Modern full-featured mail server for low-maintenance self-hosted email

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • Mailu

    Insular email distribution - mail server as Docker images

    The scope isn't revolutionary - I've used https://mailu.io/ for years for a few 10s of users, and I really like it. I've heard similar good stories from Mailcow users.

    On a quick skim I couldn't tell what was new relative to these older compose-based solutions but (as co-author of similar solution 10-15 years ago) I'm interested to know!

  • Mail-in-a-Box

    Mail-in-a-Box helps individuals take back control of their email by defining a one-click, easy-to-deploy SMTP+everything else server: a mail server in a box.

    I've set up my email using Mail-in-a-box [0] and it's worked wonderfully. How does this compare with Mail-in-a-box?

    Also, webmail, calendaring are future features in this product. I wonder how critical are those for people setting up their own email.

    [0]: https://mailinabox.email

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • mox

    modern full-featured open source secure mail server for low-maintenance self-hosted email

  • maddy

    ✉️ Composable all-in-one mail server.

    I wonder how does it compare to Maddy mail server: https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy

  • osin

    Golang OAuth2 server library (by openshift)

    For my own server I used the osin[1] library.

    [1] https://github.com/openshift/osin

  • If you are familiar with NixOS, and like to have everything declared in Nix configuration, Simple NixOS Mailserver is very robust and easy to use. Have been using it for ~2 years.

    https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver

  • docker-mailserver

    Production-ready fullstack but simple mail server (SMTP, IMAP, LDAP, Antispam, Antivirus, etc.) running inside a container.

    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

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • bore

    🕳 bore is a simple CLI tool for making tunnels to localhost

    Wireguard itself can help you out with the task of forwarding traffic or creating an overlay network. There's also ngrok and tailscale for forwarding traffic and doing NAT traversal. Except for wireguard, these are commercial platforms, the open source alternatives I know of, are (respectively):

    - https://bore.pub && https://sslip.io

  • headscale

    An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server

    - https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

    I don't think of anyone using this kind of tools for emails, the technical limitations elude my understanding TBH. This comment might be border to off-topic, but I think the tools fill in the niche use-case you just mentioned. Have fun!

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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