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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Claude Opus 5
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@@ -582,6 +582,44 @@ connection immediately, but an already-open SSE stream is not torn down at that
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five-minute forced reconnect is the upper bound on how long a just-revoked screen can keep receiving
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a channel. That window is stated rather than described as instant.
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### Outbound email is host-owned, and cannot be turned into a relay
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Ekklesia sends transactional email through a host-configured SMTP transport
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([ADR 0037](../architecture/decisions/0037-host-provided-outbound-email.md)). What keeps it from
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becoming a liability:
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- **No feature can choose a sender.** A message has no `from` field at all; the sender is host
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configuration. Feature-chosen senders are an impersonation primitive and a deliverability
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catastrophe at the same time.
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- **No HTTP route can send.** There is deliberately no `POST /api/v1/send-email` and no route that
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touches the mail provider — an authenticated relay endpoint is an open relay with extra steps. A
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test asserts no route file even imports the mail module.
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- **No module can send.** `ModuleRuntimeServices` carries no mail service, and a test asserts the
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module SDKs have no way to. Browser code has none either: the SMTP dependency exists only in Core,
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which a surface cannot import.
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- **Header injection is refused, not repaired.** Control characters in addresses, display names,
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subjects, and reply-to values are rejected. The first implementation trimmed before checking and
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silently accepted a trailing carriage return; a test caught it and the check now runs on the raw
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value.
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- **Bounded everything.** Recipients (10), subject (200), text (64 KiB), HTML (256 KiB), and
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connection, greeting, and socket timeouts are all explicit. A silent server returns a structured
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error rather than hanging a request.
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- **No downgrade.** Security modes are named (`implicit-tls`, `starttls`, `plaintext`) rather than
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inferred from a boolean and a port. `starttls` **requires** the upgrade, so a server that stops
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offering it — or an attacker who strips it — fails the send instead of continuing in the clear.
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Production refuses `plaintext`. Certificate verification is always on and there is no setting that
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disables it.
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- **The password is a deployment secret.** Never in PostgreSQL, never in module configuration, never
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in an API response, never in Doctor output, never in an error, and no value in `.env.example`.
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- **Nothing is logged.** The transport logs nothing at all. Transactional mail carries verification
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and reset links, which are exactly the credentials those flows depend on.
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- **No blind retry.** One bounded attempt. A failure after the message data has been sent is
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ambiguous, and retrying it would send someone several copies of the same reset email.
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Deliverability — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and the relay's own authorization policy — is a deployment
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responsibility this repository cannot verify, and Doctor says so rather than implying a successful
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connection means mail arrives.
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### Rate limiting is per-process today
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Better Auth's authentication rate limiter is **in-memory and per API process**. That is acceptable
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