Self-hosted email is the hardest it's ever been, but also the easiest

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

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  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
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  • Listmonk

    High performance, self-hosted, newsletter and mailing list manager with a modern dashboard. Single binary app.

    Funnily enough, I'm actually working on something (a proxy) that turns the Mailgun API into SMTP/Listmonk[0], since I was annoyed that Ghost only allows Mailgun.

    Great to hear they're a solution for this though -- will update my article to reflect them next to ImprovMX.

    [0]: https://github.com/knadh/listmonk

  • aws-lambda-ses-forwarder

    Serverless email forwarding using AWS Lambda and SES

    > Could there be a serverless alternative where the service wakes up only to receive emails and will be charged only when emails are processed, filtered and served & rest of the time no charge - avoiding $3 to $5 charged by behemoths per inbox?

    I love ideas as much as the next guy and serverless email is kind of floating out there:

    https://medium.com/schibsted-engineering/building-a-serverle...

    https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder

    https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email

    It's possible to build it, but the problem is that you still have the same problem of deliverability. Obviously it works fine/great for receving emails though.

    > Idea is how cheap can it go for personal inbox with all the features denied by the superlative pricing plans

    It could get really cheap, but would people buy it? I always wonder if price is really the limiting factor for self hosted emails.

    Zoho is already QUITE cheap: https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

    Maybe this would work as a business, but it's a bit questionable to me.

  • 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.

  • 0x4447_product_s3_email

    📫 A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

    > Could there be a serverless alternative where the service wakes up only to receive emails and will be charged only when emails are processed, filtered and served & rest of the time no charge - avoiding $3 to $5 charged by behemoths per inbox?

    I love ideas as much as the next guy and serverless email is kind of floating out there:

    https://medium.com/schibsted-engineering/building-a-serverle...

    https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder

    https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email

    It's possible to build it, but the problem is that you still have the same problem of deliverability. Obviously it works fine/great for receving emails though.

    > Idea is how cheap can it go for personal inbox with all the features denied by the superlative pricing plans

    It could get really cheap, but would people buy it? I always wonder if price is really the limiting factor for self hosted emails.

    Zoho is already QUITE cheap: https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

    Maybe this would work as a business, but it's a bit questionable to me.

  • wildduck

    Opinionated email server

    The largest WildDuck installation manages 100k+ email accounts with around 300TB of stored emails. So it does not always have to be one of the old and tried softwares. https://wildduck.email/

  • proton-bridge

    Proton Mail Bridge application

    Also avoid using ProtonMail Bridge if you value your emails. It's been silently corrupting/deleting your emails for years now. And Proton hasn't done a single thing to warn users about it. Instead they've been working on a complete rewrite which is far from completion. Meanwhile people are still discovering that their emails are disappearing.

    https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge/issues/29

  • mCaptcha

    A no-nonsense CAPTCHA system with seamless UX | Backend component

  • 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'm surprised no-one in the comments has mentioned MailInABox [0].

    On recommendations here, I switched to it 2 or 3 months ago from Gmail, after Google announced they were going to start charging for Gmail on custom domains. I'd no previous experience at all with running my own mailservers and had always been put off by how complicated it seemed.

    Even with a non supported configuration setup [running the mailserver for my domain on a separate VPS from the domain itself] MIAB setup was pretty easy. I had it installed and was up and running in no time. I then spent a couple of days setting up the various DMARC MTA-STS policies etc. [most of that time involved looking up what they were and why I needed them!] and [after testing with an unimportant account] migrating the rest of mine and my family's and friends' emails across from Gmail. I was able to import half a dozen accounts from Gmail with about 8GB of emails between them, using ImapSync [1]

    So far [fingers crossed] it's been almost painless. Giving the lie to the commonly held belief that running your own mailservers needs constant hands-on maintenance. My MIAB setup runs quite happily on a $5/month Linode [I checked the IP was not on any blacklists, before I started] and the whole thing has been pretty much 'fire and forget'. MIAB sends me weekly reports on what's been happening. Software updates are a one-liner in the terminal and I've had no trouble whatsoever with Google, Microsoft etc. as regards the mail not getting through.

    If you've always hankered after running your own mailserver but [as I did] thought it was too difficult and required too much 'hands on' tinkering, I heartily recommend you give MIAB a go.

    DISCLAIMER: I run a couple of dozen email addresses on 3 or 4 domains on my MIAB. Probably sending and receiving a few hundred emails a week between them. YMMV if you're a heavier user than this.

    [0] https://mailinabox.email/

    [1] https://imapsync.lamiral.info/

  • InfluxDB

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  • ImapSync

    Imapsync is an IMAP transfers tool. The purpose of imapsync is to migrate IMAP accounts or to backup IMAP accounts. IMAP is one of the three current standard protocols to access mailboxes, the two others are POP3 and HTTP with webmails, webmails are often tied to an IMAP server. Upstream website is

    I'm surprised no-one in the comments has mentioned MailInABox [0].

    On recommendations here, I switched to it 2 or 3 months ago from Gmail, after Google announced they were going to start charging for Gmail on custom domains. I'd no previous experience at all with running my own mailservers and had always been put off by how complicated it seemed.

    Even with a non supported configuration setup [running the mailserver for my domain on a separate VPS from the domain itself] MIAB setup was pretty easy. I had it installed and was up and running in no time. I then spent a couple of days setting up the various DMARC MTA-STS policies etc. [most of that time involved looking up what they were and why I needed them!] and [after testing with an unimportant account] migrating the rest of mine and my family's and friends' emails across from Gmail. I was able to import half a dozen accounts from Gmail with about 8GB of emails between them, using ImapSync [1]

    So far [fingers crossed] it's been almost painless. Giving the lie to the commonly held belief that running your own mailservers needs constant hands-on maintenance. My MIAB setup runs quite happily on a $5/month Linode [I checked the IP was not on any blacklists, before I started] and the whole thing has been pretty much 'fire and forget'. MIAB sends me weekly reports on what's been happening. Software updates are a one-liner in the terminal and I've had no trouble whatsoever with Google, Microsoft etc. as regards the mail not getting through.

    If you've always hankered after running your own mailserver but [as I did] thought it was too difficult and required too much 'hands on' tinkering, I heartily recommend you give MIAB a go.

    DISCLAIMER: I run a couple of dozen email addresses on 3 or 4 domains on my MIAB. Probably sending and receiving a few hundred emails a week between them. YMMV if you're a heavier user than this.

    [0] https://mailinabox.email/

    [1] https://imapsync.lamiral.info/

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