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Messages is the all-in-one collaborative inbox for La Suite territoriale.
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.
- 📝 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, ...)
- 🤖 AI Summaries, AI message composer, AI auto-labelling
- 🎨 Embeddable widgets for feedback
- 👥 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
- 🔑 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.
- 🚀 Messages is designed to be installed on the cloud or on your own servers.
- 🛠️ Configuration through environment variables for most settings
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 withsudobut this can be avoided by assigning your user to thedockergroup.
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 [email protected] / 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
When running the project, the following services are available:
| Service | URL / Port | Description | Credentials |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frontend | http://localhost:8900 | Main Messages frontend | [email protected] / user1 |
| Backend API | http://localhost:8901 | Django REST API and Admin | [email protected] / 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 |
| Widgets | http://localhost:8905 | Widgets development server | 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 |
| SOCKS Proxy | 8916 | SOCKS5 proxy | user1 / pwd1 |
| Mailcatcher (SMTP) | 8917 | SMTP server | No auth required |
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-updateYou can also generate the schema only with:
$ make back-api-updateAnd the frontend API client only with:
$ make front-api-updateThere 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 to the mailcatcher on http://localhost:8904/
swaks [email protected] --server localhost:8910
# Send a test message to the mailcatcher, then read it on http://localhost:8904/
swaks [email protected] --server localhost:8917
# Send a test message to the MTA-out, which will then relay it to mailcatcher on http://localhost:8904/
swaks -tls [email protected] --server localhost:8911 --auth-user user --auth-password=pass
# You can also send emails using Messages itself instead of the frontend
make back-shell
MTA_OUT_MODE=relay MTA_OUT_RELAY_HOST=mailcatcher:1025 python manage.py send_mail [email protected] --subject="Test" --body="Hello World"
⚠️ 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.
We currently develop some embeddable widgets in the src/widgets directory in this repository.
$ make widgets-start
This will start the development server at http://localhost:8905.
You can then build them with:
$ make widgets-build
And deploy them to an S3 bucket, with .aws/{config|credentials} files in the root of the repository.
$ MESSAGES_WIDGETS_S3_PATH=xxx make widgets-deploy
We'd love to hear your thoughts, and hear about your experiments, so come and say hi on Matrix.
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.
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.
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!