feat: add a host-provided outbound email transport
Ekklesia could authenticate people and pair devices but could not send a single message. Better Auth has been configured with emailAndPassword since ADR 0011 and neither of its mail hooks — sendResetPassword and emailVerification.sendVerificationEmail — was ever implemented, so email verification, password recovery, and invitations were all blocked on the same missing thing. That missing thing is a transport, not a Google Workspace integration. Email is now a host-provided infrastructure service with a provider seam, shaped exactly like object storage: feature code says "send this transactional message" and the provider owns the host, port, TLS, credentials, connection behaviour, and every transport error. No provider's hostname appears anywhere in Core, and a test asserts it. Google Workspace SMTP Relay is the expected first deployment and a compatibility target — the same variables address Microsoft 365, a transactional provider, or a local Postfix. The contract is deliberately tiny: one recipient or a small bounded list, a subject, text and/or HTML, an optional reply-to, and nothing else. There is no `from` field at all — the sender is host configuration, so no feature and no future module can choose who mail appears to come from, which is how a platform otherwise acquires an impersonation primitive. Control characters are refused rather than stripped in addresses, display names, subjects, and reply-to values; writing that rule down was not enough, because the first implementation trimmed an address before checking it and silently accepted a trailing carriage return until a test caught it. Security modes are named rather than inferred from a boolean and a port, which is genuinely ambiguous: `secure: false` on 587 means "connect in the clear and hope STARTTLS is offered". `starttls` sets requireTLS so a stripped upgrade fails the send instead of continuing in plaintext, production refuses `plaintext` outright, and certificate verification has no off switch. Credentials are optional as a pair, because a relay authorized by source IP has neither and requiring them would make the intended production arrangement unconfigurable; half a pair fails loudly. Connection, greeting, and socket timeouts are all explicit — the object-storage pass already showed what a network client on library defaults does to a request. Nothing retries: a failure after the message data has gone out is ambiguous, and retrying it turns one password-reset request into several emails, so this is a single bounded attempt and deliberately not an exactly-once promise. Email stays optional. An installation with no SMTP host is a complete deployment, nothing sends at startup, and constructing the transport opens no socket. There is no POST /api/v1/send-email and no route that touches the provider — an authenticated send endpoint is an open relay with extra steps. Modules get nothing either; services are added one at a time when something real needs one, and nothing does yet. Proven against a real in-process SMTP server rather than a mock: delivery with the host's sender on the wire, authentication and its sanitized refusal, a rejected mailbox distinguished from an outage, a refused connection, a silent server hitting its deadline, and a starttls transport refusing to continue when the upgrade is not offered. No test sends real email and no live credential exists in this repository or in CI. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
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# 0037: Outbound email is a host-provided transport, and SMTP is its first provider
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- Status: Accepted
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- Date: 2026-08-24
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- Extends: [0011](0011-identity-http-transport-and-public-enrollment.md),
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[0029](0029-module-configuration-and-secrets.md),
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[0030](0030-host-provided-module-object-storage.md),
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[0034](0034-host-owned-browser-authentication.md),
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[0035](0035-initial-platform-owner-bootstrap.md)
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## Context
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Ekklesia can authenticate people and pair devices, but it cannot send a single email. Better Auth
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has been configured since [ADR 0011](0011-identity-http-transport-and-public-enrollment.md) with
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`emailAndPassword` and nothing else: its `sendResetPassword` and `emailVerification.sendVerificationEmail`
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hooks are both unimplemented, so email verification, password recovery, and invitations are all
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blocked on the same missing thing.
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That missing thing is not "a Google Workspace integration". It is a transport — and the shape of the
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transport decides whether the features built on it stay portable. The first real deployment is
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expected to relay through Google Workspace, but a church that later moves to Microsoft 365, a
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transactional provider, or its own Postfix must not be rewriting feature code to do it.
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## Decision
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Outbound email is a **host-provided infrastructure service** with a provider seam, exactly as object
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storage is under [ADR 0030](0030-host-provided-module-object-storage.md):
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```text
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trusted server-side feature
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↓ "send this transactional message"
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MailProvider seam
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↓
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SMTP → whatever the deployment relays through
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```
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Feature code owns the recipient, subject, and body. The provider owns the host, port, TLS,
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credentials, connection behaviour, and every transport error. **No provider's hostname appears
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anywhere in Core**, and a test asserts it.
