Setting up Postmoogle (optional)

Note: email bridging can also happen via the email2matrix bridge supported by the playbook.

The playbook can install and configure Postmoogle for you.

It's a bot/bridge you can use to forward emails to Matrix rooms. Postmoogle runs an email server through SMTP and allaws you to create mailboxes to the domain you define in the DNS settings.

See the project's documentation to learn what it does and why it might be useful to you.

Prerequisites

Ports

Open the following ports to your server (without it you will not recive email, but you can still send):

25/tcp: SMTP
587/tcp: TLS-encrypted SMTP

You can change the above default ports through the following variables in the playbook:

# on-host ports
matrix_bot_postmoogle_smtp_host_bind_port: '25'
matrix_bot_postmoogle_submission_host_bind_port: '587'

Adjusting the playbook configuration

Add the following configuration to your inventory/host_vars/matrix.DOMAIN/vars.yml file:

matrix_bot_postmoogle_enabled: true

# Uncomment and adjust this part if you'd like to use a username different than the default
# matrix_bot_postmoogle_login: postmoogle

# Generate a strong password here. Consider generating it with `pwgen -s 64 1`
matrix_bot_postmoogle_password: PASSWORD_FOR_THE_BOT

Add an admin to Postmoogle with:

matrix_bot_postmoogle_admins:
  - '@yourAdminAccount:domain.com'

DNS

You will also need to add several DNS records so that postmoogle can send emails. See Configuring DNS.

Installing

After configuring the playbook, run the installation command again:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml --tags=setup-all,ensure-matrix-users-created,start

Notes:

the ensure-matrix-users-created playbook tag makes the playbook automatically create the bot's user account
if you change the bot password (matrix_bot_postmoogle_password in your vars.yml file) subsequently, the bot user's credentials on the homeserver won't be updated automatically. If you'd like to change the bot user's password, use a tool like synapse-admin to change it, and then update matrix_bot_postmoogle_password to let the bot know its new password

Usage

To use the bot, invite the @postmoogle:DOMAIN into a room you want to use as a mailbox.

Then send !pm mailbox NAME to expose this Matrix room as an inbox with the email address NAME@matrix.domain. Emails sent to that email address will be forwarded to the room.

Send !pm help to the room to see the bot's help menu for additional commands.

You can also refer to the upstream documentation.

Debug/Logs

In case you need to debug declare:

matrix_bot_postmoogle_loglevel: 'DEBUG'

And access it through journalctl -fu matrix-bot-postmoogle

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