Mox – modern, secure, all-in-one email server
263 comments
·March 5, 2025QuadrupleA
citrin_ru
> postfix & dovecot's 20+ years of legacy cruft
That's not my experince - I use postfix and dovecot for years and they are rare examples of high quality software to me. I don't see any cruft. They are flexible which make learning and configuration harder compare to opinionated software where most decisions made for you by a developer and you have not choice but to accept them. I myself view sometimes see flexibility as a disadvantage but IMHO they strike a good balance. Postix often criticized by Exim user for not being flexible/configurable enough. And they don't force to use unix accounts, it's just one of options.
Having said that I would agree that using a mail server which combines all in one package is easier than unix way with multiple specialized parts combined. For a novice it could be a challenge to stichs (configure) multiple parts together, especially if you don't know how to test each part separately and blidnly follow some how-to.
Where you can find plenty of legacy cruft is mail standards and implmenting them correctly is not an esty task that's why I trust Postfix and wary of anything new until it battle tested on a large number of servers.
QuadrupleA
You may have just forgotten the pain of the learning curve? Admittedly postfix & dovecot are way more sane than rspamd. But their whole default config (and something like 50% of the options and documentation) are oriented around UNIX system accounts for each of your mail users, which seems insane and 80s-era to me (let's go dial up to the mainframe at 300 baud and see if we have any mail). It takes dozens of pages of documentation to orient yourself away from all that, understand Postfix's "address classes", that you generally want "virtual mailboxes", etc. No support for DKIM, except through sendmail-invented "milters", of which Postfix heartily recommends you to OpenDKIM, a project which hasn't been touched in 10+ years, doesn't support EC signing, is not packaged on most distros, is documented on a outdated non-https site with sparse even more out-of-date plaintext documentation, referring you to a defunct FTP site to download the code, etc. And milter requires setting up a UNIX or inet socket and tedious configuration, etc. etc.
Poor support for SASL, at least for mail users looking to god forbid send an email and relay it to the internet, and password-protect against random spammers doing the same, referring you instead to Dovecot SASL - also legacy cruft (partly the SASL protocol designers' fault), SASL has numerous "mechanisms" but nearly everybody uses just the PLAIN mechanism, ensuring a TLS channel is established first, which is about 10 lines of code to implement.
Just a ton of unnecessary legacy cruft IMHO.
conradev
There is also https://github.com/stalwartlabs/mail-server
elliotali
Using this now, and love it. For easy mail reception and sending, mail-in-a-box does it all for you (if you don't mind opinionated, but stable) and Stalwart does it all for you and is highly configurable, including an oauth2 server and more. Keen to try Mox, but I think it went viral and their website accidentally got ddos'ed.
guillermin
I've been using mail-in-a-box for 5 years and I couldn't be happier. For me, stability is the #1 concern for an email server, and mail-in-a-box is really set it and forget it. I also like that it includes CalDAV and CardDAV, so it served as a complete substitute to Google Mail+Contacts+Calendar.
throw0101d
> Wow... having just gone through a 20+ hour byzantine nightmare of setting up postfix & dovecot
Did you do this by hand / manually, or use a 'pre-canned' solution like:
kbmn
Comparison between Mailcow and Mox:
Mailcow (from https://docs.mailcow.email/getstarted/prerequisite-system/#m...):
A single SOGo worker can acquire ~350 MiB RAM before it gets purged. The more ActiveSync connections you plan to use, the more RAM you will need. A default configuration spawns 20 workers.
*RAM usage examples*
A company with 15 phones (EAS enabled) and about 50 concurrent IMAP connections should plan 16 GiB RAM.
6 GiB RAM + 1 GiB swap are fine for most private installations while 8 GiB RAM are recommended for ~5 to 10 users.
I checked with htop, and my Mox process currently takes <100 MB.
bsdice
Took me weeks to perfect our own setup based on Postfix, Dovecot, Roundcube with some patches, rspamd with attachment-type whitelisting and a bazillion other features, clamav with extra patterns, plus the many tweaks and enhancements you need to dig out from obscure places.
