The main principles in the design of E-MailRelay can be summarised as:
The E-MailRelay code is written in C++11. Earlier versions of E-MailRelay used C++03.
The header files gdef.h in src/glib is used to fix up some compiler portability issues such as missing standard types, non-standard system headers etc. Conditional compilation directives (#ifdef etc.) are largely confined this file in order to improve readability.
Windows/Unix portability is generally addressed by providing a common class declaration with two implementations. The implementations are put into separate source files with a _unix or _win32 suffix, and if necessary a 'pimple' (or 'Bridge') pattern is used to keep the o/s-specific details out of the header. If only small parts of the implementation are o/s-specific then there can be three source files per header. For example, gsocket.cpp, gsocket_win32.cpp and gsocket_unix.cpp in the src/gnet directory.
Underscores in source file names are used exclusively to indicate build-time alternatives.
The E-MailRelay server uses non-blocking socket i/o, with a select() or epoll() event loop. This event model means that the server can handle multiple network connections simultaneously from a single thread, and even if multi-threading is disabled at build-time the only blocking occurs when external programs are executed (see --filter and --address-verifier).
The advantages of a non-blocking event model are discussed in the well-known C10K Problem document.
This event model can make the code more complicated than the equivalent multi-threaded approach since (for example) it is not possible to wait for a complete line of input to be received from a remote SMTP client because there might be other connections that need servicing half way through.
At higher levels the C++ slot/signal design pattern is used to propagate events between objects (not to be confused with operating system signals). The slot/signal implementation has been simplified compared to Qt or boost by not supporting signal multicasting, so each signal connects to no more than one slot. The implementation now uses std::function.
The synchronous slot/signal pattern needs some care when when the signalling object gets destructed as a side-effect of raising a signal, and that situation can be non-obvious precisely because of the slot/signal code decoupling. In most cases signals are emitted at the end of a function and the stack unwinds back to the event loop immediately afterwards, but in other situations, particularly when emitting more than one signal, defensive measures are required.
The main C++ libraries in the E-MailRelay code base are as follows:
All of these libraries are portable between Unix-like systems and Windows.
Under Windows there is an additional library under src/win32 for the user interface implemented using the Microsoft Win32 API.
The message-store functionality uses three abstract interfaces: MessageStore, NewMessage and StoredMessage. The NewMessage interface is used to create messages within the store, and the StoredMessage interface is used for reading and extracting messages from the store. The concrete implementation classes based on these interfaces are respectively FileStore, NewFile and StoredFile.
Protocol classes such as GSmtp::ServerProtocol receive network and timer events from their container and use an abstract Sender interface to send network data. This means that the protocols can be independent of the network and event loop framework.
The interaction between the SMTP server protocol class and the message store is mediated by the ProtocolMessage interface. Two main implementations of this interface are available: one for normal spooling (ProtocolMessageStore), and another for immediate forwarding (ProtocolMessageForward). The Decorator pattern is used whereby the forwarding class uses an instance of the storage class to do the message storing and filtering, while adding in an instance of the GSmtp::Client class to do the forwarding.
Message filtering (--filter) is implemented via an abstract GSmtp::Filter interface. Concrete implementations in the GFilters namespace are provided for doing nothing, running an external executable program, talking to an external network server, etc.
Address verifiers (--address-verifier) are implemented via an abstract GSmtp::Verifier interface, with concrete implementations in the GVerifiers namespace.
The protocol, processor and message-store interfaces are brought together by the high-level GSmtp::Server and GSmtp::Client classes. Dependency injection is used to create the concrete instances of the MessageStore, Filter and Verifier interfaces.
The use of non-blocking i/o in the network library means that most processing operates within the context of an i/o event or timeout callback, so the top level of the call stack is nearly always the event loop code. This can make catching C++ exceptions a bit awkward compared to a multi-threaded approach because it is not possible to put a single catch block around a particular high-level feature.
The event loop delivers asynchronous socket events to the EventHandler interface, timer events to the TimerBase interface, and 'future' events to the FutureEventCallback interface. If any of the these event handlers throws an exception then the event loop catches it and delivers it back to an exception handler through the onException() method of an associated ExceptionHandler interface. If an exception is thrown out of _this_ callback then the event loop code lets it propagate back to main(), typically terminating the program.
However, sometimes there are objects that need to be more resilient to exceptions. In particular, a network server should not terminate just because one of its connections fails unexpectedly. In these cases the owning parent object receives the exception notification together with an ExceptionSource pointer that identifies the child object that threw the exception. This allows the parent object to absorb the exception and delete the child, without the exception killing the whole server.
Event sources in the event loop are typically held as a file descriptor and a windows event handle, together known as a Descriptor. Event loop implementations typically watch a set of Descriptors for events and call the relevant EventHandler/ExceptionHandler code via the EventEmitter class.
