Setting up a reset password website

[InfiniteVerma]

There's a request to set up a reset password website through which users can directly reset their password instead of asking the mail server administrator. Feature-wise, I can build and deploy a web server that interacts directly with the docker data of docker-mailserver

There are the steps I've thought of:

1. User enters their current email and password
2. Backend validates this by directly reading docker data.
3. User enters the new password and confirms
4. Newly entered password gets updated using setup.sh (To be safe, I can also restart the mail server docker)

I would like to know if the above is valid. And if so, I would like if someone could point out on what files I need to read/update users' passwords.

Thank You!

[polarathene]

You may be interested in https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver-admin

It looks like development stalled there however.

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I worked on cleaning up our setup scripts for account management earlier in the year (setup email update script). This would probably be the better way to update passwords infrequently, which is what you plan to do with step 4.

There shouldn't be a need to restart, the check-for-changes.sh script should be monitoring for changes to the relevant files and handle any restarting needed for you. It should be ok, so long as you don't have passwords being changed often as each time those restarts happens it could make the mail-server services unavailable for around 10-20 seconds (depends how long it takes to restart a service).

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I would like if someone could point out on what files I need to read/update users' passwords.

The setup email update and other account related management for setup.sh is handled here, which works with the file "database" manager scripts I wrote here.

You should be able to perform your updates via those scripts, and that is likely going to be more reliable across releases, rather than directly manipulating any of the "database" files that we manage and generally assume no one else writes to (which could risk corruption).

You will want to perform validation prior to calling the update, as you mention in step 2. The account data is available at postfix-accounts.cf file and you an read the password hash from that like we have show in this test:

docker-mailserver/test/setup-cli.bats

Lines 72 to 99 in ff96950

	# Update an existing account
	@test "checking setup.sh: setup.sh email update" {
	local MAIL_ACCOUNT='[email protected]'
	local MAIL_PASS='test_password'
	local DATABASE_ACCOUNTS="${TEST_TMP_CONFIG}/postfix-accounts.cf"
	# `postfix-accounts.cf` should already have an account with a non-empty hashed password:
	local MAIL_PASS_HASH
	MAIL_PASS_HASH=$(grep "${MAIL_ACCOUNT}" "${DATABASE_ACCOUNTS}" | awk -F '|' '{print $2}')
	assert_not_equal "${MAIL_PASS_HASH}" ""
	# Update the password should be successful:
	local NEW_PASS='new_password'
	run ./setup.sh -c "${TEST_NAME}" email update "${MAIL_ACCOUNT}" "${NEW_PASS}"
	refute_output --partial 'Password must not be empty'
	assert_success
	# `postfix-accounts.cf` should have an updated password hash stored:
	local NEW_PASS_HASH
	NEW_PASS_HASH=$(grep "${MAIL_ACCOUNT}" "${DATABASE_ACCOUNTS}" | awk -F '|' '{print $2}')
	assert_not_equal "${NEW_PASS_HASH}" ""
	assert_not_equal "${NEW_PASS_HASH}" "${MAIL_PASS_HASH}"
	# Verify Dovecot derives NEW_PASS_HASH from NEW_PASS:
	run docker exec "${TEST_NAME}" doveadm pw -t "${NEW_PASS_HASH}" -p "${NEW_PASS}"
	refute_output 'Fatal: reverse password verification check failed: Password mismatch'
	assert_output "${NEW_PASS_HASH} (verified)"
	}

Specifically of interest to you might be:

docker-mailserver/test/setup-cli.bats

Lines 95 to 96 in ff96950

	# Verify Dovecot derives NEW_PASS_HASH from NEW_PASS:
	run docker exec "${TEST_NAME}" doveadm pw -t "${NEW_PASS_HASH}" -p "${NEW_PASS}"

That doveadm command can be provided the current password hash and the plaintext password to do the comparison (it reads the dovecot config we have for what password scheme to use, which should be SHA512-CRYPT at present). Our accounts data should be in sync with Dovecot (it has it's own db copy, separate from the postfix-accounts.cf we use), and I think I've got better tests to reference on this topic, I just haven't published the branch for a PR related to it 😅