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Postfix and dovecot are not some evil "oligopoly", they're community based truly open source software. Almost none of the things linked there are run by seriou

Postfix and dovecot are not some evil "oligopoly", they're community based truly open source software. Almost none of the things linked there are run by serious isps that are responsible for other peoples' mail in quantities of tens of thousands of inboxes or more. Resist the urge to reinvent the wheel just to be a contrarian. Edit: yes, I see the issue, the mention of postfix+dovecot is jammed together in the same small paragraph as the oligopoly. It's as if they are being discussed as the same thing. The oligopoly is clearly google, office 365, etc. One hundred percent in agreement there.

muti 4y ago
I think the point is that there are easier options than postfix and dovecot for most self host cases, the oligopoly is formed by other entities.
hardwaresofton 4y ago
I'm not sure how the post came across as Postfix and Dovecot being the monopoly... Just to be clear, the oligopoly are the large email providers (Gmail and friends). > Almost none of the things linked there are run by serious isps that are responsible for other peoples' mail in quantities of tens of thousands of inboxes or more. Software doesn't have to be run by a large ISP to be worth running for people. Even at tens of thousands of inboxes (which is something post people don't need). Good software is out there for running self-hosted email and people should know about it. [EDIT] The post must have been unclear, I've edited it so hopefully no one will think I'm bashing postfix/dovecot. I've even tried to make them easier to use in the past[0], but gave up when I realized that there was better software out there that completely sidestepped the problem. [0]: https://gitlab.com/postmgr/postmgr https://gitlab.com/postmgr/postmgr
pevey 4y ago
I remember when sendmail was the de facto standard, and postfix was the lighter-weight new kid on the block. I’ve had my own domain since the 90s and self-hosted at one point out of my dorm room. I continued for years after, but I gave it up before I ran into issues with deliverability. It was largely due to issues from the other side of the equation: Too much spam in my inbox and not enough time and motivation on my part to keep fighting it. I noticed my throw-away gmail account had pretty good spam filtering, so when moving my Mx to gmail became an option, I threw in the self-hosting towel. EDIT: Again, with perspective from the other side of the spam fight, I wonder if anyone self-hosting on a non-residential IP that is having almost ZERO of their emails go through successfully has their DMARC set up properly. I use gmail for my own personal domain, but Microsoft 365 setups I manage for companies all use the strictest filters for emails without a tight spf rule (and a pass) and not using DKIM. Those are just not optional these days, unfortunately.
- walrus01 4y ago
  I don't know that postfix was ever considered lighter weight in terms of CPU and RAM resource usage, but rather that its configuration file syntax was easier to understand, layout, and better documented. And more easily extensible with pipelined mail filters.
  - spacehunt 4y ago
    I recall the original major selling point of Postfix was that it is more secure than sendmail (lots of smaller, easier to reason programs vs. one big monolith.)
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    This. Qmail was the lighter option in between, along with some strong security guarantees, and for a while was used by some of the biggest mtas in the world. Then it failed to keep up in the war against spam and it became completely irrelevant and postfix took its place as the sendmail alternative/replacement.
    - habibur 4y ago
      This. Qmail was lightweight. Postfix was considered robust but reliable without security holes. And then at some point postfix took over qmail as the default.
      - vbernat 4y ago
        Qmail was undistributable and there were several set of patches to choose from as it was not accepting any contribution.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      I ran "qmail" for ~2 million mailboxes, and the greatest appeal with qmail was that the design made it trivial to replace anything. Hence the quotes. We started out with near-pure qmail, and ended up replacing or modifying component by component because there was a well-defined API between each piece. Spam was never the issue for us - tieing things in with filtering was not a problem. I think the bigger problem for qmail was that because of the licensing, you pretty much had to patch qmail, which meant you needed developers happy to effectively maintain your own version or at least patch sets. If you were building your own mail infrastructure (we were - we ran a webmail provider until we sold of that bit), that was fine and it was a good scaffold while you customised what you needed, but if you just wanted to run a mail server and it wasn't your core business it very quickly stopped making sense to deal with that hassle. It's a real shame, but a good example of how license choice can affect things...
rakoo 4y ago
> Almost none of the things linked there are run by serious isps that are responsible for other peoples' mail in quantities of tens of thousands of inboxes or more. The whole point of self-hosting is precisely so that no entity runs tens of thousands of inboxes. If it's good enough for your personal use and the few people you're willing to help, then it's perfect.
andris9 4y ago
The largest WildDuck installation manages 100k+ email accounts with around 100TB of stored emails. So it does not always have to be one of the old and tried softwares. https://wildduck.email/ https://wildduck.email/
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  Thanks for linking wildduck. I took a look at it and will play around with it later. Looks really great!
jeroenhd 4y ago
I have no interest in the new "let's rewrite it in Go" servers but Mailcow and Mailinabox aren't part of those. They're preconfigured Docker containers running a combination of existing mail software (including postfix and dovecot) that's easy to set up and manage. Both are terrible for anything but personal or maybe even small business use; they're easy to set up and run, but inflexible compared to a manual install. I highly recommend them for running a personal mail server without fuss though, unless you're interested in manually maintaining your email config.
deepstack 4y ago
>> Almost none of the things linked there are run by serious isps that are responsible for other peoples' mail in quantities of tens of thousands of inboxes or more. If you look at Haraka in the list, it is used by craigslist to deliver a lot emails every day, they switched to it from postfix to save cost. I know Haraka is smtp only, however by using ZoneMTA like what wildduck is using, it will be a complete email solution.

