7 ms·

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, SP

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.

WhyNotHugo 2y ago
I’ll never understand why postfix is so popular given how hated it is. OpenSMTPd has worked wonders for many years and in much easier to set up.
- tmn007 2y ago
  if you started with sendmail (and sendmail.cf) then postfix was alright
  - n3storm 2y ago
    That's it, also Qmail was a nightmare (still is?) Perspective most of times is everything.
    - mrweasel 2y ago
      Oh I miss qmail, felt much easier to deal with than the alternatives.
- defanor 2y ago
  User experience with it, and opinions on it, seem to vary. I, for one, rather like both postfix and dovecot: both are well-documented, maintained, lightweight, reliable, yet configurable and feature-rich software, with few dependencies and good track records.
- ofrzeta 2y ago
  I have no idea how/why it is hated. For me it is one of the best open source server packages. For instance if you have a specific problem you will find some configuration directives on the Internet and they will actually work.
- jmb99 2y ago
  I’ve been using it for a decade without issue. Only problems I’ve ever had self-hosting were related to being randomly junk-black-holed by the big three independently of each other for 1~30 days for seemingly no reason, but no software is going to fix that.
- spl757 2y ago
  haters gonna hate
- codethief 2y ago
  OpenSMTPd seems easier superficially but it's not particularly well-documented. I don't remember the details but I remember struggling with setting it up because certain config flags were not documented and I had to guess their exact meaning from the few blog posts out there that discuss OpenSMTPd. (It also didn't help that there were slight changes in the config format at some point in the past.)
- loloquwowndueo 2y ago
  Probably popular because it’s the default mta in Debian-based installs. Hey it could be worse, at least it’s not sendmail.
KronisLV 2y ago
I just gave up and now use https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver 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 2y ago
I ended up changing to mailu recently, very happy with it. https://mailu.io https://mailu.io
- sgt 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
    I used to think Gmail’s interface was excellent until I moved to Fastmail.
- BLKNSLVR 2y ago
  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.
conradev 2y ago
There is also https://github.com/stalwartlabs/mail-server https://github.com/stalwartlabs/mail-server
- elliotali 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
- rekabis 2y ago
  Is it known to be compatible with OpenBSD as-is, or with minimal tweaking?
tucnak 2y ago
Check out mailcow
figassis 2y ago
Maddy did it for me. Pretty awesome.
p0w3n3d 2y ago
One does not simply send mail these days
- nicce 2y ago
  Or receive.. depends how you look at it. Big players like Microsoft and Google defines what goes into spam box.
  - fodkodrasz 2y ago
    And in the case of Microsoft: often the invoices, expired credit card notification from Microsoft itself are considered spam in o365... Had some inconveniences because of this. But hey, at least it has a Copilot bar thoughtfully filling that useless vertical space on my screen!
dwedge 2y ago
I use this for one of my domains, had it running for over a year and it's been rock solid
citrin_ru 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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.
megous 2y ago
OpenDKIM works fine, and is easy to configure. My first time config was like 30 mins following the guide here: https://wiki.debian.org/opendkim https://wiki.debian.org/opendkim And postfix is exceptionally well documented software. One of the best. It's easy to script config modifications thanks to `postconf` and do all kinds of interesting stuff with milters or policy servers, etc.
- Avamander 2y ago
  OpenDKIM is unmaintained and does not support Ed25519 signatures.
  - tecleandor 2y ago
    Auch. Now that you say... last commit in 2018 and last release in 2014. And a couple beta releases in 2018.
  - megous 2y ago
    It does in my Linux distro for the last 4.5 years. https://github.com/trusteddomainproject/OpenDKIM/commits/7c70ee7c86da1c https://github.com/trusteddomainproject/OpenDKIM/commits/7c7...
bsdice 2y ago
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.
sam_lowry_ 2y ago
You are probably on Debian, this adds a lot of complexity. My exim config became10x smaller after I started using upstream directly.
GTP 2y ago
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
UltraSane 2y ago
Dealing with Linux email servers and related things is easily the worst experiences I have ever had working in IT. Just miserable.
throw0101d 2y ago
> 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: * https://mailcow.email https://mailcow.email * https://workaround.org https://workaround.org
- kbmn 2y ago
  Comparison between Mailcow and Mox: Mailcow (from https://docs.mailcow.email/getstarted/prerequisite-system/#minimum-system-resources 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. Mox: I checked with htop, and my Mox process currently takes <100 MB.
- QuadrupleA 2y ago
  Manually - I want as slim/minimal/resource-efficient a setup as I can, and to understand what I'm configuring.
  - throw0101d 2y ago
    https://workaround.org https://workaround.org has pretty good instructions for each component that allows one to understand things: very little magic involved. * https://workaround.org/ispmail-bookworm/big-picture/ https://workaround.org/ispmail-bookworm/big-picture/
jcarrano 2y ago
I once set up qmail on a home server. Looking back, I have no idea how I managed.
- coob 2y ago
  It is a rite of passage. That config system…
  - throw16180339 2y ago
    It's a lot better than sendmail.cf, which I had to use in a previous job. # handle "from:<>" special case R$*<>$* $@@ turn into magic token # basic textual canonicalization R<$*<@$+>> $@$1<@$2> R$*<$+>$* $2 basic RFC822 parsing # make sure <@a,@b,@c:user@d> syntax is easy to parse -- undone later R@$+,$+:$+ @$1:$2:$3 change all "," to ":" R@$+:$+ $@$>6<@$1>:$2 src route canonical R$+:$*;@$+ $@$1:$2;@$3 list syntax R$+@$+ $:$1<@$2> focus on domain R$+<$+@$+> $1$2<@$3> move gaze right R$+<@$+> $@$>6$1<@$2> already canonical
Emoticon4032 2y ago
I gave up and started self-hosting Mailcow. It’s worth paying the support fee to free yourself to do other more productive things. Let them manage the complexities.
arielcostas 2y ago
I did that a few years ago too. Then decided to just use OpenSMTPD instead of Postfix, keep Dovecot for IMAP and rspamd for signing DKIM. I followed the guide at https://prefetch.eu/blog/2020/email-server/ https://prefetch.eu/blog/2020/email-server/ and got it running relatively smoothly. However, Microsoft (and sometimes Google) kept blocking emails coming from my server's IP, so I just decided to stop messing around and pay migadu 19€ a year for dealing with that stuff for me.
account42 2y ago
IME postfix + dovecot + opendkim were pretty easy to set up. No idea why you'd need to go through a "20+ hour byzantine nightmare" for that.

