History / Release Process

What the check of the merged wiki found, put right. The landing page counted 61 pages, 34 guides and 'the other 60', and listed none of the four pages written for 6.3.4: it counts 65, 38 and 64, and Message Storage, Compliance and eDiscovery, Rooms and Equipment and Mail In to a Webhook have their rows where the sidebar groups them. Twelve sentences named the next release as 6.3.5; each now says the releases after 6.3.4, since nothing after 6.3.4 has a number yet. Installing on Linux said the AppImages began in 6.3.2, where the GitLab releases of 6.3.0 and 6.3.1 carry both of them. Capabilities and Configuration gave 23 per-account tables as today's count, where AccountStores.cpp declares 62 in 6.3.4, 24 carried and 38 exceptions; the old figures stay, labelled with 3233b0cc4. The Settings Reference counted 26 bootstrap keys, where build/ini-settings-baseline.txt has 29. And Stopping Spam said the quarantine digest needs its domain's switch and hour, when an account may hold a value of its own for both (EffectiveSetting.cpp, QuarantineDigestTask.cpp).

Christopher Holloway committed Sep 26, 2026

The eighteen pages that copy repository documents are copied again from master 92b8f9f63, the 6.3.4 release, so they say what the repository says on the day 6.3.4 is published. Each was brought forward from the version it was last copied from, 540347500, hunk by hunk, and the wiki's own additions were kept where they are still true. What the documents gained: the stored-secrets key in the command line, the high-availability runbook and the warm standby, which now say that it is made once, exported and imported on the other node, and what a node without it does (HM7495); the service account, the COM rule that a change to an item of a shared collection is written onto a copy until Save(), and MySQL's utf8mb4 step in the upgrading guide; database TLS and utf8mb4 in the backend migration; the fuzz job moved from GitHub Actions to GitLab CI's linux-fuzz; the Windows and Linux suites on GitLab CI in the regression environment; the security policy's scans on the project's own runner and its questionnaire pointer; the contributing guide's CI checks; MessageStore and QuickJS in the architecture; a pre-release tag's suffix and the pinned .NET runtime in the release checklist; the update verifier's two signers in the assurance case. Third-Party Binaries follows a rewritten document: the tree commits no executable binary, and the sections this copy had added about where the forty committed binaries lived and their dispositions described the tree before 11 September 2026, so they are gone. Regulatory Scope's note loses four of the five things it called out of date, which the repository has corrected, and its own Annex I table now says the installer has been Authenticode-signed since 6.3.1, that 6.3.x is the supported line, and what a new installation's secure defaults are. The wiki's labels that said "in the tree after 6.3.3, not yet released" now say what is new in 6.3.4, and each header names 92b8f9f63. Where the repository text itself is now stale - the release checklist's and Regulatory Scope's statements that no release can be cut while the chain is on GitHub, the contributing guide and the security policy naming 6.3.3 as the latest release, the assurance case pointing at the changelog's Unreleased section - the copy keeps the repository's words and the header says so where a reader would be misled; 6.3.4 was built and Authenticode-signed by hand and carries no Sigstore bundle.

Christopher Holloway committed Sep 26, 2026

The pages on how the project runs stop describing GitHub as its process. Governance copies GOVERNANCE.md, whose status note says its passages on the GitHub ruleset, repository admin and private vulnerability reporting describe how the project ran there but whose body still says them in the present tense; the copy now puts them in the past tense and says what happens now, from that note and from CONTRIBUTING.md and SECURITY.md at master 540347500: merge requests, no approval rule on GitLab, a gated tree landing on master by fast-forward, reports arriving as confidential GitLab issues that one maintainer receives, and the ownership of the GitLab project as the critical asset where GitHub repository admin stood. It also says plainly that GOVERNANCE.md does not yet record the second maintainer's access on GitLab. Release Process keeps RELEASE.md as it is and adds short notes at steps 9, 11, 12 and 13, where a reader of one step would otherwise miss the status note: the alert pages are GitHub's, build-inputs-1 is unreachable, the draft, packaging, SBOM, signing, smoke test and package managers cannot run until the chain moves, which is planned roadmap work, and a gated tree lands by fast-forward with no pull request. Its own publishing section now says the releases are on GitLab with the same files, that no later release can carry the GitHub signing identity, and that the installer has been Authenticode-signed since 6.3.1, where it said it was not. The Project Handbook, a record of 4 September, says in sections 7 to 12 what has changed - the merge-request route, checks by hand, no CI, the release chain stopped, CVE IDs through GitLab and the Security template - and puts the GitHub checks it records in the past tense. The home page's pointer to Contributing speaks of a merge request.