muti 4y ago

I think the point is that there are easier options than postfix and dovecot for most self host cases, the oligopoly is formed by other entities.

hardwaresofton 4y ago

I'm not sure how the post came across as Postfix and Dovecot being the monopoly... Just to be clear, the oligopoly are the large email providers (Gmail and friends). > Almost none of the things linked there are run by serious isps that are responsible for other peoples' mail in quantities of tens of thousands of inboxes or more. Software doesn't have to be run by a large ISP to be worth running for people. Even at tens of thousands of inboxes (which is something post people don't need). Good software is out there for running self-hosted email and people should know about it. [EDIT] The post must have been unclear, I've edited it so hopefully no one will think I'm bashing postfix/dovecot. I've even tried to make them easier to use in the past[0], but gave up when I realized that there was better software out there that completely sidestepped the problem. [0]: https://gitlab.com/postmgr/postmgr https://gitlab.com/postmgr/postmgr

pevey 4y ago

I remember when sendmail was the de facto standard, and postfix was the lighter-weight new kid on the block. I’ve had my own domain since the 90s and self-hosted at one point out of my dorm room. I continued for years after, but I gave it up before I ran into issues with deliverability. It was largely due to issues from the other side of the equation: Too much spam in my inbox and not enough time and motivation on my part to keep fighting it. I noticed my throw-away gmail account had pretty good spam filtering, so when moving my Mx to gmail became an option, I threw in the self-hosting towel. EDIT: Again, with perspective from the other side of the spam fight, I wonder if anyone self-hosting on a non-residential IP that is having almost ZERO of their emails go through successfully has their DMARC set up properly. I use gmail for my own personal domain, but Microsoft 365 setups I manage for companies all use the strictest filters for emails without a tight spf rule (and a pass) and not using DKIM. Those are just not optional these days, unfortunately.

walrus01 4y ago
I don't know that postfix was ever considered lighter weight in terms of CPU and RAM resource usage, but rather that its configuration file syntax was easier to understand, layout, and better documented. And more easily extensible with pipelined mail filters.
- spacehunt 4y ago
  I recall the original major selling point of Postfix was that it is more secure than sendmail (lots of smaller, easier to reason programs vs. one big monolith.)
- stormbrew 4y ago
  This. Qmail was the lighter option in between, along with some strong security guarantees, and for a while was used by some of the biggest mtas in the world. Then it failed to keep up in the war against spam and it became completely irrelevant and postfix took its place as the sendmail alternative/replacement.
  - habibur 4y ago
    This. Qmail was lightweight. Postfix was considered robust but reliable without security holes. And then at some point postfix took over qmail as the default.
    - vbernat 4y ago
      Qmail was undistributable and there were several set of patches to choose from as it was not accepting any contribution.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    I ran "qmail" for ~2 million mailboxes, and the greatest appeal with qmail was that the design made it trivial to replace anything. Hence the quotes. We started out with near-pure qmail, and ended up replacing or modifying component by component because there was a well-defined API between each piece. Spam was never the issue for us - tieing things in with filtering was not a problem. I think the bigger problem for qmail was that because of the licensing, you pretty much had to patch qmail, which meant you needed developers happy to effectively maintain your own version or at least patch sets. If you were building your own mail infrastructure (we were - we ran a webmail provider until we sold of that bit), that was fine and it was a good scaffold while you customised what you needed, but if you just wanted to run a mail server and it wasn't your core business it very quickly stopped making sense to deal with that hassle. It's a real shame, but a good example of how license choice can affect things...

rakoo 4y ago

> Almost none of the things linked there are run by serious isps that are responsible for other peoples' mail in quantities of tens of thousands of inboxes or more. The whole point of self-hosting is precisely so that no entity runs tens of thousands of inboxes. If it's good enough for your personal use and the few people you're willing to help, then it's perfect.

andris9 4y ago

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

mccorrinall 4y ago
Thanks for linking wildduck. I took a look at it and will play around with it later. Looks really great!

jeroenhd 4y ago

I have no interest in the new "let's rewrite it in Go" servers but Mailcow and Mailinabox aren't part of those. They're preconfigured Docker containers running a combination of existing mail software (including postfix and dovecot) that's easy to set up and manage. Both are terrible for anything but personal or maybe even small business use; they're easy to set up and run, but inflexible compared to a manual install. I highly recommend them for running a personal mail server without fuss though, unless you're interested in manually maintaining your email config.

deepstack 4y ago

>> Almost none of the things linked there are run by serious isps that are responsible for other peoples' mail in quantities of tens of thousands of inboxes or more. If you look at Haraka in the list, it is used by craigslist to deliver a lot emails every day, they switched to it from postfix to save cost. I know Haraka is smtp only, however by using ZoneMTA like what wildduck is using, it will be a complete email solution.