* Maddy: https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy
* Mox: https://github.com/mjl-/mox
* and Stalwart
which all see to aim for more or less the same niche. I wonder if we'll see two of those merge eventually.
My Maildirs "justed worked" though, and have been moved across dozens of servers - not to mention worked in so many different filesystems - over the years.
Now I am able to send reliably to Gmail, and semi-reliably to Outlook.
My mail volumes are very low however. I just setup this as my SMTP server just for the heck of it.
The other contender was getting nixos-mailserver up and running alongside postfixadmin. But with stalwart I wont have to do that wiring up.
Side note: I route outgoing messages to sendgrid.
After I install this via the install script on, say, Debian. An update comes along. What do I do? Run the install script again?
Or does the web UI have a process for initiating an update?
I couldn't find any information on this on the website: I consider this essential information.
[Edit] I found it: https://stalw.art/docs/management/webadmin/usage
That's a little too efficient for my taste.
I've been looking at both Stalwart and Kanidm, I suspect they would be a good pairing.
The software is (perhaps expectedly) not really built to support semi-ephemeral lifetimes, so it took quite a few hacks to get it running in Kubernetes the last time I tried.
As I recall, the primary issue I had was with exposing the certman-provided Let's Encrypt certificates to the kanidm process inside the container in a reasonable fashion. I don't think I found an elegant way of signalling to the kanidm process that the certificates had been renewed and should be reloaded.
ldap is currently a second citizen in stalwart tho so there are rough edges and missing features. But the basics are there
Another feature that would be nice to have built-in is masked hide-my-email aliases for privacy like the cloaked email services from iCloud, FastMail, SimpleLogin, Cloudflare email routing, etc.[1]
For now, I use the typical aliases addresses in Dovecot but it doesn't hide the real email when replying. Also, creating new aliases in Dovecot-based email systems is very tedious and cumbersome because you have to go through the cPanel interface to create them. (Some suggest using the "catchall" feature to avoid the need to manually create new aliases but that advice is not workable when spam robots constantly send emails to new random addresses in your domain.) The cPanel/Dovecot aliases also don't have any metadata so you can add details on what the alias is for and when it was created.
[1] masked email services examples
https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Ma...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing
EDIT ADD to reply : >On Stalwart you can implement masked e-mail using address rewriting
Stalwart's feature of "Sieve scripts" for custom rewriting/filtering is interesting but it's not UI friendly for endusers to create new masked email addresses (and also later delete them). There's also no user-defined metadata. It's also not clear if Sieve scripts can run on outgoing mail rather than just incoming mail. Example of how UI workflow in Apple's Hide My Email is simpler than Stalwart Sieve scripting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRrkJy0vUk&t=34s
Is there anything approaching "Microsoft Exchange" today without the Microsoft or commercial pseudo-FOSS?
We could ofc use Mailchimp but always happy to explore self hosting. Would this or another solution work?
Oh well, might look into it when I have more time. Looks promising though!
* generates a random email
* asks for an optional description
* inserts new email to the database
* adds an entry to postgrey whitelist
* emails me the address and description (so I can search the email address later in my inbox if necessary)
Works a treat for me, but not something my family can use.
Just make sure you set up everything (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) correctly, including the PTR reverse lookup of your server ( really important ).
Key tip: warm up your ip(s). I use mailreach.co ( it has a USD 25/m cost ), reached near 100% deliverability in a month.
I now have barely have any maintenance to do. It just works.
I don't know much about mail server and this must be how people feel when they watch Hollywood movie hacker moment
for recipient in "${recipients[@]}"; do
aws sesv2 send-email \
--from-email-address "$sender" \
--destination "ToAddresses=$recipient" \
--content "Simple={Subject={Data='$subject',Charset='UTF-8'},Body={Text={Data='$body',Charset='UTF-8'}}}" \
--region "$region"
done
If you want an actual product, check out Buttondown. Indie, great support, and amazing APIs.
Tbh I haven't used it in a few years but it was super useful. I see it's a one-time cost of $69 (used to be $29 but that was over a decade ago).
Disclaimer: I'm in contact with the founder after stumbling on HackerNews and I'm trying to help revive this awesome and economical tool. (I'm not paid.)
For context, getting out of the sandbox at every org I worked at was essentially a single ticket with the word please and had almost immediate approval.
For my own account for a low volume form notification tool I wrote AWS’s response was ‘We will not approve your request and we will not revisit this decision’.
Stalwart might be a good use case for your business/employee mail account handling, however.
It's not perfect ( a bit slow ), but really easy to set up and configure. Which was the main draw.
It seems Stalwart also makes it easy in their UI based on the gif in the post. You can see at some point a list of DNS entries to update.
The only missing thing in all these is the PTR record which needs to be set up at the hosting level.
A good tool to check if everything is OK is https://www.mail-tester.com/
Most of the movie hacker moment is often people who want to setup and configure and maintain each component of an email server manually, compared to a reasonably compiled package to allow more administration of it.
If this package isn't someone's cup of tea, products like MDaemon continue to exist and crush it for self-hosting email using a windows server just fine for the past 15-20y.
https://gist.github.com/johnnydecimal/e7b1a03e26b79239363b5d...
Though I've since updated that to include a .txt file as the body vs. typing it out in the email. But that's easy enough.
I might have added TXT records to satisfy DKIM etc., I don't remember. There are guides on the Amazon site; I'm a bit of a dummy when it comes to this so if I worked it out it must have been obvious enough.
It's a bit of a grey area thing in fairness.
Trying to game the system is frowned upon in all cases.