Good mail server for selfhosting
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This is probably the way, because a traditional "mail server" is actually 4-5 different servers working together.
- postfix for SMTP
- dovecot for IMAP
- amavis to plug in..
- spamassassin as anti spam
- clam-av as antivirus
And they can all be very easily misconfigured to break everything completely. Great learning experience though.
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Looks amazing. But the dual licensing scares me. The open variant could be artificially limited in functionality or could end up basic abandon ware.
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I've been using mailu for years without probelms
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I was going to ask if anyone had experience with Maddy, which is an all-in-one solution I've been eyeballing for a while.
Getting DKIM and postfix set up correctly was such a PITA, and then dovecot, I'm nervous about having to go through all that again and fretting about accidentally configuring an open relay, so I haven't tried it yet. But it looks nice, and has been around for a couple of years.
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A project ending as abandonware is always a possibility. One reason projects get abandoned is losing funding, which can be secured by using dual licensing and selling some features to businesses.
They use AGPL so even if they broke their promise and restricted features, it could still be developed further (even if no new features got added). NGINX also uses a dual license.
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fretting about accidentally configuring an open relay
That's easy enough to test. Try sending mail from the Internet to an address outside your domain, both from a real sender and a sender spoofing your own domain.
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A project ending as abandonware is always a possibility. One reason projects get abandoned is losing funding, which can be secured by using dual licensing and selling some features to businesses.
That is not my point.
Having a CE or OS version and an Enterprise Version can lead to conflict of interest. Do you add a feature to the OS Version or do you spend time on the Enterprise feature? There are a lot of examples, Emby is one, others are escaping me right now.
There are other models that work well like paid support etc. Nonetheless i will stay away.
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I've never messed with it but I've heard mail servers are a pain in the ass.
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If only this wasn't asked 50 times in the past 7 days. SEARCH.
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I use OpenSMTPD for mail delivery, dovecot for IMAP, fdm for filtering and some tool I forget the name of for DKIM signing.
To bulk move mail around, just move the maildirs.
(Hosting email is a pain)
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After 20+ years of hosting my email in a similar way (postfix...) I decoded to explore the "all in ones" like stalwart and mailcow.
Stalwart looks promising because its a new approach, supposedly more streamlined and efficient. Will post back in a few months.
I am not worried about stalwart dual license, the overall feeling seems to be of trust.
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A forum is good for searches. Social media is good for blind repost and "me me me" posting.
That's life
So sad we abandoned the forum approach.
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It's a bit unconventional maybe, but I vote
simple-nixos-mailserver- IF you are curious / willing to learn nix. It's essentially just sanely configured dovecot, postfix, rspamd.My config for those three combined is about 15 lines, and I have never had an issue with them. Slap on another 5-10 lines for Roundcube as a webmail client.
Since it's Nix, everything is declarative, so should SOMETHING happen to the server, you can be up and running again super quickly, with the exact same setup.
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I use nixos on my desktop, the server is a debian one but might be good to install nix on it.
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In that case I can really highly recommend it. Nixos on the server is fantastic anyways, and the only hurdle to recommending simple-nixos-mailserver is that most people are not familiar with nix...
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Another vote for Mailcow-dockerized. Used it for about 5 years now and never had a problem.
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https://mxtoolbox.com/ will help a lot with making sure you're configured correctly.
And look at Mailcow if you're nervous about setting up another server, it's bulletproof and mature.
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I miss the old days, before you had to worry about spam.
I'm not OP, and I have everything set up fine now; Mailcow would replace what I currently have with the same software components, so I don't see any value there - for myself.
Something like Maddy is completely at odds with the Unix philosophy, and yet I've fought enough with postfix to dislike it enough to want to try an all-in-one. I dread the DKIM setup, though; that took so much time, and the mail server configuration wasn't the hard part. Maybe now I've got it configured for my domains, switching email server software will be easier.
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Yeah, all the threads I came across when I looked into this were like "Self host everything! Except email" so I haven't looked into it.
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Mailcow was effortless and I've never had to intervene in the stack. And after 20 years of fighting postfix and dovecot, that was a pleasant change. I can see why you'd want to try something different, but don't expect it to be easy.
