Snappy Mail on Cloudron - Creating a mail account and letting people login

[LoudLemur]

This workflow doesn't work. I can't understand why:

• Create Cloudron on domain (e.g. animals.com
• Create Group (e.g. emailers)
• Assign Applications to that group (e.g. SnappyMail)
• Create User (e.g. Lion, Primary email bigcat@mailbox.com; recovery email bigcat@nospam.com)
• Create Cloudron Mailbox for User (e.g. lion@animals.com)
• Invite User (e.g. send email / link - it arrives in primary email)
• User activates account with a password: miaow and logs into Cloudron OK and sees SnappyMail
• User launches snappy to login
• User fails to login

Why?

From my understanding, the user ought to be able to login with their Cloudron credentials. In this case, it would be the user's primary email address and the password the user created:

bigcat@mailbox.com / miaow

I tested this and it doesn't work. It doesn't work with the Cloudron email either:

lion@animals.com / miaow

[girish]

@LoudLemur said in Snappy Mail on Cloudron - Creating a mail account and letting people login:

bigcat@mailbox.com / miaow

This won't work. You have to login with the email address . The reason for this is that we could have 3 different mailboxes lion@ tiger@ panther@ all assigned to the user . The login username is used to determine which mailbox the user is trying to access. If a user tried with bigcat@mailbox.com , the system has no idea which of the above 3 mailboxes the user is trying to access.

lion@animals.com / miaow

this should work. Do you see anything in the snappymail logs?

[LoudLemur]

@girish said in Snappy Mail on Cloudron - Creating a mail account and letting people login:

lion@animals.com / miaow

No errors I can see in the logs.

I tried it again, and received the Authentication error message again. No login possible.

I also checked the permissions of the group to which lion was assigned and verified that they were granted access to SnappyMail. I tried again on different browsers and refreshed after attempting login in case it was showing an old page. It didn't fix it.

I tried the same process on the Cloudron demo, using the following credentials, and it worked! But I still can't get it going on the self-hosted one...

user: lion
email: lion@demo.cloudron.io
password: cloudron

[jdaviescoates]

@LoudLemur said in Snappy Mail on Cloudron - Creating a mail account and letting people login:

Why?

I think you just need to make the group the owner of the mailbox

[robi]

Are you at the latest Cloudron version?

[LoudLemur]

@robi said in Snappy Mail on Cloudron - Creating a mail account and letting people login:

Are you at the latest Cloudron version?

v7.6.3
So, it is up to date, and I reinstalled snappy, so that is a recent version too.

[LoudLemur]

@jdaviescoates

I think you just need to make the group the owner of the mailbox

I think it has something to do with groups but I have tried a few permutations of assigning / unassigning group/groups without success.

I might try nuking Snappy again and restarting.

[robi]

ok, then you may have to help us by posting screen shots of the Cloudron email settings view

[jdaviescoates]

@LoudLemur said in Snappy Mail on Cloudron - Creating a mail account and letting people login:

Assign Applications to that group (e.g. SnappyMail)

Email apps on Cloudron aren't like other apps. All users with a mailbox on a particular Cloudron have access to them regardless. Access controls on SnappyMail are just about visibility on the dashboard (but you don't actually need to have it visible in your dashboard to be able to access it)

The only thing that matters is who the owners of the mailbox are. They can be individuals or groups (or even Apps).

Here you can see that for my bettermedia.uk domain I've created 3 mailboxes, which are all owned by a group called better-media - so anyone in that group can login to those mailboxes using any webmail app installed on the same Cloudron.

To login they just use the email address plus their Cloudron password.

So, me, Gareth and Rowan (the people in the better-media group that owns these mailboxes) can all access those email addresses.

To repeat: To login they just use the email address plus their Cloudron password.

So, if I want to check contact@bettermedia.uk I just login using

username: contact@bettermedia.uk
password: my my.cloudron.coop password

And if Rowan wants to check it he uses:

username: contact@bettermedia.uk
password: rowan's my.cloudron.coop password

etc

Simple really

[LoudLemur]

Thanks, that is clear. So, it follows that if somebody wants to change their email password, they would do so by changing their cloudron login password. The two (cloudron password and email password) are always the same.

I think there is an issue with this, because some users only connect to the website through the applications rather than interfacing with cloudron.

There might be circumstances where one does not wish to expose users to the Cloudron instance. In the case of changing email credentials, it seems that this is not possible. @girish ?

[girish]

That's correct, it's not possible to change password without interfacing with cloudron dashboard. The email protocols have no way to change password. So there has to be some separate dashboard somewhere to change password and for us this is the cloudron dashboard.

[LoudLemur]

@girish said in Snappy Mail on Cloudron - Creating a mail account and letting people login:

That's correct, it's not possible to change password without interfacing with cloudron dashboard. The email protocols have no way to change password. So there has to be some separate dashboard somewhere to change password and for us this is the cloudron dashboard.

Thanks. I hope this statement is added to the Cloudron email documentation. Also, a note could be added indicating that the way new users are invited to the cloudron will determine their email password choices.

To use an email application on Cloudron, e.g. SnappyMail or RoundCube, one way or another, the email users will interact with Cloudron directly when they are invited. Whether it is by Cloudron sending an email invitation or Cloudron generating a sign-up link, the users will arrive on the setting up an account page on Cloudron.

It seems the only way around this at the moment is for the Cloudron admin to create the new user's account and inform the user of their password. This is not good from the end-user's perspective.

Is there a way to fix this?

One idea might be to include a sign-up wizard that would collect the necessary data.
Another route might be SSO - single sign on technology somehow, using an existing account, but I can't see how.
Maybe the easiest way would be to create an additional cloudron application (like Cubby) and use this to create and modify their account. However this would still be like interacting with cloudron though by proxy.

[girish]

@LoudLemur yeah, there is no way around user not knowing about Cloudron dashboard to change the email password. The alternative is to create a web app which does this and uses Cloudron API (which is out of scope for us). Unless Cloudron develops it's own webmail ui , this is hard to solve (for the reasons you pointed out).