Icon legend
These docs use a small set of inline term icons — one glyph per recurring domain word — so a reader scanning a page can spot where a mailbox, a frombox, a stamp, a pin, a domain, or the postmaster is being discussed without re-reading the sentence. The set is deliberately small: it covers only the handful of terms that recur across the whole book (see the frequency data below), so the icons stay meaningful rather than becoming decoration.
An author drops an icon in Markdown with a single inline <span> — mdBook
renders inline HTML as-is:
<span class="ticon ticon-mailbox" role="img" aria-label="mailbox"></span>
The base ticon class sizes and aligns the glyph; the ticon-<term> modifier
picks which one. Always include role="img" and an aria-label so screen
readers announce the term.
Legend
Every icon, its modifier class, and what the term means. (The first column shows the glyph as it renders on this page — in the surrounding text color.)
| Icon | Term | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| address | A Solana wallet address, which doubles as a SithBit email address. | |
| mailbox | The 1:1 account for a wallet, holding its domain, encryption key, and default stamp price. | |
| frombox | A recipient-owned prepaid-stamp account, one per (sender “from” address, recipient) pair. | |
| stamp | Prepaid postage for one email from one sender to one recipient; sending decrements the count. | |
| alias | A globally-unique, case-insensitive human-readable name that resolves to a wallet address. | |
| domain | A DNS mail domain authorized on-chain, whose authority relays that domain’s inbound mail. | |
| mail / message | An email — on-chain, a parked message account referencing the sealed body’s IPFS CID. | |
| pin | Retaining a mail body’s blocks on IPFS against garbage collection; unpinning releases them. | |
| postoffice | The singleton admin account: it holds the delegate, the ownership root, and the fee values, and collects protocol fees. | |
| postmaster | The postoffice’s owner — a hidden, ceremony-committed key set, not a single on-chain pubkey. | |
| POP | POP3, the single-spool mail-retrieval protocol SithBit serves. | |
| IMAP | IMAP4rev1, the folder-based mail-access protocol SithBit serves. | |
| daemon | A long-running server process — e.g. sithbitd, the combined SMTP/IMAP/POP + spooler binary. | |
| hash | blake3, the fast hash used for two PDA seeds (the frombox “from” address and the alias name). | |
| SOL | Solana’s native token; all postage, fees, and rent are denominated in it (in lamports). | |
| campaign | A bountied outreach to opted-in participants: an advertiser reaches wallets that published a participation beacon, paying postage and reply bounties. |
Why these terms
The set was picked from how often each word actually appears across the book, so the icons buy the most scanning value. The table below counts distinct Markdown pages (out of the 66 content pages measured when the set was chosen) that mention each term. Terms that recur on a third or more of the pages carry an icon; the count also scopes the later book-wide application sweep — the higher the count, the more pages the sweep touches.
| Term | Pages (of 66) |
|---|---|
| 60 | |
| address | 51 |
| mailbox | 48 |
| domain | 46 |
| alias | 40 |
| message | 40 |
| postoffice | 28 |
| frombox | 24 |
| postmaster | 24 |
| hash | 23 |
| POP | 19 |
| IMAP | 19 |
| SOL | 17 |
| daemon | 12 |
These counts are a point-in-time snapshot of the term distribution that
justified the icon set, not a live tally — adding pages naturally shifts them —
and each was measured with grep -rlwi <term> mail_docs/src --include=*.md.
How it renders
The icons are not <img> elements. Each icon-*.svg is used as a CSS
mask-image, and the masked shape is painted with background-color: currentColor. Because the glyph takes the surrounding text color, it adapts to
the light and dark mdBook themes automatically, with no per-page markup. Each
icon is sized to roughly 1em and sits on the text baseline, so it flows inline
with the words around it.