Like fts-flatcurve, an archive plugin for dovecot that can find stuff in 30 years worth of mails in a second, over IMAP in Roundcube. Or rspamd settings to blacklist not a single IP but an entire ASN of misbehaving colo clients. IMAP with namespaces is also a true pain to configure. Or setting bzip2 compression for an auto-expunged journal for spam, and archive without expunge. Painful.
If you made it this far, you will find that your IP address is tainted. So choosing a hoster that keeps his backyard clean from spammers is necessary, otherwise you will suffer by association. Did I mention SPF records in DNS.
So I consider our server a piece of art. 30 years in operating systems certainly helped.
jcarrano
I once set up qmail on a home server. Looking back, I have no idea how I managed.
coob
It is a rite of passage. That config system…
KronisLV
I just gave up and now use https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver
It hasn’t given me many issues so far! Nice to see new options popping up, though!
sgt
I ended up changing to mailu recently, very happy with it. https://mailu.io
BLKNSLVR
Seconding for mailu. I've had a mailu server running for at least a couple of years that requires very little on-going maintenance, but I don't use it daily or for anything personally mission critical.
When I do need it, however, it's there, humming away happily.
sgt
Btw, I ended up disabling webmail. I don't the users really need it. Nothing will compare to the Gmail experience anyway, so might as well just encourage people to use proper Mail clients like Mail.app or Mail on iOS.
rytis
> Nothing will compare to the Gmail experience
I think this might be a matter of personal preferences. Personally I find GMail very confusing, and not that user friendly.
FastMail UI is so much more intuitive. For me.
aryonoco
I used to think Gmail’s interface was excellent until I moved to Fastmail.
GTP
This isn't a project unique in his genre. There are also others like Mailu[0] that, although different in the implementation (Docker containers abstracting away the hard parts of deploying "traditional" components) share the spirit of having a self-contained project that is easy to deploy. Are there some specific reasons why you didn't go the Mailu (or some similar project) way? I'm asking because, every now and then, I have the itch of deploying my own mail server to be used for my side projects (nothing commercial), so if you have an opinion on those projects I would be curious to hear it.
[0] mailu.io
kbmn
I've hosted my mailserver myself for years now. I recently (a number of months ago) have started using Mox for my mail server (after using stalwart, manual postfix/dovecot, a couple others). It's a perfect solution for a small personal mailserver.
It's among the simplest (/least complicated) mail servers I've used, and I have to waste basically zero time on it. Running backup & update every couple months takes <5 min.
However, I noticed: when I showcase it to some people, some of them mistake the very simple minimalist web interface for being ‘outdated’ or similar - it appears that to be "modern", things are required to be extremely bloated, and even technical people look down on fast (seriously: try it) clutter-less design.
volemo
I’m honestly curious, what’s the point of a personal mail server nowadays? Isn’t it the case that today they have two huge disadvantages:
1. Being plagued by spam,
2. Being considered spam by major mail services (where most of one’s recipients will usually reside)?
Do you face these problems? How do you manage? Are there any potential problems I don’t see?
kbmn
> I’m honestly curious, what’s the point of a personal mail server nowadays?
With a catch-all domain, you can email <anything>@example.org, and I will get it. I don't have to first generate some addy.io or simplelogin.io or Firefox Relay alias; I can simply enter <company name>@example.org or <service>@example.org when registering on a website, hell I do that even on physical (paper) forms.
Later on, I can decide to add an alias with special configuration, e.g.: email arrives at <tax department>@example.org? → Route to "High importance" mailbox; I receive a Newsletter from a company I never heard of → <company name>@example.org sold my email address (and they can't strip the marker off, which they easily could with the +suffix).
> Isn’t it the case that today they have two huge disadvantages:
> 1. Being plagued by spam,
My spam folder currently contains 0 elements.
And I don't even have any advanced spam filtering or reputation blacklists or anything similar setup.
> 2. Being considered spam by major mail services (where most of one’s recipients will usually reside)?
