Mailu VS Mail-in-a-Box

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.

I looked into Purelymail when searching around for good email solution. Google Workspace was getting a bit costly and there were too many things I did not need.

Zoho Mail provides another option - $1.95 per month I think for my use where I am (AU) and has all the features I need for my small indie business.

One other option I tried was to actually run mail myself with Linode VPS - https://mailinabox.email/

I know it sounds a little scary at the start running your own thing, but so far it's been working out great - zero issues so far. I may turn off Zoho one day and go fully into self-hosted option.

Sorry for the late reply.

I've heard good things about Mail-in-a-Box[0], but haven't used it myself (although I have/do use(d) a bunch of the servers/tools amalgamated into the product).

The setup guide[1][2] also gives a good overview of implementation requirements.

Have fun!

[0] https://mailinabox.email/

[1] https://mailinabox.email/guide.html

[2] Annoyingly, the setup guide wants to you 'curl setup.sh | bash'. You might want to check it out first at https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox

Mail-In-a-Box (MIAB)[1] comes with a built in nameserver. I think you may use it as a standalone DNS even for the domain names whose email is not managed by MIAB. Not sure about any benefit of doing it this way though.

[1] https://mailinabox.email

may i recommend https://mailinabox.email ?