TinyMail

TinyMail is a minimalistic, self-hostable webmail client designed for simplicity and security. It offers a lightweight alternative to heavier PHP-based email clients.

Features

• Single binary server, under 10MB in size
• Automatic configuration via SRV records
• Simple, lightweight and performant web interface, under 10MB memory usage
• Plain text and UTF-8 email support
• Only secure IMAP/SMTP protocols (unencrypted and STARTTLS not supported)
• Does not store emails on the server
• Free and open-source software (AGPLv3)

Tech Stack

Backend is written in Go and frontend in vanilla JavaScript. The project uses a small number of Go libraries: go-imap, go-smtp, letters.

Build and Run

Requirements

For building the release binary Docker, Git and Make are required.

Build

git clone https://github.com/codecyanic/tinymail.git
cd tinymail
make build

This will produce a standalone tinymail binary.

Run

./tinymail

By default, the server listens on :9009. To bind to a different address:

./tinymail 127.0.0.1:8000

Usage

Open your browser at:

http://localhost:9009

You can use the interface to log into your email account using your email and password. Keep in mind that your email's domain's DNS needs to have valid SRV records for automatic configuration of IMAP and SMTP, and the servers need to support strict TLS and PLAIN authentication.

Deployment

systemd Service Example

Create a file at /etc/systemd/system/tinymail.service:

[Unit]
Description=TinyMail Email Client
After=network.target
Requires=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
DynamicUser=yes
ExecStart=/opt/tinymail/tinymail 127.0.0.1:8000
WorkingDirectory=/opt/tinymail
Restart=always
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable and start the service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reexec
sudo systemctl enable --now tinymail

License

TinyMail is licensed under the GNU AGPLv3.

The server automatically bundles and distributes the source code for easier compliance.

Roadmap

This project was developed in under two weeks and is currently minimal. Planned improvements include:

• Support for IDLE (push notifications)
• Ability to reply to emails
• Ability to specify allowed domains/hosts
• Error handling on the frontend
• Optional manual configuration
• Keyboard navigation

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Simon Ser for the IMAP and SMTP libraries used in this project.