← Features

Receive email

Your VM can receive emails at *@vmname.exe.xyz.

Enable

ssh exe.dev share receive-email vmname on

Once enabled, any email sent to any.name.here@vmname.exe.xyz will be delivered to ~/Maildir/new/ on your VM.

Enabling inbound email also lets your VM reply to the people who email it, scoped to their threads by default; see replying to correspondents, including the --reply-policy flag to restrict or disable this.

Disable

ssh exe.dev share receive-email vmname off

Disabling does not delete existing emails. It does clear the VM's permission to reply to people who have emailed it — except that anyone who unsubscribed stays unsubscribed.

Email format

Emails are delivered in Maildir format.

Email include an injected Delivered-To: header as the first line, containing the envelope recipient address. Use this header (not To: or CC:) to determine what address the email was sent to.

DKIM-Signature: headers are removed before delivery. exe.dev checks them on the message as it arrived, and what it concludes is what decides who your VM may reply to. A signature is a reusable credential — anyone holding a signed message can present it again — so your VM gets the mail without it, and cannot re-present someone else's mail as permission. Other authentication headers, such as Authentication-Results:, are passed through untouched; they are the upstream relay's claims, and exe.dev does not trust them either.

To watch for new mail, poll or use inotify. For example:

inotifywait -m ~/Maildir/new -e create -e moved_to |
  while read dir action file; do
    FILE="$dir/$file"
    # process email in $FILE
    mv "$FILE" ~/Maildir/cur/
  done

You are responsible for promptly moving emails out of ~/Maildir/new/. If there are more than 1000 files in that directory, we will automatically disable email receiving. If this happens, you may clear the backlog and re-enable it, as above.

Limitations

  • No spam, virus, phishing, or safety checks, we only deliver the bits
  • No custom domains yet, only *.exe.xyz
  • Strict receiving rules; mail that fails authentication may be rejected
  • 1MB maximum message size
  • Delivered emails must be processed promptly