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It's one tiny binary that does everything you could possibly need for hosting a mail server, including an admin UI, and you get a bunch of modern and convenient

It's one tiny binary that does everything you could possibly need for hosting a mail server, including an admin UI, and you get a bunch of modern and convenient features for free. For example, it automatically handles Let's Encrypt certs for you. You get JMAP, CalDAV, WebDAV, CardDAV, IMAP4rev2, DKIM/SPF/DMARC, MTA-STS, DANE, spam filtering, SQL+blob+object storage backends, search, clustering, OpenTelemetry, etc all in one tiny binary. Downsides: some features are gated behind an enterprise version and I think the dev team is one guy, or at least it was a while ago. Having ran both for a long time, I'm sticking with Stalwart from now on as long as development continues.

matesz 1y ago
> Downsides: some features are gated behind an enterprise version I treat this as an insurance policy. Even in this thread people mentioned how Maddy, which is an alternative modern full stack email solution in a single binary, lacks development efforts. This is why we have this fantastic release for Stalwart - free shit. Also as of now enterprise is for $0.2 per account per month which is extremely cheap unless somebody wants to build a big spam farm, of which as civilized Internet user I don't support. Obviously this might change, but even if you can always built multi-tenancy layer by yourself if you really need it - rest of the codebase is AGPL.
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  Agree with your points, it's a downside if you're cheap like me and don't want to pay a penny for email at all.
WhyNotHugo 1y ago
What you’re describing sounds like one huge downside to me, not and advantage. The only way to adopt Stalward is to drop everything else and use a single monolithic do-it-all? Messages are stored in a bespoke format and not easily accessible directly? It doesn’t sound like it’s made to be usable with other software. This isn’t an advantage in my book.
- audelair 1y ago
  But the messages are accessible by every open standard: POP, IMAP, JMAP. You can also pick your storage backend, your database backend, your full text/search tool or provider, directory backend. It is amazingly versatile. Between all the options, you can design incremental backups, snapshots, or whatever with 3rd party tools to write a script to backup your mailboxes to be restorable in any other email service or software. I have tested it with rsync, restic, database dumps, mc/aws-cli depending on the backends used, of which I have tried them all, and found it designed to be very straightforward. The monolithic aspect is a necessary aspect of being built for HA and distributed environments that it is all the more impressive how versatile it is.
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  The features are toggles or allow you to slot in your own infrastructure where need be, from what I can see. It's not that you have to use it, it's that it's there if you want it, and I want it. Suits my needs, but I can see why it wouldn't suit everyone's.

matesz 1y ago

> Downsides: some features are gated behind an enterprise version I treat this as an insurance policy. Even in this thread people mentioned how Maddy, which is an alternative modern full stack email solution in a single binary, lacks development efforts. This is why we have this fantastic release for Stalwart - free shit. Also as of now enterprise is for $0.2 per account per month which is extremely cheap unless somebody wants to build a big spam farm, of which as civilized Internet user I don't support. Obviously this might change, but even if you can always built multi-tenancy layer by yourself if you really need it - rest of the codebase is AGPL.

heavyset_go 1y ago
Agree with your points, it's a downside if you're cheap like me and don't want to pay a penny for email at all.

WhyNotHugo 1y ago

What you’re describing sounds like one huge downside to me, not and advantage. The only way to adopt Stalward is to drop everything else and use a single monolithic do-it-all? Messages are stored in a bespoke format and not easily accessible directly? It doesn’t sound like it’s made to be usable with other software. This isn’t an advantage in my book.

audelair 1y ago
But the messages are accessible by every open standard: POP, IMAP, JMAP. You can also pick your storage backend, your database backend, your full text/search tool or provider, directory backend. It is amazingly versatile. Between all the options, you can design incremental backups, snapshots, or whatever with 3rd party tools to write a script to backup your mailboxes to be restorable in any other email service or software. I have tested it with rsync, restic, database dumps, mc/aws-cli depending on the backends used, of which I have tried them all, and found it designed to be very straightforward. The monolithic aspect is a necessary aspect of being built for HA and distributed environments that it is all the more impressive how versatile it is.
heavyset_go 1y ago
The features are toggles or allow you to slot in your own infrastructure where need be, from what I can see. It's not that you have to use it, it's that it's there if you want it, and I want it. Suits my needs, but I can see why it wouldn't suit everyone's.