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### The contract is deliberately tiny
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One recipient or a small bounded list, a subject, a text body, an HTML body, and an optional
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reply-to. There are no attachments, no custom headers, no CC, no BCC, no templates, and no mailing
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lists. This is transactional infrastructure: every field beyond that is surface a future caller
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could abuse, and it stays out until something real needs it.
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At least one of `text` or `html` is required. A message with neither is not a message, and sending
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an empty one silently would be worse than refusing it.
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### There is no `from` field, anywhere
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The sender is host configuration. A message has nowhere to put a sender, so no feature — and no
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future module — can choose who mail appears to come from. Letting feature code pick a sender is how
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a platform acquires an impersonation primitive and destroys its own domain reputation at the same
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time. If several approved sender identities are ever genuinely needed, that is a deliberate design
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with its own authorization, not a field.
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### Header injection is refused, never repaired
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Carriage returns, line feeds, and every other control character are rejected in addresses, display
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names, subjects, and reply-to values. A mail header is line-oriented, so a `\r\n` in a subject lets a
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caller append headers of its own — a `Bcc:` elsewhere, a replaced `From:`, or a second body.
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They are **refused rather than stripped** because silently rewriting input means the value that was
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validated is not the value that gets sent. Writing that rule down was not enough: the first
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implementation trimmed an address before checking it, which quietly accepted a trailing carriage
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return, and a test caught it. The check now runs on the raw value.
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### Explicit TLS modes, never a boolean
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`implicit-tls` (conventionally 465), `starttls` (587/25), or `plaintext`.
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A boolean plus a port is genuinely ambiguous: `secure: false` on 587 means "connect in the clear and
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hope STARTTLS is offered", and a server that stops advertising it — or an attacker who strips it —
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turns that into a plaintext session carrying a password, with nothing in the configuration having
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changed. Naming the mode makes the downgrade unreachable by accident: `starttls` sets Nodemailer's
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`requireTLS`, so a missing upgrade is a failed send. An omitted mode defaults to `starttls`, never to
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the one that sends a password in the clear, and production refuses `plaintext` outright.
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Certificate verification is left at the library's verifying default, and there is deliberately **no
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configuration path that could switch it off** — a setting that disables verification is one someone
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eventually disables in production.
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### Credentials are optional as a pair
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Most SMTP examples assume a username and password. Google Workspace SMTP Relay is commonly
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authorized by **source IP** and has neither, so requiring them would make the intended production
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arrangement unconfigurable. Half a pair is always a mistake, though — someone set one variable and
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expected authentication — so it fails loudly rather than silently connecting anonymously.
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The password is a deployment secret. It is never persisted in PostgreSQL, never routed through
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module configuration, never returned by any route, never printed by Doctor, and never placed in an
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error. It follows the discipline [ADR 0029](0029-module-configuration-and-secrets.md) established.
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### Bounded on every axis, and no retry
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`connectionTimeout`, `greetingTimeout`, and `socketTimeout` are all set explicitly. Nodemailer's own
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defaults are two minutes and ten minutes, which is not a deadline anyone would choose for a
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password-reset email someone is waiting on — and the object-storage pass already learned what an
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unbounded network client does to a request under load.
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**Nothing retries.** A failure after the message data has gone out is genuinely ambiguous: the
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server may have accepted it and only the acknowledgement was lost. Retrying an ambiguous send is how
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one password-reset request becomes three emails. A single bounded attempt is the whole behaviour,
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and `send` resolving means the next hop took responsibility — not that anyone received anything.
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This is deliberately **not** an exactly-once promise. A durable outbox with deliberate retry
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semantics can be added later if product requirements justify it; guessing at one now would be
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inventing delivery guarantees this transport does not have.
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### Errors are structured and say nothing
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`MAIL_NOT_CONFIGURED`, `MAIL_RECIPIENT_INVALID`, `MAIL_MESSAGE_INVALID`, `MAIL_PROVIDER_UNAVAILABLE`,
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`MAIL_REJECTED`, `MAIL_SEND_FAILED`. A 4xx SMTP reply maps to unavailable and a 5xx to rejected, so a
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caller can tell a transient outage from something that will never be accepted, and a refused mailbox
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keeps its own code because it is the one failure a human can usually act on.