Christopher Holloway committed Sep 24, 2026

The pages that copy repository documents are copied again from master 540347500, so they say what the repository says after the move to GitLab and after the batches that have landed since each was last copied. Contributing and Security Policy follow their files to the root of the repository, where both were rewritten for GitLab: the contributing guide is now the full one - where things are, how to report, the rule for GitHub's issue numbers, the prerequisites, one build command per component, the suites, every checker, the change checklists, commits, sign-off and merge requests - and the security policy supports 6.3.x and takes a report by a GitLab confidential issue or the project's Service Desk address. Governance names two maintainers, and it, the Release Process and the Assurance Case carry the repository's note that the release chain runs on GitHub Actions and cannot run until it moves. The runbooks gain what the tree after 6.3.3 added to them: the settings store in the database and a save that applies the setting, the drain as a state of its own and UpgradeOnStart, the message held for a sandbox, SPF as an RFC 7208 implementation, the Linux update helper, the locked copies of shared collections, the second bench and the gate in halves. Command Line becomes the whole current document, with every verb the clients have gained since 15 September. Most of these pages carry the wiki's own additions - diagrams, tables, worked commands, and corrections the repository has not taken - so each was merged three ways, from the version of the document it was last copied from to master, and the additions were kept wherever they are still true. Where the repository text describes something in the tree after 6.3.3 and not yet released, the page labels it, as the wiki does elsewhere, and says what 6.3.3 does instead where that matters to someone running it. Additions the repository has overtaken are gone or rewritten: the contribution flowchart and the table of required checks, which were GitHub's, are gone; so are the governance duty table and the bus-factor section, which the document now covers with two maintainers; the security flowchart and timeline send a report to GitLab and ask for the CVE there. The Project Handbook and the release diagram describe build/generate-com-wrapper.ps1, which replaced build/regenerate-interop.ps1 on 11 September 2026 when the COM wrapper left git. Each copy says at the top that it was re-copied from master 540347500 on 24 September 2026. Two say plainly where the repository document is itself out of date, and the copy with it: Third-Party Binaries and Regulatory Scope still count forty committed binaries, none of which has been in git since 11 September 2026, and Regulatory Scope still calls Authenticode signing outstanding and the releases GitHub's. The regression environment's 7-Zip path, which the repository document writes with a control character where \7 belongs, reads correctly here. Fuzzing.md has not changed since the wiki's copy, and its page says so.

Christopher Holloway committed Sep 24, 2026

The wiki's links move from GitHub to GitLab, where the project has lived since 22 September 2026. GitHub suspended the account on 18 September and every one of the project's GitHub addresses answers 404, so the download links, the source links, the security route, the support route and the "report an error" link all led nowhere. Every link to a file in the repository now opens it on GitLab, and the four community files that moved to the repository root on master 540347500 - CONTRIBUTING.md, SECURITY.md, SUPPORT.md and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md - are linked there, which also mends the seven links to a root SECURITY.md that did not exist when they were written. The download links open the latest GitLab release, and the installer has a link that always fetches the latest one. A private report goes to a GitLab confidential issue or the project's Service Desk address, a question is an issue with the Question template because GitLab has no Discussions, and a reader who wants to hear of releases is told how to watch the project on GitLab. The Project Handbook, written against GitHub on 4 September, says that its GitHub process is the project as it was then. The GitHub facts that stay are facts about the product, and each now says what is true of it: the update feed the server reads by default, which answers 404, so a check fails with "The update feed answered HTTP 404." until UpdateFeedUrl names another feed; the Sigstore identity and issuer that signed every release up to 6.3.3, which verify those files wherever they are hosted and which the verifier's defaults still name, so a release signed anywhere else is refused unless the three settings are changed; and the two GitHub addresses compiled into the product, the Policy line of the security.txt the server serves and the Control Panel's About link. Every GitHub issue, discussion and pull-request number written with a hash is now written in words - "GitHub issue 114", "GitHub discussion 18", "upstream PR 602" - with the kind the repository's CHANGELOG gives each number, because GitLab turns a hash and a number into a link to its own issue of that number, which is something else. The one maintainer handle left in running text is in code, and the webmail's mentions no longer read as a GitLab user. Four things GitLab rendered wrongly are put right. The Stopping Spam link to Routes and Relays was split by a line break and led to a page that does not exist. The Fuzzing page's two repository-relative links resolved inside the wiki; they open the fuzz folder and its regression README on GitLab. Placeholders written outside code, such as <host:port>, <addr> and <culture>, were read as HTML and dropped or turned into links; they are in code now. And the Assurance Case's eight section headings began "1. " above a setext rule, which CommonMark reads as a list and a thematic break, so its contents links had nothing to land on; they are ATX headings with the ids those links name.

