I recently came across Ciphermail and would like to evaluate it as a mail gateway (MTA).
I downloaded the Hyper-V appliance and noticed that six RPM packages are installed. I also read that Ciphermail can be fully managed via the CLI.
For security reasons, I would prefer to run a minimal installation, ideally without any web GUIs.
Is it possible to uninstall the two UI-related packages?
Are there any additional packages that can be safely removed for a pure CLI-based MTA configuration?
Yes. The CipherMail Gateway can be fully managed from the command-line interface (CLI). The gateway itself is controlled by a REST API, and the CLI is a client that uses this API. The CLI can run locally on the gateway host or remotely.
The web-based user interface (UI) also communicates with the same REST API. It is built with React, a JavaScript framework that runs in the browser (not on the server). Removing the UI packages does not provide additional security, because they only serve static assets to the browser. However, you can remove the UI packages if you prefer.
If you want to prevent network access to the system, block access to ports 443 and 8443, or configure Apache to bind to localhost only.