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Nothing from the underlying error survives: not the server's response text, not the greeting, not
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the auth challenge, not the envelope. SMTP servers routinely echo back what was sent to them, and an
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authentication failure's reply can name the account.
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### Email is optional, and the platform still runs without it
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An installation with no SMTP host configured is a **complete deployment**. Nothing in the platform
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sends email yet, so Doctor reports it as `skipped` rather than a warning, and a future feature that
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needs to send discovers a structured `MAIL_NOT_CONFIGURED` rather than crashing. Whether email
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becomes *required* for particular identity flows is Pass 2's decision to make when those flows exist.
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### Nothing sends at startup, and no route sends at all
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Constructing the transport opens no socket. The first connection happens when something actually
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sends, so an unreachable relay can never stop the platform from booting, and a temporary SMTP outage
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is an operational condition rather than a module lifecycle event.
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There is deliberately **no `POST /api/v1/send-email`**, and no HTTP route anywhere touches the mail
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provider. An authenticated relay endpoint is an open relay with extra steps; a test asserts that no
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route file so much as imports the mail module.
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### Core only, for now
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`ModuleRuntimeServices` carries `database` and nothing else, with a standing note that services are
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added **one at a time, when something real needs one**. No module needs email in this pass —
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Announcements migration is out of scope — so modules get none, and a test asserts the module SDKs
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have no way to send.
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This is not a permanent decision. When a module genuinely needs transactional mail, the module-facing
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contract goes in `@ekklesia/contracts` and Core layers a scoped facade over this same
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`MailProvider` seam — exactly the path object storage took. The seam is already the right shape for
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it: a scoped facade would add the module's identity and leave the sender, the bounds, and the
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validation exactly where they are.
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## Consequences
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### The seam Pass 2 wires into
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Better Auth's two hooks take a `{ user, url, token }` and return a promise:
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```ts
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emailAndPassword: { sendResetPassword: async ({ user, url }) => { /* mail.send(...) */ } }
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emailVerification: { sendVerificationEmail: async ({ user, url }) => { /* mail.send(...) */ } }
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```
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`createIdentityRuntime` will take the provider as an injected option and call `mail.send` from
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inside them. `startApi` already constructs the provider and closes it on every shutdown path, so
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Pass 2 adds the two functions and the message bodies and nothing else. **The `url` and `token` those
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hooks receive are credentials** — the whole point of the email is that only the recipient sees them
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— so they must never be logged, and the transport already refuses to log a message body.
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### What is safe to log
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Send attempted, the provider's message id, and an error category. Never a body, never a subject,
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never a recipient beyond what an operator genuinely needs, and never a verification or reset link.
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The transport itself logs nothing at all.
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### Doctor reports configuration, and probes without sending
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`outbound-email.configuration` reports absent, valid-and-reachable, valid-but-unreachable, or
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structurally invalid. The probe performs the SMTP handshake and, where credentials are set, an
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authentication exchange — and **sends no message**: a diagnostic that emailed somebody every time an
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operator ran it would be its own incident.
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An unreachable relay is a warning rather than a failure, because nothing depends on mail yet and
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some relays decline a connection that sends nothing. The report says so explicitly instead of
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claiming a health it cannot prove, and it states that a successful connection does not establish
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deliverability — that depends on the relay's authorization policy and the domain's SPF, DKIM, and
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DMARC records, none of which is knowable from here.
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### Google Workspace is a target, not a dependency
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It is the expected first deployment and appears nowhere in Core. Whether a relay needs credentials,
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and which source addresses it accepts, is configured in Google Workspace Admin and varies per
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deployment — so this repository documents the shape and refuses to claim that a relay works
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anonymously from an arbitrary host.
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### Ekklesia Lite
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Lite is a minimal trusted-network module runtime. It may one day supply this same contract if an
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operator configures SMTP, and it must never *require* mail to run modules that do not need it —
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which is already true, because a provider is optional and its absence is a complete deployment.
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Nothing here is implemented in Lite and no module code branches on which host is running it.
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### Deferred
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Email verification, password reset, and invitations (Pass 2). Templates, which belong to the
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features that render them rather than to a transport. Bulk or marketing mail, mailing lists,
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attachments, DKIM key management, domain-verification automation, provider-specific HTTP API
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adapters, and a durable outbox with retry workers.
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