Installing Send in Yunohost

Send is super cool. Not only is it one of the quickest, most simple and intuitive interfaces for sending large files that I’ve ever seen, but it also apparently integrates with ‘filelink’ in Thunderbird which I’ve always been tempted to try. Now that I see it’s a one-click install in YH, I wanted to go for it on my own. However… it wasn’t quite ‘one click’ because it requires it’s own subdomain and won’t work directly on the base URL of your YH installation. Thankfully, it’s pretty dead easy to do a subdomain in conjunction with Digital Ocean and YH. Here are the steps for Send app since you don’t need email sending wtih it (I think)

Set up DNS Records In Digital Ocean

1. Go to networking
2. Go to your YH domain
3. add in these records like this:

send.domain.com

In the DNS section of this new domain it will give you some recommended DNS records to make it legit.

A RECORDS
hostname | will direct to | TTL

send | your server | 300 (change back to 3600 later)

*.send | your server | 300 (change back)

CAA RECORD
Hostname | Authority | Tag | Flags | TTL

send | letsencrypt.org | issue | 128 | 300 (change back to 3600 later)

Now let that start to propagate through the internet and let’s do the second step

Setup Subdomain in Yunohost

From your home dashboard:

1. Domains
2. + Add Domain button
3. “I already have a domain” radio dial
4. Enter ‘send.domain.com’ using your domain for domain.com
5. “Add” button
6. Wait while it processes a while

Now your sub-domain is setup in YH, the records on your server are pointing to it, but it doesn’t have encryption yet (SSL Cert). The domain must be fully propagated for that to work.

Setup Lets Encrypt Certificate for Sub-domain

From your home dashboard in YH:

1. Domains
2. select your new send.domain.com subdomain
3. SSL Certificate (white button with lock)
4. If the green “Install a Let’s Encrypt certificate” is clickable click it, if not:

• in a terminal, try ping send.domain.com and see if it gets a bounce back. If not, you probably have to wait longer
• in a terminal try dig send.domain.com to see if your domain shows up paired with an IP address, SSL cert installation ‘should’ work
• Also check ports 80 and 443 are open for send.domain.com in this tool

With all the above checking as ‘ok’, and after waiting 5 or 10 minutes and it still isn’t clickable, I found once that logging out of the YH admin or doing a control f5 refresh helped. For me, one time it took only 10 minutes to propogate and another time it took about 1 hour….

After clicking it will ask “Are you sure you want to install a Let’s Encrypt certificate for this domain?” which you will obviously approve. If all goes well it will say ‘Great! You’re using a valid Let’s Encrypt certificate”.

Installing Send App in Yunohost

Now that your sub-domain and SSL certificates are set up, you are readying to install Send. From your YH home dashboard:

1. Applications
2. + Install
3. Search “send” – You should see “Send – File sharing which allows to send encrypted files” app show up
4. Click the green + Install
5. Select your newly-created subdomain from the dropdown in the ‘Choose the domain where this app should be installed’ field.
6. For Send, probably you’ll want to expose this to the outside world since you might want non-users to be able to use it? It’s a personal choice and may require re-thinking later, but for now I’m installing with ‘yes’ selected here. This will likely be more relevant if you are using it with the Thunderbird ‘Filelink’ option explained in the bonus section below…
7. At bottom of summary page, if all looks good ‘install’ button

If all goes well you should see a success message. Test your new Send app by going to send.yourdomain.com.

Bonus Section – Installing Filelink Thunderbird Add-on for sending big attachments

Now that you’ve done all that work, time to take advantage of one of the coolest features. First, email is not designed for big attachments. Second, people of the world seem not to know this. Third, as a self-hosting email champ, you’re going to need to control memory usage of email user accounts more than before. Using Thunderbird with Send with Yunohost is an amazingly easy way to do this. Furthermore, it’s a much more secure way to send an attachment than a simple attachment. To prove this, last week a tech support person for my current personal email provider actually downloaded my email, read the body of it, and opened the email while on a tech support call. And I wish I was joking. No authorization or pin number or anything required of me. Cpanel Root users (your host) can do this. So by using Filelink you’re assuring that at least the attachment will expire within a period of time after sending and it’s not just hanging around out there forever.

Anyways, here’s how you do it, assuming you are already using Thunderbird and an account is already set up. Feel free to set up your Yunohost account in Thunderbird – works like a dream!

1. in the left pane of Thunderbird, click the top-most entry for your account (the plain email@emailserver.com)
2. click ‘Filelink’ button
3. Click the ‘find more providers’ link
4. When you find the ‘FileLink provider for Send’ in the list, click the + Add to Thunderbird button
5. Configure the app the way you’d like it.

To use it, simply write an email and, if your attachment passes the size you set, it will give you a warning to please use filelink where you can use Send. Alternatively, you can just press ‘attach’ dropdown arrow while composing an email and select ‘fileline’ and ‘Thunderbird send’ and set up your attachment details. It will then magically process and appear as a link in the body of the email. Nice!