I do not remember mails of mine not reaching their intended receiver very often - while this might happen once a year (that you send an email and one second after get a "your message could not be delivered" response), I actually hear about this more often from peers using the largest email provider in the DACH region (GMX), so apparently I rank better? It's usually a misconfiguration from the receiver setting up some scam DNS blocklist (e.g. UCEPROTECT). Wouldn't call this a problem of the mail server though, and as I said, even some rather large (commercial) providers have the same issue.
Generally speaking, if you do things right, email will go well for you - this "doing things right" has simply for a long time been quite hard (when postfix/dovecot was prevalent where you need n-number of different third-party software packages, e.g. OpenDMARC). Nowadays, with the modern mail servers available, like Mox (or Stalwart, or Maddy) doing "things right" is very simple: Choose an hoster/ISP with good IP reputation (e.g. check with https://multirbl.valli.org/ if they are on any blocklists), setup your (modern) mailserver, and you're golden.
And this will come with a nice number of advantages:
- you have your own domain, so you're portable
- you control and are able to customize your email infrastructure (how many mailboxes do I want for my use cases, how would I like different aliases to be mapped to them, catch-all/wildcard, applying scripts on these mailboxes, etc)
- privacy/security: Your email (which I consider deeply core to the modern internet infrastructure and ones digital identity (due to controlling the login to basically all websites)) lives on your infrastructure, and no-one but you can access them
- selfhosting is fun, and one gains lots of knowledge about inner workings of the internet with it
jwr
So happy to see that. Hopefully more people will run their own E-mail instead of being slaves to the large adtech "free" e-mail providers. We need more balance on the Internet.
razemio
I tried for several years. There where to many issues. Even a perfectly configured mail server landed in spam folders of smaller providers. Had to constantly whitelist my server manually with the big providers. For 1-8 dollars a month, it was simply not worth it for me. Switch to encrypted mails where privacy matters. It is not like my emails land on private servers anyway, so the privacy aspect is more of a symbolic gesture than a real thing.
kazinator
You can't run your own e-mail, or not entirely. It's practically impossible to send SMTP from your own IP address. For sending SMTP, you need to go through a smarthost that has reputation.
If your ISP provides you with an e-mail setup that you can use with a conventional mail client where you enter IMAP4 and SMTP credentials, chances are you can use that for SMTP sending. I.e. from the perspective of sending mail, your ISP can't tell that you're a server; it thinks it's just Outlook or Thunderbird connecting to it.
Receiving mail is no problem; your ISP just must not be blocking port 25.
It's handy to give yourself mobile access. When I send mail from my phone, it connects to port 537 of my own mail server which provides authenticated SMTP over TLS. It forwards to the aforementioned ISP. (I can't connect directly to my home ISP's SMTP server from my phone because the phone is on a mobile network unrelated to that ISP; the ISP's SMTP forwarding servers are firewalled so only the subscriber addresses can talk to them.)
mmooss
Mox's FAQ addresses this question:
https://www.xmox.nl/faq/#hdr-won-t-the-big-email-providers-b...
Won't the big email providers block my email?
It is a common misconception that it is impossible to run your own email server nowadays. The claim is that the handful big email providers will simply block your email. However, you can run your own email server just fine, and your email will be accepted, provided you are doing it right.
If your email is rejected, it is often because your IP address has a bad email sending reputation. Email servers often use IP blocklists to reject email networks with a bad email sending reputation. These blocklists often work at the level of whole network ranges. So if you try to run an email server from a hosting provider with a bad reputation (which happens if they don't monitor their network or don't act on abuse/spam reports), your IP too will have a bad reputation and other mail servers (both large and small) may reject messages coming from you. During the quickstart, mox checks if your IPs are on a few often-used blocklists. It's typically not a good idea to host an email server on the cheapest or largest cloud providers: They often don't spend the resources necessary for a good reputation, or they simply block all outgoing SMTP traffic. It's better to look for a technically-focused local provider. They too may initially block outgoing SMTP connections on new machines to prevent spam from their networks. But they will either automatically open up outgoing SMTP traffic after a cool down period (e.g. 24 hours), or after you've contacted their support.
