Documentation

Corsair is a mail server and the control panel that manages it, in one process. This manual covers the whole of it: getting a copy running, getting mail to actually flow, keeping it healthy, and every protocol and endpoint it exposes.

Pick a starting point#

How this manual is organised#

Start here is the shortest path from nothing to a working install, plus the vocabulary the rest of the manual assumes. If you read three pages, read Introduction, Quickstart, and Core concepts.

Tutorials are start-to-finish builds. They tell you what to type and what you should see, and they end with something that works. Every one of them has been written against a real install, not sketched.

Install and operate is the reference an operator lives in: installation methods, every setting, TLS, backups, monitoring, upgrades, and what to do at three in the morning.

Using Corsair covers the product surface — domains, addresses, clients, filters, webmail, migrations, deliverability, and event hooks.

Reference is exhaustive rather than narrative: the architecture, the HTTP API, each mail protocol's supported command set, the database schema, and the SMTP reply-code lookup.

What Corsair will not do for you#

Running a mail server is four things that are not software: a static IP with a matching PTR record, port 25 unblocked outbound, a real TLS certificate, and the ability to bind privileged ports. No amount of good code substitutes for any of them, and Prerequisites says so at length before you spend an afternoon finding out.

Conventions#

example.com is always your domain — the one whose mail you are hosting. mail.example.com is the Corsair host itself. Commands prefixed with $ are run on the server; anything else is a file's contents or a protocol transcript.

Where a page states a default, it is the default in the shipped code, not a suggestion. Where a page says something is deliberate, there is a reason given — usually because the obvious alternative breaks something subtle.