A real deployment could not send mail through an IP-authorized relay.
Every attempt surfaced as MAIL_PROVIDER_UNAVAILABLE while the relay was
healthy and swaks sent from the same machine.
The cause was the greeting, and it is generic rather than tied to any
provider. An SMTP client identifies itself in EHLO, and with nothing
configured Nodemailer derives that from the machine hostname —
substituting the address literal [127.0.0.1] whenever the hostname is
not fully qualified, which is the normal state of a container. The relay
closed the connection on it with a 421 before any message was offered,
which is indistinguishable from the relay being down.
EKKLESIA_SMTP_HELO_NAME now lets the deployment say what to greet as. It
is validated as a fully qualified domain name — no scheme, port,
brackets, whitespace, or control characters, and at least one dot, since
a single unqualified label is exactly the input Nodemailer already
discards. It is not a credential: it travels in the clear on every
connection, so Doctor prints it where an operator can compare it against
what the relay expects, and Doctor's probe performs the same greeting the
runtime does.
Absent preserves Nodemailer's behaviour exactly. It is deliberately not
defaulted to the sender's domain: a machine whose hostname is already a
valid FQDN may be greeting correctly, and some relays check that against
reverse DNS, so replacing it silently would trade one deployment's bug
for another's.
The regression guard is a raw SMTP server that refuses any greeting but
the expected one, because smtp-server exposes no EHLO hook and its
earliest hook is never reached by a send-nothing probe.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Ekklesia could authenticate a person and, since Pass 1, send a
transactional email — but it had no way to establish that an address
belonged to whoever claimed it, and no way back in for someone who
forgot their password.
A verified address is now a precondition for holding a session. Better
Auth enforces that after the password check and before any session
exists, so an unverified sign-in returns 403 with no cookie. That is why
no "unverified principal" was needed: a correct password on an
unverified address carries exactly the authority of no password, and
/api/v1/principal is unchanged.
Better Auth keeps every token. Ekklesia adds no token table, no hashing,
and no expiry clock. It supplies a recipient, a subject, and two bodies,
and the mail provider supplies everything about SMTP.
Verification and reset links are rebuilt from a validated Dashboard
origin, taking only the token — never the URL Better Auth prebuilds from
a caller-supplied callbackURL — so no request can steer where a
recipient lands. Following a verification link mints no session, because
mail infrastructure dereferences links. Reset revokes that person's
other sessions and leaves managed devices alone.
Recovery answers identically for an address with an account, without
one, already verified, or undeliverable — including when SMTP is broken,
which is why the delivery adapter never throws.
The initial platform owner is the one exception: created already
verified by an operator command with no mail prerequisite, so a fresh
server can be signed in to before a relay exists. Migration 0007 extends
that to owners of installations that already exist. Public signup stays
disabled; verification is not a licence to self-register.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
`pnpm doctor` and `startApi` each read their own subset of the same
environment variables, and the subsets had drifted. Doctor never read
`S3_*` or module secrets at all, so a correctly configured installation
was told its object storage was "not configured" and every module
requiring a bucket or a secret was reported blocked -- while the runtime,
from the identical environment, bound those buckets and ran the modules.
Both executables now map the environment through one
`loadHostConfiguration(env)` in Core, which takes the environment as an
argument and never reads `process.env` itself. Validation stays with the
existing per-domain validators, so each caller keeps its own failure
behaviour: startup refuses a rejected value, Doctor reports it as a
sanitized code.
Doctor's storage option becomes raw input like its mail option, so a
half-configured provider is reported as a blocking configuration failure
instead of throwing before a report exists. The outbound-email check --
computed, counted toward the result, but absent from every rendered
section -- is now printed, and the rendered set is asserted against a
real report so a future check cannot go missing the same way.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