After you get past the IP blocklist checks, email servers use many more signals to determine if your email message could be spam and should be rejected. Mox helps you set up a system that doesn't trigger most of the technical signals (e.g. with SPF/DKIM/DMARC). But there are more signals, for example: Sending to a mail server or address for the first time. Sending from a newly registered domain (especially if you're sending automated messages, and if you send more messages after previous messages were rejected), domains that existed for a few weeks to a month are treated more friendly. Sending messages with content that resembles known spam messages.
Should your email be rejected, you will typically get an error message during the SMTP transaction that explains why. In the case of big email providers the error message often has instructions on how to prove to them you are a legitimate sender.
kazinator
That FAQ doesn't address anything. Suppose you're in a blacklisted block. Now what? Most residential IPs are blacklisted.
When I say I'm self-hosting, I mean I have a machine under a table right here in my home: True Scotsman's cotsman's self-hosting.
razemio
This FAQ is in complete disregard of reality. Almost all IP ranges of server providers are blocked. Getting a clean IP is close to impossible.
Big providers often only support their own forms and ignore open sources trust providers.
Small providers often do not maintain their email services which will simply auto spam your mail/domain, when it does not come from the big 10 providers.
null
Avamander
Using an ISP's SMTP is an incredibly obsolete and problematic concept. Poorly authenticated with even worse deliverability. It was a bad idea even 10 years ago and it's just horrid right now.
Use your email provider's SMTP, even if it's you yourself.
durakot
This just isn't true, of course you can, you just need to use a hosting provider or ISP that allows it. Plenty do.
kazinator
It's not whether the hosting provider or ISP allows it, it's whether the address they give you has reputation so that mail servers all over the world allow connections from it.
khimaros
hetzner allows outbound smtp by request. the process is relatively painless and quick.
jks
Yes, but the process of getting Gmail, Outlook etc to receive your emails and put them in recipients' inboxes is far from painless or quick. An IP address with a clean history and SPF/DKIM/DMARC are table stakes, but then you get to play the "my emails are randomly dropped today while everything looked fine yesterday" game.
sgt
Been running my own mail server since 1999 or so. No issues.
zimpenfish
> Been running my own mail server since 1999 or so.
Same.
> No issues.
Many issues.
ggm
You're grandfathered in. Fresh starts face an uphill battle with taint and reputation.
dizhn
Re mail deliverability. My experience so different than what you are saying that I take comments like this as regurgitating FUD at this point. Please do not do it. Even google is mostly OK with just spf or dkim. It really isn't that hard to host your own email.
gbear605
I’m on an open source email list, where a lot of users self host their email. They have all the correct things done by the book. But gmail sends them all to my spam box, despite my continuing to mark them as not spam. Some even don’t appear in the spam box, despite other users on the list receiving the emails just fine.
icameron
They also want a PTR record on your IP to match your SMTP banner matching you hostname. Having an mx record for you sender domain also helps. Just sending form an IP address usually is tagged spam in my experience. Its weird their FAQ doesn't mention reverse DNS at all, its a very important step in having a good sender reputation.
WhyNotHugo
It’s mostly Microsoft that is a problem. I’ve heard of a couple of cases in the past years where recipients used Microsoft’s services and never received emails from small self-hosted servers (where SPF, DKIM, etc were all properly set up).
If your client uses MS for email and doesn’t receive your invoices, it becomes a big deal.
jimmaswell
I've had mild but inconsistent success sending to gmail with a perfect setup with 100% compliant dkim and spf, but Microsoft servers might be flat-out unreachable with no way to appeal:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35691618
In the end I set up a gmail account just to route all my outgoing mail through, with a whitelist of specific servers I know won't reject me for no reason (i.e. a few very small email services or friends who also self-host). Defeats half of the purpose but what can you do? There's nothing else I can possibly do to make my emails reach hotmail inboxes - I've exhausted all of their phony support channels and advice articles and clearly they just want me to go away and stop self-hosting.
devmor
I am sending and receiving emails on a small rack server in a datacenter for 40+ domains, and have had no real issues with deliverability. YMMV but I believe the reputation problem is heavily skewed against cloud providers such as VPS hosts more than anything.