Christopher Holloway committed Sep 24, 2026

The wiki rewritten in depth: 141 diagrams drawn from the code, every reference page made exhaustive, and twenty-one defaults corrected that no page had ever stated The wiki was accurate after this morning's sweep and thin. This is the depth pass the owner asked for: every page read against the code again, every reference page completed, and a diagram wherever a diagram says it better than a paragraph. 141 Mermaid diagrams across 49 pages, each drawn from the handler rather than from memory: the SMTP submission sequence with the checks in the order ProtocolMAIL_ and ProtocolRCPT_ actually run them, the IMAP session state machine from the per-command authentication guards, the DMARC evaluation, the delivery pipeline and its retry arithmetic, the ACME renewal state machine, the spam decision from connection to delivery, the schema chain, the component and threading models of the whole server, the CI workflows and what each one gates, the release draft-sign-publish flow, and a map of the journeys through the wiki itself on the landing page. The reference pages are now exhaustive rather than representative: every route with its method, authentication, request and response shape and its error codes; every [Settings] key with its default, its effect and whether it needs a restart; every port with the key that opens it; every rule criterion and action; every Sieve extension the server advertises; every metric the listener exposes. Twenty-one facts were wrong or absent, and each is corrected against the code rather than adjusted. The ones that will save somebody an afternoon: IMAP SASL PLAIN and SCRAM are not advertised on a default install, which looks exactly like a client bug; SMTP AUTH PLAIN is off by default too; DMARC checking is on while SPF and DKIM as scored tests are off, and the DMARC test evaluates both itself regardless; the seeded DNSBL and SURBL servers are inactive; a new mailbox contains INBOX and nothing else, which is the real cause of the classic missing Sent folder; MTA-STS hosting and autoconfiguration default on while both web-service ports default to 0, so the shipped default is features on with nothing listening; and TLS-RPT and DMARC report sending are inert until their From address is set, with each completed day discarded unsent. Eleven screenshots are named as wanted, with what each should show. The existing images are from a 6.2.10-era build and the pages say so where it matters.

chrisholloway5 committed Sep 8, 2026

Every page read against the tree on 8 September 2026: the release and schema stamps (6.2.27, schema 6031, 2,124 tests), the routes, keys and pages that were missing, the listener paragraphs that were false, and the unreleased work labelled as such An audit of all 51 pages against master produced about 360 findings on 43 of them, applied here. The largest: the APIs reference lacked 47 routes and described the listeners as single-threaded HTTP/1.0 (they run on the Boost.Asio HTTP/1.1 server); the settings reference lacked the fourteen Update* keys and IMAPCompressionEnabled and counted 195 keys instead of 236; every "current release" stamp said 6.2.24; Changes Since 6.2.10 ended three releases and one schema step early; Architecture said the optional listeners were deliberately not Boost.Asio and built their own SSL contexts (neither is true); the upgrading pages still warned of a silent-upgrade hang fixed in 6.2.23; the Control Panel pages knew nothing of the seventeen languages, the Updates card or the stalled-mail page; and two pages did not render (a header inside a code block, CR and TAB bytes in file names). Anything in the tree but not in v6.2.27 - the live update, the self-service portal and /api/v1/me, the HttpServer listeners, IMAP COMPRESS=DEFLATE, the seventeen-language Control Panel, the Control Deck views - is documented and marked "in the tree after 6.2.27, not yet released". The Control Panel screenshots are still from a 6.2.10 build and the pages now say so.

chrisholloway5 committed Sep 8, 2026

Settings and Control Panel reference: BackupVerifyRestore and ArchiveDomains

chrisholloway5 committed Sep 5, 2026

References regenerated for 5 September 2026: message retention, scrypt, the ClamAV connection test, tarpitting, the server-enforced administrator second factor, and the assertion build; the landing page keeps its new name

chrisholloway5 committed Sep 5, 2026

The hMailServer 6.2.24 wiki: the corrected manual, the runbooks, and the references generated from the code

chrisholloway5 committed Sep 4, 2026