Multi-threading is used to make DNS lookup and external program asynchronous so unless disabled at build-time std::thread is used in a future/promise pattern to wrap up getaddrinfo() and waitpid() system calls. The shared state comprises only the parameters and return results from these system calls, and synchronisation back to the main thread uses the main event loop (see GNet::FutureEvent). Threading is not used elsewhere so the C/C++ run-time library does not need to be thread-safe.
The optional GUI program emailrelay-gui uses the Qt toolkit for its user interface components. The GUI can run as an installer or as a configuration helper, depending on whether it can find an installation payload. Refer to the comments in src/gui/guimain.cpp for more details.
The user interface runs as a stack of dialog-box pages with forward and back buttons at the bottom. Once the stack has been completed by the user then each page is asked to dump out its state as a set of key-value pairs (see src/gui/pages.cpp). These key-value pairs are processed by an installer class into a list of action objects (in the Command design pattern) and then the action objects are run in turn. In order to display the progress of the installation each action object is run within a timer callback so that the Qt framework gets a chance to update the display between each one.
During development the user interface pages and the installer can be tested separately since the interface between them is a simple text stream containing key-value pairs.
When run in configure mode the GUI normally ends up simply editing the emailrelay.conf file (or emailrelay-start.bat on Windows) and/or the emailrelay.auth secrets file.
When run in install mode the GUI expects to unpack all the E-MailRelay files from the payload into target directories. The payload is a simple directory tree that lives alongside the GUI executable or inside the Mac application bundle, and it contains a configuration file to tell the installer where to copy its files.
When building the GUI program the library code shared with the main server executable is compiled separately so that different GUI-specific compiler options can be used. This is done as a 'unity build', concatenating the shared code into one source file and compiling that for the GUI. (This technique requires that private 'detail' namespaces are named rather than anonymous so that there cannot be any name clashes within the combined anonymous namespace.)
E-MailRelay can be compiled on Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio C++ (MSVC) or mingw-w64.
For MSVC builds there is a perl script (winbuild.pl) that creates cmake files from the autotools makefiles, runs cmake to create the MSVC project files and then runs msbuild to compile E-MailRelay. If perl, cmake, MSVC, Qt and mbedTLS source are installed in the right way then the winbuild.bat batch file should be able to do a complete MSVC release build in one go. After that the winbuild-install.bat batch file can be used to create a distribution.
When building for a public release the E-MailRelay setup program should be statically linked and copied into the distribution created by winbuild.pl. This requires a static build of Qt: edit msvc-desktop.conf to use /MT; run configure.bat with -static -release; run nmake -f Makefile for release then install. Then build the E-MailRelay GUI using emailrelay-gui.pro: qmake CONFIG+='win static' emailrelay-gui.pro; then mc messages.mc; then copy emailrelay-icon.ico; and finally nmake -f Makefile.Release.
For MinGW cross-builds use ./configure.sh -w64 and make on a Linux box and copy the built executables and the MinGW run-time to the target. Any extra run-time files can be identified by running dumpbin /dependents in the normal way.
On Windows E-MailRelay is packaged as a zip file containing the executables (including the emailrelay GUI as emailrelay-setup.exe), documentation, and a payload directory tree. The payload contains many of the same files all over again, and while this duplication is not ideal it is at least straightforward.
The Qt tool windeployqt is used to add run-time dependencies, such as the platform DLL. (Public releases of Windows builds are normally statically linked, so many of the DLLs added by windeployqt are not needed.)
To target ancient versions of Windows start with a cross-build using MinGW for 32-bit (./configure.sh -w32); then winbuild.pl mingw can be used to assemble a slimmed-down package for distribution.
On Unix-like operating systems it is more natural to use some sort of package derived from the make install process rather than an installer program, so the emailrelay GUI is not normally used.
Top-level makefile targets dist, deb and rpm can be used to create a binary tarball, a debian package, and an RPM package respectively.
The GUI code has i18n support using the Qt framework, with the tr() function used throughout the GUI source code. The GUI main() function loads translations from the translations sub-directory (relative to the executable), although that can be overridden with the --qm command-line option. Qt's -reverse option can also be used to reverse the widgets when using RTL languages.
The non-GUI code has some i18n support by using gettext() via the inline txt() and tx() functions defined in src/glib/ggettext.h. The configure script detects gettext support in the C run-time library, but without trying different compile and link options. See also po/Makefile.am.
On Windows the main server executable has a tabbed dialog-box as its user interface, but that does not have any support for i18n.
The source code is stored in the SourceForge svn repository. A working copy can be checked out as follows:
$ svn co https://svn.code.sf.net/p/emailrelay/code/trunk emailrelay
Compile-time features can be selected with options passed to the configure script. These include the following:
Use ./configure --help to see a complete list of options.