AnonHP
I’m curious to know how you could know if any emails you send are getting silently dropped. Do you check with the recipient again and/or through other modes of communication?
kazinator
What you have is really great. Hoeever, if I had a small rack server in a data center, I wouldn't be able to call it self-hosted with a straight face, unless I had an uncle who owns a 60% share of the data center or something.
arp242
There are plenty of free non-adtech alternatives: Proton, Tuta, probably others. Even more options if you're willing to pay a few monetary units/month for it. You don't really need to run your own email server.
fareesh
- Where does one get an affordable server that isn't on a blacklist somewhere?
- What happens when one of the big cloud providers arbitrarily start putting your emails in spam?
Are there solutions to this? It feels like the biggest value provided by "big email" are these two things
dwedge
Those are the two problems caused by "big email". I've used hetzner, ovh and mythic beasts and had no issue with blacklisted IPs, and if you follow the Mox instructions you will be trusted and shouldn't get put in spam
jmb99
For your first point, the key is an IP range that isn’t on a blocklist. Pick a very reputable hosting provider (not AWS/GCP/Azure), who has strict no-spam rules, and check out some spam reports from their ranges. Hetzner I’ve heard is good, digitalocean as well, but your mileage may vary.
For your second point, you live with it. I haven’t found a solution, at least. I’ve never landed in spam for corporate offerings (cloud O365, google workspace or whatever they call it now) or (very rare these days) anyone self-hosting with rspamd or equivalent, just regular personal mail (hotmail, gmail, iCloud, etc). That’s usually pretty easy to detect and work around (“hey I sent you an email” “oh I didn’t get it” “did you check your junk?”) Irritating, but not the end of the world.
I’m going to try hosting from my residential IP sometime this year, now that I have sufficient redundancy in terms of power and networking. I don’t know if I’ll have better or worse luck than with hosting providers’ IP ranges, though.
grepfru_it
Bro, I owned a /23 at a colo for over 10 years. Registered my ip space with ARIN, had abuse contacts, setup a mail server on a /27 on a /24 that remained mostly unused outside of dev and test servers (strictly controlled). The mail server was also strictly configured to never emit a single email that wasn’t sent by me. So no forwards, no bounces etc.
Mail server still gets blocked by random domains. Nope. Done with hosting email. Everyone assumes you are spam and won’t accept your mail unless you pay them (to be your mail provider).
pjc50
If people just want to stick it to the Man by moving out of the cloud, then the solution might be "medium email": hosted by a commercial provider, so you don't have to do all the admin, but not self-hosted.
pmlnr
My ISP, Zen, in the UK, gives static IPs. That, combined with residential fiber and a thin client makes excellent mini server at home.
gostsamo
I self host on hetzner. ticket to support to open 25 and mailbox on a 5euro machine.
nmz
We won't have much choice, last year yahoo implemented a limit on COPY so you couldn't move or delete more than 10 mails at once. this broke claws-mail, I think its good now but I still moved on to another "free" service.
Mixing email with the drive service in the account is actively hostile.
durakot
It's cool to see some new modern all-in-one email solutions. Stalwart is another good one. Would be even cooler to see this lead to a bit of a resurgence of small and self-hosted email providers.
Avamander
Stalwart does seem much more modern and feature-complete however.
ehnto
I hope it does. We have to get through the challenging issue of convincing big tech companies that our small email servers are not spam however.
durakot
I've self-hosted email on and off since the mid 2000s and my impression is that with the widespread adoption of DKIM/DMARC, the large providers have toned down the spam-by-default treatment of small/unknown email servers. Even Microsoft a bit, though you still have to get your IP whitelisted to send to outlook.com addresses usually.
goku12
That's perhaps because you have been self-hosting that long. One of the advises given to new self-hosters these days is to start sending mail to your your friends' email accounts that are hosted by the bigtech. Then you have to contact each one and ask them to mark it as not-spam, so that some day your mails will go to their inboxes, rather than the spam folder.
Honestly, I don't think that DKIM/DMARC has made the situation any better. In fact, spamassassin and rspamd often seems to work better than their spam filters in identifying actual spam.
