I need to run my own email server for some of my domains, because the providers that I usually use don’t support them (they use Unicode characters, and not everyone supports that yet). I have a small VPS that I run a few Docker containers on, and I’m wanting to try and run an email server on it as well. What containers are good for a low-hassle email setup? I don’t need a mailbox webui (ex: round cube), but it would be nice to have a UI for management. I do need multi-domain support, however.
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Mailcow-dockerized. I’ve used it for nearly a decade, it’s been flawless. Very easy to set up with the admin webpage and has a webmail client, or use Roundcube with it.
Make sure you have your DKIM, SPF and Dmarc records in order and tested against MXtoolbox before you start.
What’s the resource usage like? I’ve looked into mailcow before but the recommended system specs are too expensive to make it worth it on a VPS.
mox. just one go binay. pure bliss: https://www.xmox.nl/
This is so cool… Didn’t know about it… And also european… Will try it for sure
I’m still looking for a good solution that includes support for notes. I’m migrating off Exchange Online and using mailcow temporarily but the built in notes feature is sorely missed.
You’re gonna have a bad time if you have to email MSFT/GOOG. MSFT was worse in my experience. their DumbScreen tech was horrible. Even the tech couldn’t get my emails to not go to spam. Gave up in the end. The likes of MSFT and Google make it nigh on impossible for people to self host their own email.
Been running my own mailserve for last 20 years and never had big issues.
Do dkim dmark stuff and DNS records properly and you will be fine. Also don’t spam and beware of spam-related subnets, and you should not have issues.
Have you considered that the reason why your mail server is trusted is because it’s been around for 20 years?
Have you tried to set up mail from scratch on a new domain/ip recently?
Stalwart
Written in rust, contains SMTP, IMAP, JMAP, Sieve, CalDAV, CardDAV, WebDAV. Has an admin web ui. Sane defaults, minimal foot guns. No zoo of containers needed.
Beware it’s very heavyweight. My dedicated oldish server with 8gb ram and spinning hdes couldn’t even handle one single domani and a few users…
Was 6 months ago, tough.
I had to play with database types, because apparently out of the box setup works only on SSDs (??) And do a bunch of other stuff to improve performance.
End result was way worse than installing postfix+dovecot+dkim/dmark/etc stuff directly.
Quite unusable, but the hardware was limited
True. The default rocksdb is completely unusable on HDDs. For me it runs pretty good with PostgreSQL. Dovecot was certainly easier to handle with its file based storage and was super fast. But Postfix was a pain and I can’t count how often it bit me over the years (and since it’s SMTP, that means something broke in receiving, delivery or was suddenly a spam vector, which all sucks quite hard).
I’ve had a good experience with mailcow. It’s not the most lightweight tho, and spins up quite a few containers.
+1 for mailcow, i’ve been running my mailserver for over 2 years now, very efficient, no hassle setup.
This is what I use as well and it’s pretty painless after setup.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
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Have a look at https://mailu.io/ and https://docs.mailcow.email/
I use mailu, find it quite lightweight as well.
