chibenwa commented on a change in pull request #833: URL: https://github.com/apache/james-project/pull/833#discussion_r785725979
########## File path: src/adr/0053-email-rate-limiting.md ########## @@ -0,0 +1,70 @@ +# 53. Email rate limiting + +Date: 2021-01-10 + +## Status + +Accepted (lazy consensus). + +Not yet implemented. + +## Context + +Rate limiting is one of the common features expected from an email system. Examples: SaaS is +one https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277382-Account-limits#sending/receiving +, https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22839 + +They limit how many emails users can send/receive from/to each email account over a given period of time. +We believe the rate-limiting will help James to have more benefits: + +- Control of the resources +- Easy to configure dynamically the user policy. +- Complements the storage quota +- Can be a security requirement for SaaS deployments. +- Minimise impacts of Open-relay types of compression. +- Limiting the amount of emails sent to third parties can also prevent them from considering you as an open relay and can + be beneficial as well. + +## Decision + +Set up a new maven project dedicated to rating limiting. This allows the rate limiting mailets to be embedded in a James +server as a soft dependency using the external-jar loading mechanism. Please note that this will take the form of an +extension jar, that could be dropped in one's James installation, and thus is optional, and not a runtime dependency. + +Rate limiting will be enabled per sender, per receiver and globally. For each we will provide options for email size and +email count. + +- This can be done via mailets: + - PerSenderRateLimit is per sender + - PerRecipientRateLimit is per recipient + - GlobalRateLimit is for everyone. Depending on the position in the pipeline this could allow rate limiting all emails in + transit, relayed emails or locally delivered emails. + The rate limit will be configured + in [mailetcontainer.xml](/server/apps/distributed-app/sample-configuration/mailetcontainer.xml). + +- Those mailets will be based on a generic RateLimiter interface. We will propose two implementations for it: + - In memory (guava based) suitable for single instance deployments + - [Redis](https://redis.io) based, suitable for distributed deployments. + +The implementation chosen will be configurable as part of mailet configuration. One would be able to configure the +implementation he wishes to use. + +- We will document such a setup, and provide a mailetcontainer sample file. + +## Consequences + +- When having a change in the rate limit configuration, we need to restart James. +- Only protocols allowing to submit emails make sense here so SMTP and JMAP. +- It is more than acceptable to lose all redis data, which is equivalent to resetting the rate limiting. + +## Alternatives + +Alternatives implementation of the rate limiter can be proposed, and used within the aforementionned mailet. + +For instance one could rely on Cassandra counters and Cassandra time series (thus not needing additional dependencies) however we fear the potential performance impact doing so. Streaming based options, that aggregate in memory counters, might be a viable option too. + +## References + +- [JIRA](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-3693) +- [Redis driver](https://github.com/lettuce-io/lettuce-core#reactive-api) +- [Guava rate limiter](https://guava.dev/releases/19.0/api/docs/index.html?com/google/common/util/concurrent/RateLimiter.html) Review comment: Also, you propose an external dependency. Can I ask you to do a quick assessment regarding the health of that community? -> License ? -> Are there recent releases ? Are the release frequent ? -> Code activity ? Release cycles ? -> Companies behind this ? -> Are PR and Issues actively / passively managed ? -> Are there some forums/chats where we can ask questions if we have issues ? Do people receive answers ? -> Are there several maintainers or is it more or less one guy ? (Ultimately the question is `will we save more energy on the long run depending on this dependency?`) (and yes, we should do this assessment every time we add a dependency) -- This is an automated message from the Apache Git Service. To respond to the message, please log on to GitHub and use the URL above to go to the specific comment. To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For queries about this service, please contact Infrastructure at: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
