Item 7 of the spec wants game-state and membership-state changes to land as durable inbox entries the affected players can re-read after the fact — push alone times out of the 5-minute ring buffer. Stage B adds the admin-kind send matrix (owner-driven via /user, site-admin driven via /admin) plus the lobby lifecycle hooks: paused / cancelled emit a broadcast system mail to active members, kick / ban emit a single-recipient system mail to the affected user (which they keep read access to even after the membership row is revoked, per item 8). Migration relaxes diplomail_messages_kind_sender_chk so an owner sending kind=admin keeps sender_kind=player; the new LifecyclePublisher dep on lobby.Service is wired through a thin adapter in cmd/backend/main, mirroring how lobby's notification publisher is plumbed today. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
diplomail
diplomail owns the diplomatic-mail subsystem of the Galaxy backend
service. Messages live in the lobby-side domain (their storage and
lifecycle are tied to a game), but they are surfaced inside the game UI
— the lobby exposes only an unread-count badge per game.
Stages
The package ships in four staged increments. Stage A is the surface described below; the remaining stages add admin / system mail, lifecycle hooks, paid-tier broadcast, multi-game broadcast, bulk purge, and the language-detection / translation cache.
| Stage | Scope | Status |
|---|---|---|
| A | Schema, personal single-recipient send / read / delete, unread badge, push event with body-language und |
shipped |
| B | Owner / admin sends + lifecycle hooks (paused, cancelled, kick); strict soft-access for kicked players | shipped |
| C | Paid-tier personal broadcast + admin multi-game broadcast + bulk purge | planned |
| D | Body-language detection (whatlanggo) + translation cache + async worker | planned |
Tables
Three Postgres tables in the backend schema:
diplomail_messages— one row per send (personal, admin, or system). Capturesgame_nameand IP at insert time so audit rendering survives renames and purges.diplomail_recipients— one row per (message, recipient). Holds per-userread_at,deleted_at,delivered_at,notified_atstate. Snapshot fields (recipient_user_name,recipient_race_name) are captured at insert time and survive membership revocation.diplomail_translations— cached per (message, target_lang) rendering. One translation is reused across every recipient that asks for that language.
Permissions
| Action | Caller | Pre-conditions |
|---|---|---|
| Send personal | user | active membership in game; recipient is active member |
| Send admin (single user) | game owner OR site admin | recipient is any-status member of the game |
| Send admin (broadcast) | game owner OR site admin | recipient scope ∈ active / active_and_removed / all_members; sender excluded |
| Read message | the recipient | row exists in diplomail_recipients(message_id, user_id); non-active members see admin-kind only |
| Mark read | the recipient | row exists; idempotent if already marked |
| Soft delete | the recipient | read_at IS NOT NULL (open-then-delete, item 10) |
Stage C will add the paid-tier player broadcast and the bulk-purge admin endpoint.
System mail is produced internally by lobby lifecycle hooks:
Service.transition() emits game.paused / game.cancelled system
mail to every active member; Service.changeMembershipStatus /
Service.AdminBanMember emit membership.removed /
membership.blocked system mail addressed to the affected user.
Content rules
- Body is plain UTF-8 text. The server does not parse, sanitise,
or escape HTML — the UI renders messages via
textContent. - Body length is capped by
BACKEND_DIPLOMAIL_MAX_BODY_BYTES(default 4096). Subject length is capped byBACKEND_DIPLOMAIL_MAX_SUBJECT_BYTES(default 256). Both limits live in the service layer so they can be tuned without a schema migration. body_langis stored as the BCP 47und(undetermined) sentinel until Stage D wires the auto-detector.
Push integration
Every successful send emits a diplomail.message.received push
intent through the existing notification pipeline. The catalog entry
limits delivery to the push channel — email is intentionally absent;
the inbox endpoint is the durable fallback for offline users. The
payload includes the recipient's freshly recomputed unread count for
the lobby badge and for the in-game header.
Lifecycle hooks (Stage B)
The lobby module is the producer of system mail. Stage B will add a
DiplomailPublisher collaborator on lobby.Service and call it on
paused / cancelled transitions and on BlockMembership /
AdminBanMember. The publisher constructs a
kind='admin', sender_kind='system' message with a templated body;
the recipient receives the durable copy in their inbox even after the
membership is revoked.
If a future stage adds inactivity-based player removal at the lobby sweeper, that path must call the same publisher so the kicked player has the explanation in their inbox.
Wiring
cmd/backend/main.go constructs *diplomail.Service with three
collaborators:
*Storeover the shared Postgres pool;MembershipLookupadapter that walks the lobby cache for the active(game_id, user_id)row and stitches in the immutableaccounts.user_name;NotificationPublisheradapter that translates eachDiplomailNotificationinto anotification.Intentand routes it through*notification.Service.Submit.