VladVladikoff
Microsoft is absolutely hell to deal with. Especially if you are hosted on Linode. They frequently ban entire linode subnets. I’ve had to resort to routing all send mail via Amazon AWS SES just because of Microsoft’s IP range bans. It’s not what I’m doing, but my neighbours.
petee
I haven't tried sending to Outlook, but so far I'm getting through Google with just a strict SPF and a DNSSEC domain. Very low volume, to the point I assume reputation isn't being tracked. Just an observation
ehnto
That's really great to hear, I haven't self hosted since maybe 2015. I must admit I assumed things would surely have gotten worse, not better.
jwr
This doesn't seem to be a problem anymore. What is a problem, though, is big tech companies spamming us incessantly and doing almost nothing to prevent that.
I get 10-20 spam E-mails a day from AWS, Google and Microsoft. Forwarding spam to their abuse@ contacts doesn't seem to do anything. And I can't block them, like I would a smaller spammer.
VladVladikoff
Haha the best part is when the same Gmail or outlook address spams you again two weeks after reporting that very same address to abuse@gmail/outlook.
null
dyzdyz010
Stalwart isn't really an all-in-one solution, it doesn't have webmail functionalities, just a backend.
throawayonthe
the FAQ claims it does have a web interface; is it not really functional, or something else? never used it myself
AAAAaccountAAAA
That's an admin interface, to configure the server. Webmail is something that one uses to read the mails.
leptons
Self-hosting email is a fool's errand. I used to do it. I'll never do it again. It requires way too much specific knowledge about how the entire email system works. You have to really want to learn everything about running an email server and everything about email to be successful, and even then your ISP could get in the way, as well as all kinds of spam blocker services that you have to deal with to get your special email server unblocked. It was a nightmare, and it's honestly worth paying a few bucks a month for someone else to deal with that. I have a ton of other way more important things to do with my time.
null
dwedge
Email hosting is absolutely the lowest maintenance of everything I host. For anyone else reading this, if you follow 'mox quickstart' it will help you set up your DNS correctly so you don't have the above experience.
VladVladikoff
I have some questions for the creator of this software if they happen to be paying attention to this thread. I have been running a small scale email server for about 10 different related business domains. Currently we use iRedMail. 1) Does the webmail client support 2FA? 2) Is it possible to do 2FA in thunderbird? 3) Can I make custom rules for BEC attacks (ideally I want to define “FirstName LastName” => email@domain.com whitelists using regex patterns. We get a LOT of very targeted BEC attacks and we have found this is the best way to handle it. We have it very locked down now. Yes we also do employee education on what to look for but this also helps. 4) does the webmail client do banners like “this sender is outside of your org” or “you have never received an email from this sender beige” etc.
Thanks!
mjl-
1. no 2fa in the webmail yet. work is currently underway at the ietf for standardizing chained SASL (auth) mechanisms, and passkeys. i want to look at implementing passkeys already for the web interfaces, but there is much more on the todo-list... 2. i as shown by yamrzou, i don't think so. SASL auth really just uses 1 auth mechanism at the moment. i think there is also standardiziation work underway for password+totp sasl authentication. but clients (like thunderbird) would still have to implement it before it's useful. there may be a trick to get 2fa-like authentication now, using both TLS client cert authentication (mox supports this based on public key identification, no other properties of certs) and a IMAP/SMTP-level SASL authentication. 3. no, but this is interesting. what kind of rules would you set? rules to match specific message headers/content that identify a message a phishing and reject it? for when attackers send the same message to many employees? do you need to remove messages from their inboxes after it has been delivered (assuming all employees would get the email at around the same time)? 4. no, but i've considered adding it. it should be very simple to add. and it's much better than mail servers modifying the message content to add messages like that.
yamrzou
Apparently, it doesn't support 2FA (yet). From https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/mox-modern-full-featured...:
> Another is 2FA. It would be relatively easy to implement in the web interfaces, but not with SMTP (submission) and IMAP. Most clients can at most do cram-md5 for authentication mechanism (old). I don’t know any clients doing the safer scram-sha-256-plus properly (with mutual verification and TLS channel binding, mox implements it). Interested in hearing what the thoughts are on these topics.
npodbielski
You can have 2Fa in mailcow, for admin UI and sogo.
johntitorjr
If I spun this up and attached it to my domain, would my emails be received by gmail/outlook/etc?
