13 KiB
E-MailRelay Developer Guide
Principles
The main principles in the design of E-MailRelay can be summarised as:
- Minimal third-party dependencies
- Windows/Unix portability without #ifdefs
- Event-driven, non-blocking, single-threaded networking code
- Functionality without imposing policy
Dependencies
E-MailRelay started life at a time when Linux had no decent package manager and Windows was in the grip of DLL hell. As a result, a key principle is that it has no dependencies other than a good C++ run-time. Since that time OpenSSL has been introduced as a dependency to support TLS encryption, and the optional configuration and installation GUI has been developed using the Qt toolkit.
In those early years multi-threading support in C++ libraries was poor, so up until version 2.0 the code was single-threaded throughout, and multi-threading is still optional.
Portability
The E-MailRelay code is now 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.
Event model
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).
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.
The advantages of a non-blocking event model are discussed in the well-known C10K Problem document.
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 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.
Module structure
The main C++ libraries in the E-MailRelay code base are as follows:
"glib"
Low-level classes for file-system abstraction, date and time representation,
string utility functions, logging, command line parsing etc.
"gssl"
A thin layer over the third-party TLS libraries.
"gnet"
Network and event-loop classes.
"gauth"
Implements various authentication mechanisms.
"gsmtp"
SMTP protocol and message-store classes.
"gpop"
POP3 protocol classes.
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.
SMTP class structure
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 Filter
interface. Concrete implementations are provided for doing nothing, running an
external executable program and talking to an external network server.
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 ProtocolMessage and Filter
interfaces.
Event handling and exceptions
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 a pointer that identifies the child object that threw the exception (ie. the exception source). 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 held as a file descriptor, a windows event handle, an EventHandler pointer, an ExceptionHandler pointer and an ExceptionSource pointer. The first two together are known as a Descriptor, and the last two together are known as an ExceptionSink.
Multi-threading
Multi-threading can be used as a build-time option to make DNS lookup and the
execution of helper programs asynchronous; if enabled then 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
event loop (see GNet::FutureEvent).
E-MailRelay GUI
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 exectuable or inside the Mac application bundle, and it contains a configuration file to tell the installer where to copy its files.
Windows build
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.
For MinGW cross-builds use ./configure.sh -m 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.
Windows packaging
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
Qt DLLs.
To target ancient versions of Windows start with a cross-build using MinGW;
then winbuild.pl mingw can be used to assemble a slimmed-down package for
distribution.
Unix packaging
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.
Internationalisation
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 minimal i18n support using gettext(), mostly for startup
error messages and usage help. This is disabled by default and requires a
configure-script option (--with-gettext) to enable it at build-time and
a --localedir option at run-time. See also po/Makefile.am.
Source control
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
Compile-time features can be selected with options passed to the configure
script. These include the following:
- Configuration GUI (
--enable-gui) - Multi-threading (
--enable-std-thread) - TLS library (
--with-openssl,--with-mbedtls) - Debug-level logging (
--enable-debug) - Event loop using epoll (
--enable-epoll) - PAM support (
--with-pam)
Use ./configure --help to see a complete list of options.
Copyright (C) 2001-2022 Graeme Walker