Mailu VS Mailcow

Made the switch to self-hosted https://mailu.io (on k8s) 2 years ago when Gandi announced the deprecation of their free plan.

Happy after IP was off most blocklists, but setup was kinda rough - https://mxtoolbox.com is your friend.

I'm just going to repeat a bunch of what hughesjj has already said, but anyway:

OPNSense (as my household's internet interface), Unifi Controller (as my household's primary wifi), Jellyfin, Wireguard, Pi-hole, LMS[0], Frigate NVR (migrating off ZoneMinder, awaiting delivery of a Coral TPU to finalise this), couchdb (as Noteself[1] back-end), nginx (serving a handful of sites for my own entertainment), Mailu[2], Calibre[3], various other in-flight experiments (which Home Assistant will soon become, Bitmagnet DHT scraper).

Most of the above are docker instances hosted on a small number of VMs hosted on two (or sometimes three) physical machines running proxmox.

[0]: https://github.com/epoupon/lms (HN lurker)

[1]: https://noteself.org/

[2]: https://mailu.io

[3]: https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/calibre or https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/calibre-... (I can't remember which)

Self hosted - I went for mailu and it's very good:

https://mailu.io/

I didn't enable its Webmail feature though, so I have no idea if it's good or not. I just use Mail on iOS and macOS.

Worth mentioning, if you want a docker-compose ready email server/service there's mailu[1]. It's relatively easy to get up and running, and will guide you through the DNS records for secure mail. I've got a couple test domains up so far, and it's mostly been good. Some outlook.com (not o365) domains have been problematic though, I'm sure everyone has stories here.

If the article's solution were open-source, would be interested in seeing the UI/UX. I also looked into WildDuck with great interest but the lack of good UI/UX is mostly what held me back. If I didn't have to work for a living, and was less lazy, I might have written something.

    1. https://mailu.io/

Consider installing Mailu instead, which is a single Docker container with a full mail server and Roundcube on top. Very easy to install.

I've been using Mailu (https://mailu.io/) for years and have had no problems. I love that it has the concept of domain admins so that people can manage mailboxes for their own domains. DNS isn't automatic, but meh. Upgrading is easy (Docker + automatic migrations).

Mailu is pretty solid for personal use and is lighter on memory than Mailcow

While hosting mail isn't easy, Mailu and similar projects make it way easier than it used to be.

$ cd /opt $ git clone git clone https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized $ cd mailcow-dockerized $ ./generate_config.sh

Funny how they cite https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized/blob/cb0b0235f... as terrifying when it's simple and a single file for me and I'm terrified of lots of small files and that whole systems/redhat approach because it always broke in subtle ways for me.

(Not judging on podman/quad let, just my personal preference)

> Wow... having just gone through a 20+ hour byzantine nightmare of setting up postfix & dovecot

Did you do this by hand / manually, or use a 'pre-canned' solution like:

* https://mailcow.email

* https://workaround.org

If you had a server around, considering just setting up https://mailcow.email/ it's super easy and straigforward. Everything is in docker compose. `docker compose up` and you go.

If you want a hosted SMTP for your own single domain, and volume is low, consider just using AWS SES. I run betterdev.link with it, send about 20k email per months and pay around $2

If finally you want some nice and easy UI to use for email forwarding and SMTP, consider my email forwarding app https://mailwip.com It was built for this use case.

You could go with https://mailcow.email, it's pretty easy to setup and keep up to date.

> Which different provider did you go with?

I actually fell back to Gmail for the time being - I just don't like to "advertise" any Google product for known reasons, even though Gmail is a quite solid product, sorry about the confusion - but that's my temporary solution.

I am planning to either give Migadu a try or host my own mail provider. (I have seen some good feedback about https://mailcow.email)

I've been running mailcow [1] on a Hetzner cloud server for a few years and am pretty happy with it.

[1] https://mailcow.email

I have been searching for a self-hosted suite similar to Google Worksuite. I found the following: 1. Mailcow - https://mailcow.email/

Yes, I switched to mailcow (https://mailcow.email) and installed Roundcube via the excellent tutorial (https://docs.mailcow.email/third_party/roundcube/third_party-roundcube).