I'm pretty happy with forwardemail.net as a mail server, I selfhost snappymail to access it through a web browser. Not sure I want to take the step to selfhosting an email server, but I love the idea of cutting that external dependency.
durakot
Yes, but it depends heavily on whether your mail server has a clean IP with no spam history, the reputation of the IP range it belongs to, whether you've correctly set up DKIM/SPF records, etc. And you might have to get MS to whitelist your IP before you can send to outlook.com address, you'll only find out in your email logs whether that's the cast when you try the first time.
dwedge
Of course I can't speak for everyone, but I used mox with a brand new domain on an OVH IP a year ago and it could immediately deliver to Gmail.
kazinator
You will almost certainly be able to continue to use forwardemail.net as your SMTP forwarding host for sending traffic.
That means that you do either one of two things:
- keep using forwardemail.net SMTP credentials in all your e-mail clients, such as snappy. Only point those clients to your own server for IMAP4 access (accessing the mailboxes where mail is flowing into your own server).
- or else, point SMTP to your own server, and configure your SMTP server to use forwardemail.net as the next host. There are some advantages in that you have your own SMTP endpoint that you can use with multiple devices. In my case, my phone can talk to my own SMTP server for sending mail, and my SMTP server talks to my residential ISP's SMTP server. My phone cannot talk directly to my residential ISP server, because it's not inside their network; it's on an unrelated mobile network. So my SMTP server acts as mail forwarding proxy for the phone.
- Sine you keep using forwardemail.net for sending, your reachability is not impacted.
Sending SMTP through forwardemail.net is covered in their FAQ. It looks like they have a few configuration hoops to jump through:
https://forwardemail.net/en/faq#do-you-support-sending-email...
I'm guessing you know about this because you must be using that with your snappy setup. What catches my eye is that they have some configuration bits where you declare your custom domain. That's not always necessary. For instance, in my setup, my ISP knows nothing about me and my domain. I just connect to their SMTP server, and use whatever From: header I want in my e-mails. The SMTP envelope address is one assigned by the ISP. I also noticed the bit at the bottom of that FAQ about their "manual review process on a per-domain basis for outbound SMTP approval" which supposedly takes 24 hours.
npodbielski
I am running mailcow for about 7 years now and it worka fine. Sometimes some exchange server refuses to send my email. But it is pretty rare. Of course I had to set up SPF and DKIM. I think it happened once that I was grey listed. You.can request removal of such entry. In general I do not have much problem with it. Most of the work is for migration from machine to another machine.
chmike
How does mox compare to maddy, another Go all in one mail server ? Does mox support antivirus addition ? Didn't see that in the docs but I may have skipped that section.
mjl-
> Does mox support antivirus addition
No, not currently possible. I think it needs milter-like functionality in the smtp server. Would be good to have eventually.
averageRoyalty
A somewhat related tangent, has anyone got good desktop email client recommendations? Preferably macOS/Linux.
I have 6ish email accounts I need to monitor, and outside of Outlook (and the various hellish variations of it), I'm yet to find a good client like all smartphones seem to have - all inboxes in one client presented together. I recall having a number of issues with Thunderbird a few years ago when I last tried it, but I don't remember why.
amiga386
I'm not sure what your issues were, but Thunderbird is still the king of desktop email clients. It supports a unified inbox, go to the inbox and tick View -> Folders -> Unified
ptman
Has someone compared this to other modern alternatives? Stalwart (open core), chasquid, maddy, ...?
phoronixrly
Stalwart seems to be more ahead feature-wise. As a Stalwart user I will definitely keep an eye on this project. Just a couple of missing features that are a dealbreaker. One of them is also absent in Stalwart - aliases to external accounts.
ValdikSS
I've compared iRedMail, Mail-in-a-box, Mailcow, Modoboa, in 2021, if that helps (its in Russian)
https://www.linux.org.ru/forum/general/16654099?cid=16658164
ptman
I'm not really interested in these setups that combine postfix, dovecot, opendkim etc. Those aren't what I consider modern all-in-one email servers.
brokegrammer
Stalwart seems to be Rusty, while this one is Gooey.
amiga386
This seems like a good place to ask - does anyone have recommendations for a mail server and webmail integrated with CalDAV and CardDAV?
