=…                     # clears every second factor

App passwords for mail clients

A mail client cannot answer a second factor, so an account signs a client in with an app password: create one in the webmail (Settings, app passwords), copy it once, and give it to the client as the account password. It is shown a single time and stored only as an Argon2id hash.

An app password works for SMTP submission, IMAP and POP3, as its scopes column allows (the default is all three). A scope limits it: an app password with only imap can read mail and cannot send. ManageSieve takes the mailbox password only. The mailbox password keeps working everywhere, and a login with an app password stamps its last_used_at, which the settings screen shows.

Until this was wired in, the protocols compared every password only against the mailbox password, so an app password was created, shown and then refused by SMTP, IMAP and POP3 with 535 Authentication credentials invalid.

An account locks itself for 15 minutes after 5 failed passwords. That is the lockout working, not a fault; reset-password clears it.

reset-mfa is the lost-phone command, and the answer to a subtler case: an enrolment can be confirmed against a secret the authenticator no longer holds, and the account is then locked behind codes nobody can produce. It removes the authenticator secrets and the recovery codes, and signs the account's sessions out - a live session would otherwise keep the console open without the factor that was just removed. The password is untouched, so this alone grants nobody access; the next sign-in enrols a new factor.

Do not delete and recreate the mailbox for this. That takes its mail, folders and aliases with it, and none of those are the problem.

The equivalent by hand, if you are on an image that predates the command - note that clearing mfa_totp alone leaves the recovery codes valid:

DELETE FROM mfa_totp WHERE mailbox_id = (SELECT id FROM mailboxes WHERE email_address = 'them@example.com');
DELETE FROM mfa_recovery_codes WHERE mailbox_id = (SELECT id FROM mailboxes WHERE email_address = 'them@example.com');

Delivery

The outbound queue lives in Postgres, so it survives a restart of anything. The retry ladder is 5 min, 15 min, 1 h, then 2/4/8/12 h with jitter, giving up after 5 days with a bounce. A delay notice goes out at the fourth attempt.

-- What is stuck and why
SELECT destination_domain, status, attempt, last_smtp_code, left(last_error, 80)
  FROM outbound_jobs WHERE status IN ('DEFERRED','BOUNCED')
 ORDER BY created_at DESC LIMIT 20;

Reading the failures:

• 4.7.5 with a TLS message — the destination published a DANE or MTA-STS policy that could not be satisfied. The message is deferred rather than sent in the clear, which is the point. If it persists, the destination's certificate is broken, not yours.
• 5.1.1 — no such recipient. Permanent, bounced immediately.
• A dial or connection error with no code — the destination is unreachable; it will retry.

The admin console's Queue page shows the same data with retry and cancel.

DNS drift

With a Cloudflare token, the zone is reconciled on start and every six hours. It is idempotent, and records it did not create are reported as conflicts rather than overwritten.

docker compose logs protocols | grep -E "DNS reconcile|DNS conflict"

PARTIAL or DRIFT in that output means the desired state and the zone disagree — most often because a record was edited by hand.

Spam filtering

Rspamd holds its state in Redis and its thresholds in system_config, editable from the admin console. The defaults reject at 15, tag at 6 and greylist at 4.

A message the filter routes to Junk is filed there; one over the reject threshold is refused during the SMTP session, so the sender is told. Nothing is accepted and silently discarded — a silent discard loses legitimate mail with nobody aware of it.

Rotating a DKIM key

From the admin console, or:

curl -X POST https://<host>/api/v1/admin/dkim/rotate \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -b 'lm_admin_session=…' \
  -d '{"domain":"example.com","selector":"lmail2","algorithm":"rsa2048"}'

The previous key is retired with a 7-day overlap rather than deleted: mail already sent under it is still being verified by receivers who may take a while to stop resolving the old selector. Publish the new selector's TXT record before the overlap ends, or signatures start failing when the old key goes.

Rotating the master key

There is no automated path today. It requires decrypting every sealed secret with the old key and resealing with the new one, and getting it wrong destroys them. Plan a maintenance window and rehearse against a copy first.

Upstream images

Two images in the stack are upstream projects with our files layered on top: migrations (golang-migrate plus the schema) and rspamd (Rspamd plus its configuration). Vulnerability scanning in CI covers the four images whose contents this project authors; findings inside those two belong to the upstream project and cannot be fixed here.

That is a decision, not an oversight: watch their releases and bump the pinned tags when they publish. docker run --rm aquasec/trivy image rspamd/rspamd:3.9 shows where they stand at any point.

What is not automated

Being explicit so nothing is assumed:

• Backups are documented, not scheduled. Set up a cron job.
• Restores are not rehearsed.
• There is no metrics endpoint or alerting yet; the signals above are log lines and the health endpoint.
• Master key rotation is manual.
• Log retention is whatever Docker's json-file driver is configured for (10 MB × 3 per service, in docker-compose.yaml).
• Attachments are not uploaded. The compose screen lists the files you pick and sends their names only; there is no upload endpoint behind the picker yet. The screen says so when you attach something, rather than letting the message leave without them.
• The vacation responder, the signature and the Sieve rules are stored, but nothing consumes them during delivery yet.