WhyNotHugo 2y ago

I’ll never understand why postfix is so popular given how hated it is. OpenSMTPd has worked wonders for many years and in much easier to set up.

tmn007 2y ago
if you started with sendmail (and sendmail.cf) then postfix was alright
- n3storm 2y ago
  That's it, also Qmail was a nightmare (still is?) Perspective most of times is everything.
  - mrweasel 2y ago
    Oh I miss qmail, felt much easier to deal with than the alternatives.
defanor 2y ago
User experience with it, and opinions on it, seem to vary. I, for one, rather like both postfix and dovecot: both are well-documented, maintained, lightweight, reliable, yet configurable and feature-rich software, with few dependencies and good track records.
ofrzeta 2y ago
I have no idea how/why it is hated. For me it is one of the best open source server packages. For instance if you have a specific problem you will find some configuration directives on the Internet and they will actually work.
jmb99 2y ago
I’ve been using it for a decade without issue. Only problems I’ve ever had self-hosting were related to being randomly junk-black-holed by the big three independently of each other for 1~30 days for seemingly no reason, but no software is going to fix that.
spl757 2y ago
haters gonna hate
codethief 2y ago
OpenSMTPd seems easier superficially but it's not particularly well-documented. I don't remember the details but I remember struggling with setting it up because certain config flags were not documented and I had to guess their exact meaning from the few blog posts out there that discuss OpenSMTPd. (It also didn't help that there were slight changes in the config format at some point in the past.)
loloquwowndueo 2y ago
Probably popular because it’s the default mta in Debian-based installs. Hey it could be worse, at least it’s not sendmail.

