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So coincidentally I was just looking into this earlier this week. I just got a server to host the blog I've been working on and figured hey, why don't I try sel

So coincidentally I was just looking into this earlier this week. I just got a server to host the blog I've been working on and figured hey, why don't I try self-hosting my email while I'm at it. Turns out there are plenty of good open source webmail frameworks: Roundcube, Mailpile, Zimbra and RainLoop are all freely available and ridiculously easy to set up. The issue is that they're all just front-ends for the horribly complex and difficult to configure backend of a modern email server (SMTP/POP3/IMAP). You can configure them to hook into Google/Yahoo/Other smtp servers, but then why bother — you're back where you started. I had no understanding of how broken email was until I tried to set up a simple SMTP + IMAP server using postfix + courier.

aaronem 13y ago
I didn't find postfix all that hard to set up. Courier, on the other hand, is a disaster area, which is why my mail server runs dovecot instead; the latter took little effort to configure, and works quite nicely across several devices. The really hard part was finding a halfway decent CalDAV/CardDAV server that didn't require undue suffering to configure; I settled on Baïkal, which works okay, but could be considerably improved upon.
- abvdasker 13y ago
  Thanks for the tip on dovecot. I'll give that a shot.
  - aaronem 13y ago
    Do; I spent half a day wrestling with courier and lost, and it took me less than an hour to get dovecot up and doing what I wanted.
tilsammans 13y ago
I've been using, and contributing to, Sovereign. It's fantastic. Even if you are only looking for a mail server, you can point it to a VPS and let it do its magic. Zero trouble, self-hosted IMAP/POP3/SMTP/Webmail. https://github.com/al3x/sovereign https://github.com/al3x/sovereign
kackontent 13y ago
Thanks for mentioning RainLoop,I was looking at various open source webmails and wasn't happy with them (Mailpile looks promising though), but never before run into RainLoop, looks like a winner.

aaronem 13y ago

I didn't find postfix all that hard to set up. Courier, on the other hand, is a disaster area, which is why my mail server runs dovecot instead; the latter took little effort to configure, and works quite nicely across several devices. The really hard part was finding a halfway decent CalDAV/CardDAV server that didn't require undue suffering to configure; I settled on Baïkal, which works okay, but could be considerably improved upon.

abvdasker 13y ago
Thanks for the tip on dovecot. I'll give that a shot.
- aaronem 13y ago
  Do; I spent half a day wrestling with courier and lost, and it took me less than an hour to get dovecot up and doing what I wanted.

tilsammans 13y ago

I've been using, and contributing to, Sovereign. It's fantastic. Even if you are only looking for a mail server, you can point it to a VPS and let it do its magic. Zero trouble, self-hosted IMAP/POP3/SMTP/Webmail. https://github.com/al3x/sovereign https://github.com/al3x/sovereign

kackontent 13y ago

Thanks for mentioning RainLoop,I was looking at various open source webmails and wasn't happy with them (Mailpile looks promising though), but never before run into RainLoop, looks like a winner.