mox VS docker-mailserver

It's interesting how there is now

* 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.

Pitching my own: https://github.com/mjl-/mox has a "mox localserve" subcommand that runs a mail server on localhost for testing, including a pedantic mode and special addresses that cause failure conditions you may want to test for. This is actually a full mail server (SMTP, IMAP and much more) and it comes with a webmail client. The "localserve" mode was just so easy to implement that I couldn't resist.

Just run your own mail server on a Pi at home and get your ISP to set up a PTR record for you, assuming you are on a static IP. Mox is good and outputs all of the instructions for DNS etc.:

https://github.com/mjl-/mox

I have setup a mail server (thank you mox ) hosted on VPS in Linode and everything seems fine: no issue on SPF, DMARC, DKIM records, the reputation of the domain and of the IP is okay and the IP is not in any blacklist. Unfortunately, Google and MS are rejecting my emails, even if I added the DNS records that they asked to add in order validate my domain.

I can recommend Docker mailserver (it also works with Podman). It is already pretty lightweight but you can even make it lighter and it has an active community as well as regular updates.

https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest/ https://www.programonaut.com/how-to-host-a-mail-server-with-docker-for-free-step-by-step/

Use https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver or mailcow . They both provide reasonable default setup for spam detection and even UI for adjusting settings.

" this docker based mail server looks pretty legit https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver "

Check https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver It has almost everything in a single docker image. Email is not the easiest to implement with container(s), but that project has managed it.

I set up docker-mailserver[0] Monday in ~6 hours, most of which were me trying to be fancy using podman instead of docker and dealing with SELinux. But then again I did choose it over mail-in-a-box for just that level of customization. Obviously I can't tell how reliable it will be in the long run yet, but since it's using the classic Postfix/Dovecot stack I expect it'll be pretty stable

[0] https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver