uucp — UUCP-over-TLS mail network

Secure, mutually-authenticated mail connectivity between all nodes: Taylor UUCP carried over stunnel-terminated TLS, one private CA, a fixed set of named peers. This is what SMTP does not give you by default between hosts — STARTTLS is strippable, trust rests on public CAs and DNS, and a message can cross a relay nobody chose. The goal here is the opposite shape: every hop mutually authenticated, no discovery, no trust-on-first-use. See uucp/handover-next-actions for the full statement of intent.

Status

Transport and internal mail are working on pomelo, gravlax and kelp (2026-09-20). All nine mail paths verified. gravlax is the configurable mail hub; only pomelo polls every 15 minutes.

Internal host-to-host mail is enabled as authorised on 2026-09-20. Internet mail integration remains gated off; no popit3, Envoy or IMAP connection was added. Read the local /var/mail/<user> mailboxes. Existing unrelated mail configurations remain separate.

Nodes

Child notes

uucp/setup-status — architecture, port scheme, authentication, TLS integration, and the gotchas (public-dir permissions, compiled-in lock path, FQDN-only resolution between EC2 hosts).

uucp/handover-next-actions — the actual handover/next-actions note: what's done, what's paused and why, what to do when work resumes, and the FreeBSD-node build options. Named handover-next-actions rather than uucp/next-actions for historical reasons — not renamed.

Related

ansible — the roles/uucp ansible role, uucp.yml, uucp_topology.yml drive all three nodes.

ssl — the shared stunnel PKI (one self-signed CA) that UUCP's TLS layer reuses rather than inventing its own.

popit3 — inbound mail arrives via popit3, not via UUCP, once the mail layer exists.

PROGRAMMING_RULES/freebsd-build-from-source — build-from-source policy that applies when a FreeBSD node joins this network.

uucp/mail — deployed internal mail, short addresses, configurable hub, polling, Ansible setup and host onboarding.

version 3  ·  created 2026-09-18  ·  updated 2026-09-20  ·  tags uucp, mail, tls, ansible, infrastructure