I was looking at Horde's Imp, Kronolith and Turba so far - https://www.horde.org/apps - they seem OK but is there anything else in this area?
hkt
https://github.com/mjl-/mox/issues/242
They're thinking of doing this already and apparently have some pox/prototype code, and a user has suggested a thing in the meantime.
Tepix
Sounds interesting.
I didn't find anything about sub-addressing in the features list. Is it a supported feature?
Also, with a version number starting with 0.0. I'm left wondering if Mox is already stable enough to be entrusted with my precious email.
Other options i'm considering are mailcow running in docker.
mjl-
> I didn't find anything about sub-addressing in the features list. Is it a supported feature?
Yes, assuming you mean addresses like user+<anything>@domain. The "+" is configured by default when you add a new domain. See https://www.xmox.nl/config/#cfg-domains-conf-Domains-x-Local....
> Also, with a version number starting with 0.0. I'm left wondering if Mox is already stable enough to be entrusted with my precious email.
It's been suggested to just increase the version number since it's more stable than a 0.0.X might suggest. I'm currently considering mox at release number 14. I'm still on the fence about it. Ideally people make the decision on the merits of stability, not based on the looks of the version number. But I understand it's used as a signal for how stable software is (but mileage will vary!).
At least I'm trying hard not to break anything, so upgrades will work for all installations.
dwedge
I've been using it since 0.9 and it has mostly been solid. I had two bugs receiving emails, one where incoming emails didn't work from Microsoft but they fixed that in 0.13, and another incoming issue I can't remember that they fixed in 0.10. I'm not sure if I want to move my main domain over from Exim yet but I'm considering it.
mjl-
> incoming emails didn't work from Microsoft but they fixed that in 0.13
Yeah, this one was interesting. It looks like microsoft updated their TLS stack to TLS 1.3, but incorrectly, breaking TLS connections to Go TLS servers. I don't know how to contact Microsoft about it, but others have raised issues with Microsoft. Mox got a workaround (disabling session tickets for SMTP) so Microsofts TLS stack wouldn't abort the connection anymore. This is a downside of being a small guy: You have to work around the bugs of the big guys.
Tepix
The latest version is 0.0.14 which is lower than 0.9 (i guess you mean 0.0.9)?
Tepix
Thanks.
Absolutely, if you feel that the software is already usable and is not lacking essential features, i'd suggest dropping the second zero in the current version number.
I noticed the roadmap section on your "Features" page, that also helps. I consider SIEVE server side filtering to be pretty essential.
wiredfool
I've been stuck running my own inbound email since back in the 90's when I set the catchall separator to '-' on my domain.
V__
I am running multiple mailcow instances and am very happy (supports sub-addressing). The only downside is that if you need mailpiler for archiving purposes you need to set it up manually since that is part of their paid offer.
donatj
Since the late 90s I've always had the thought in the back of my mind that one day I would run my own mail server. That day never came and the task seemed more and more impossible. This looks genuinely manageable, I might actually give this a shot when I get off work.
Wow... having just gone through a 20+ hour byzantine nightmare of setting up postfix & dovecot (that's on top of an already deep understanding of SMTP, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, SASL, etc.) and now struggling through an even more kafkaesque nightmare of rspamd (with its 3 different programming languages needed to understand its 92+ configuration files, which you can't modify by the way, you have to add your own "override" and "merge" config files on top of that mess) for the simple purpose of getting it to DKIM-sign my stupid outgoing messages the way all the big mail systems want... I wish I had seen mox earlier!
Not sure its quality, but battling with postfix & dovecot's 20+ years of legacy cruft, I felt compelled many times to just throw them aside and build something like this on first principles - simple single binary mail server with modern protocol support, sans all the archaic UNIX-account timesharing-era sendmail bullshit that still lives on in the mainstays.
Going to have a look at this one, despite now having moderately deep postfix & dovecot knowledge.