postfix VS Haraka

FWIW C can do it too to some extent, here's postfix: https://github.com/vdukhovni/postfix/blob/master/postfix/src...

Postfix.

But that’s only an MTA i hear you cry, Exchange does both MTA & MDA! Bear with me.

Postfix is software to learn from. It might be written in C but the architecture is the epitome of beautiful modular design. It’s not just the meticulous separation of concerns, the care and attention to detail, everything from string handling to memory management is pristinely handled. https://github.com/vdukhovni/postfix

Even at runtime the beauty of the architecture allows for a sysadmin to choose (via master.cf) exactly how the components should be composed to fit their needs. The defaults are crafted for minimum fuss if you just need to get it running ASAP. The software is ergonomic in addition to being artfully crafted.

So what does all this care and attention get you? Only 9 CVEs in 22 years, only 3 of which are code exec, only 2 of which are (maybe) remote code exec, only 1 of which is unauth user RCE - but very hard in practice to exploit.

Maybe it’s just not that popular? It was 1/3 of all SMTP servers on the internet according to a 2019 scan.

So it’s the best MTA ever to exist, but what about MDA? Well, that was the whole point. Compose well crafted components together to build a system. You especially don’t run part of your mailserver’s web interface in kernel space because, well i’m not sure why IIS/Exchange does that :-)

postale.io has an MX record that points to mail.postale.io, which resolves to an AWS IP address (probably an EC2 instance) and has Haraka listening on port 25 (if its SMTP banner can be believed)

I found that Zerodha uses Haraka and Karan–their DevOps guy, mentioned it is easy-setup and performant.

The next time this happens i'll move to a self hosted solution, like haraka or anonaddy

Haraka Like: Simple to hook into the processing pipeline Dislike: Node.js and had some issues with stability when I last tried it

Having another SMTP as a choice is cool but not as fun as something that is way more configurable (ex. Haraka), or API driven (a la Postal).

Look at Haraka: http://haraka.github.io/

For the record, I'm using dovecot (https://www.dovecot.org/) for IMAP and Haraka (https://haraka.github.io/) for SMTP.

I run my own mail servers for small projects, though for my main email I've actually switched to ProtonMail.

It's never been easier to self host your email with projects like the following around:

- https://foxcpp.dev/maddy/

- https://github.com/albertito/chasquid

- https://github.com/haraka/haraka

Of course the usual dovecot + postfix setup is great for learning even if a bit complicated.

Haraka (https://haraka.github.io/) is a plugin-based mailserver written in JavaScript. I've messed with postfix before but found Haraka easier because instead of arcane configuration files I can just read, copy, and tweak a plugin to suit my needs. Policies for receiving, storing, forwarding, and ignoring mail can be arbitrarily complex.