mailrise 1.2.1

An SMTP gateway for Apprise notifications.

mailrise

An SMTP gateway for Apprise notifications.

Description

Mailrise is an SMTP server that converts the emails it receives into Apprise notifications. The intended use case is as an email relay for a home lab or network. By accepting ordinary email, Mailrise enables Linux servers, Internet of Things devices, surveillance systems, and outdated software to gain access to the full suite of 60+ notification services supported by Apprise, from Matrix to Nextcloud to your desktop or mobile device.

Just as email brought written messages into the 21st century, Mailrise brings email notifications into the year 2021 and beyond. Compared to a conventional SMTP server, it’s more secure, too—no more replicating your Gmail password to each of your Linux boxes!

A Mailrise daemon is configured with a list of Apprise configuration files. Email senders encode the name of the desired configuration file into the recipient address. Mailrise then constructs the resulting Apprise notification(s) using the selected configuration.

A minimalist Mailrise configuration, for example, might contain a single Apprise configuration for Pushover:

configs:
  pushover:
    urls:
      - pover://[...]

And email senders would be able to select this configuration by using the recipient address:

[e-mail]

It is also possible to specify one of the four Apprise notification types, which, if the service you selected supports it, will change the color of the icon of the resulting notification:

[e-mail]

Email attachments will also pass through to Apprise if the addressed notification service(s) support attachments.

Mailrise is the sucessor to SMTP Translator, a previous project of mine that articulated a similar concept but was designed solely for Pushover.

Installation

As a Docker container

An official Docker image is available from Docker Hub. To use it, you must bind mount a configuration file to /etc/mailrise.conf.

From PyPI

You can find Mailrise on PyPI. The minimum Python version is 3.8+.

Once installed, you should write a configuration file and then configure Mailrise to run as a service. Here is the suggested systemd unit file:

[Unit]
Description=Mailrise SMTP notification relay

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/mailrise /etc/mailrise.conf

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

From source

This repository is structured like any other Python package. To install it in editable mode for development or debugging purposes, use:

pip install -e .

To build a wheel, use:

tox -e build

If you are using Visual Studio Code, a development container is included with all the Python tooling necessary for working with Mailrise.

Configuration

The mailrise program accepts a path to a YAML configuration file that encapsulates the daemon’s entire configuration. The root node of this file should be a dictionary. Mailrise accepts the following keys (periods denote sub-dictionaries):

Key	Type	Value
configs.<name>	dictionary	<name> denotes the name of the configuration. It must not contain a period. Senders select this configuration by addressing their emails to <name>@mailrise.xyz. It is also possible to use a full email address, such as [e-mail], as a name, in which case senders must use the entire address as their recipient address to select this configuration. The dictionary value is the Apprise YAML configuration itself, exactly as it would be specified in a standalone file for Apprise. In addition to the Apprise configuration, some Mailrise-exclusive options can be specified under this key. See the mailrise options below.
configs.<name>.mailrise.title_template	string	The template string used to create notification titles. See “Template strings” below. Defaults to $subject ($from).
configs.<name>.mailrise.body_template	string	The template string used to create notification body texts. See “Template strings” below. Defaults to $body.
configs.<name>.mailrise.body_format	string	Sets the data type for notification body texts. Must be text, html, or markdown. Apprise uses this information to determine whether or not the upstream notification service can handle the provided content. If not specified here, the data type is inferred from the body part of the email message. So if you have your body template set to anything but the default value of $body, you might want to set a data type here.
listen.host	string	Specifies the network address to listen on. Defaults to all interfaces.
listen.port	number	Specifies the network port to listen on. Defaults to 8025.
tls.mode	string	Selects the operating mode for TLS encryption. Must be off, onconnect, starttls, or starttlsrequire. Defaults to off.
tls.certfile	string	If TLS is enabled, specifies the path to the certificate chain file. This file must be unencrypted and in PEM format.
tls.keyfile	string	If TLS is enabled, specifies the path to the key file. This file must be unencrypted and in PEM format.
smtp.hostname	string	Specifies the hostname used when responding to the EHLO command. Defaults to the system FQDN.

Template strings

You can use Python’s template strings to specify custom templates that Mailrise will construct your notifications from. Templates make use of variables that communicate information about the email message. Use dollar signs ($) to insert variables.

The following variables are available for both title and body templates:

Identifier	Value
subject	The email subject.
from	The sender’s full address.
body	The full contents of the email body.
to	The full email address of the selected Apprise configuration.
config	The name of the selected Apprise configuration, unless it uses a custom domain, in which case this is equivalent to the “to” variable.
type	The class of Apprise notification. This is “info”, “success”, “warning”, or “failure”.