mox VS emailengine

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.

When I started with https://emailengine.app, a similar product, I also considered releasing it as a SaaS. But looking at the competition, it seemed too complicated for me (just look at the compliance list for Nylas Email API https://www.nylas.com/security/#compliance ). Will be interesting to see how it works out for you. Good luck!

EmailEngine has all the code public [1], even though it is not open-source but is source-available. Some core parts I even published under the MIT license, like the IMAP client library I built from scratch to serve the special requirements EmailEngine has for IMAP access [2]

My thinking has always been that those who try to hack the license validation stuff and replace the missing build pipeline were never going to be my customers in the first place, so every second I would spend on them is a wasted effort.

[1] https://github.com/postalsys/emailengine

https://github.com/postalsys/emailengine

Seems open-source to me.

Well, I for one, hope that email stays as complicated as described in the post. Otherwise my project that simplifies access to email accounts (https://emailengine.app) would get no traction :D

I'd like to know if anyone here can share some experience using https://emailengine.app in a larger environment, e.g. managing / watching 100-200 email accounts and processing ~50.000-100.000 mails per day?

I had the same issues when I started with https://emailengine.app - just like Ghost, it’s an app written in Nodejs. I tried multiple distribution options at first and finally went with complete self containment. All modules are pre-installed during the publishing step and thus the user never needs to run npm. Or if you download the “compiled” single binary version you don’t even need node as it’s bundled with the binary (I use the pkg module to bundle these executables). So upgrading is just downloading and replacing the old version files with new ones.

The dowside - no sane way to use compiled dependencies, everything has to be vanilla javascript.