KronisLV 2y ago

I just gave up and now use https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver 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 2y ago

I ended up changing to mailu recently, very happy with it. https://mailu.io https://mailu.io

sgt 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  I used to think Gmail’s interface was excellent until I moved to Fastmail.
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
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.

conradev 2y ago

There is also https://github.com/stalwartlabs/mail-server https://github.com/stalwartlabs/mail-server

elliotali 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
rekabis 2y ago
Is it known to be compatible with OpenBSD as-is, or with minimal tweaking?

tucnak 2y ago

Check out mailcow

figassis 2y ago

Maddy did it for me. Pretty awesome.

p0w3n3d 2y ago

One does not simply send mail these days

nicce 2y ago
Or receive.. depends how you look at it. Big players like Microsoft and Google defines what goes into spam box.
- fodkodrasz 2y ago
  And in the case of Microsoft: often the invoices, expired credit card notification from Microsoft itself are considered spam in o365... Had some inconveniences because of this. But hey, at least it has a Copilot bar thoughtfully filling that useless vertical space on my screen!

dwedge 2y ago

I use this for one of my domains, had it running for over a year and it's been rock solid

citrin_ru 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
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.

megous 2y ago

OpenDKIM works fine, and is easy to configure. My first time config was like 30 mins following the guide here: https://wiki.debian.org/opendkim https://wiki.debian.org/opendkim And postfix is exceptionally well documented software. One of the best. It's easy to script config modifications thanks to `postconf` and do all kinds of interesting stuff with milters or policy servers, etc.

Avamander 2y ago
OpenDKIM is unmaintained and does not support Ed25519 signatures.
- tecleandor 2y ago
  Auch. Now that you say... last commit in 2018 and last release in 2014. And a couple beta releases in 2018.
- megous 2y ago
  It does in my Linux distro for the last 4.5 years. https://github.com/trusteddomainproject/OpenDKIM/commits/7c70ee7c86da1c https://github.com/trusteddomainproject/OpenDKIM/commits/7c7...

bsdice 2y ago

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.

sam_lowry_ 2y ago

You are probably on Debian, this adds a lot of complexity. My exim config became10x smaller after I started using upstream directly.

GTP 2y ago

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

UltraSane 2y ago

Dealing with Linux email servers and related things is easily the worst experiences I have ever had working in IT. Just miserable.

throw0101d 2y ago

> 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: * https://mailcow.email https://mailcow.email * https://workaround.org https://workaround.org

kbmn 2y ago
Comparison between Mailcow and Mox: Mailcow (from https://docs.mailcow.email/getstarted/prerequisite-system/#minimum-system-resources 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. Mox: I checked with htop, and my Mox process currently takes <100 MB.
QuadrupleA 2y ago
Manually - I want as slim/minimal/resource-efficient a setup as I can, and to understand what I'm configuring.
- throw0101d 2y ago
  https://workaround.org https://workaround.org has pretty good instructions for each component that allows one to understand things: very little magic involved. * https://workaround.org/ispmail-bookworm/big-picture/ https://workaround.org/ispmail-bookworm/big-picture/

jcarrano 2y ago

I once set up qmail on a home server. Looking back, I have no idea how I managed.

coob 2y ago
It is a rite of passage. That config system…
- throw16180339 2y ago
  It's a lot better than sendmail.cf, which I had to use in a previous job. # handle "from:<>" special case R$*<>$* $@@ turn into magic token # basic textual canonicalization R<$*<@$+>> $@$1<@$2> R$*<$+>$* $2 basic RFC822 parsing # make sure <@a,@b,@c:user@d> syntax is easy to parse -- undone later R@$+,$+:$+ @$1:$2:$3 change all "," to ":" R@$+:$+ $@$>6<@$1>:$2 src route canonical R$+:$*;@$+ $@$1:$2;@$3 list syntax R$+@$+ $:$1<@$2> focus on domain R$+<$+@$+> $1$2<@$3> move gaze right R$+<@$+> $@$>6$1<@$2> already canonical

Emoticon4032 2y ago

I gave up and started self-hosting Mailcow. It’s worth paying the support fee to free yourself to do other more productive things. Let them manage the complexities.

arielcostas 2y ago

I did that a few years ago too. Then decided to just use OpenSMTPD instead of Postfix, keep Dovecot for IMAP and rspamd for signing DKIM. I followed the guide at https://prefetch.eu/blog/2020/email-server/ https://prefetch.eu/blog/2020/email-server/ and got it running relatively smoothly. However, Microsoft (and sometimes Google) kept blocking emails coming from my server's IP, so I just decided to stop messing around and pay migadu 19€ a year for dealing with that stuff for me.

account42 2y ago

IME postfix + dovecot + opendkim were pretty easy to set up. No idea why you'd need to go through a "20+ hour byzantine nightmare" for that.