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Mail-in-a-Box
- owenversteeg 12y agoI use roundcube and it (usually) works great. Good choice. [tangentially related] I love seeing a new TLD in the wild.
- techdragon 12y agoownCloud needs to integrate this kind of easy email setup. I already run an ownCloud server but deliberately avoided moving my email to it due to the less than ideal state of email on ownCloud
- Brakenshire 12y agoThe situation we really want to get to is a single streamlined sign up and set up for email alongside owncloud, with contacts, file storage, calendar, bookmarks and webmail. That would make it an attractive proposition for quite a large section of the population.
- sciurus 12y agoI really hope owncloud won't try to reinvent the wheel for email; Kolab already provides those features. http://kolab.org/ http://kolab.org/
- brongondwana 12y agoIt's a great idea except that for one person it's going to cost a lot more than buying an account on FastMail (disclaimer: I work there) or any of the other hosting sites (even before you start start thinking redundancy and backups - we have about 10Tb of disk for every 1Tb of pure email quota, by the time you count search indexes and RAID and 3x replication redundancy - two local one offsite) For more than one person it can get cheaper, but you're going to be on call to fix it every time it breaks - because those other people aren't going to like waiting until you need it. Have fun with that (and I say this after being paged at 3:30am last night to fix a problem that was only affecting redundency for about 1% of our userbase - no user visible problems - most issues are solved without user visible outages)
- spindritf 12y agoFastmail costs $40/yr. You can get a half-decent VPS for that with a few bucks to spare on Tarsnap.
- OSWJimlo 12y agoUnfortunately, there are other costs associated with running than just "a half-decent vps"... IN addition your vps probably has to be better than you expect. For example, ramnode ($20/year) does not give near enough ram to run anti-spam (e.g. amavisd or just clamav solo). You need on the order of a gig of ram. You won't get that for less than $5/mo or $50/year. You also must buy an ssl cert or else many other email providers will mark your email spam score up. You also must go through the operational burdon of setting things up and managing backups, restores, etc. This is perhaps 30 hours / year, which means you're already well over the cost of $40/yr. One thing to note is that for more than a few accounts (bring your own address, catchall, many aliases) you're unlikely to find something that costs as little as $40/year and the cost of running that yourself is identical, so that's where you can start to make money. I've gone down the route of using hosted and hosting my own mail and feel like I have a good understanding of the costs. Your flippant remark, completely disregarding even the system requirements, shows that you have not. Good day sir.
- gojomo 12y agoJust curious, what's the "half-decent VPS" you're thinking of for ~$3/month?
- hackmiester 12y agoI'm not spindritf, but I am thinking of BuyVM: http://buyvm.net/ http://buyvm.net/
- spindritf 12y agoYou will probably need to go a little lower on the price than BuyVM to squeeze SpamAssasin in.
- jph 12y agoGreat project, thank you Josh. I am donating to your project and will also offer $100 to help fund the creation of an apt-get deb package, if you or anyone here would like to commit to creating it. I run mail servers with Postfix and much of the same setup, to enable custom domains, scriptable responders, message tagging, and the like. Using apt-get to install Mail-in-a-Box would be wonderful.
- IgorPartola 12y agoI will look into creating a .deb package. No $100 necessary for me. My email address is in my profile, I'd anyone wants to connect before I can put together a pull request.
- joshdata 12y agoHey. Please start an issue on github sooner rather than later so you don't do lots of work and then I end up rejecting the PR. :) Communication! [I'm the guy behind the project.]
- konklone 12y agoA .deb package sounds like a terrific idea!
- IgorPartola 12y agoWill do. Sorry, I am really short on time this weekend but I will reach our first thing Monday.
- mattl 12y agoI have a use for this at CC if we can get it working on Debian wheezy. Thanks for releasing this under CC0.
- IgorPartola 12y agoWhat service would the more experienced out there recommend run this on? AWS seems rather expensive, but Digital Ocean wouldn't provide much storage space. Also, what about reliability? Any advice on not getting blacklisted for sharing a subnet with spammers? Or do people generally run setup like this old school: on a server in their bedroom?
- liamzebedee 12y agoI think 20GB is certainly reasonable. I use Thunderbird heavily for three accounts and my profile barely exceeds 3GB.
- Sami_Lehtinen 12y agoWhy would users need to store all old mail on server? You can auto archive it or simply delete about 95% of mail which you won't ever need later again.
- illuminated 12y agoYou have pretty cheap VPS's by OVH (http://www.ovh.ie/vps/vps-classic.xml http://www.ovh.ie/vps/vps-classic.xml) and if you ever outgrow their offer you can move to SoYouStart (http://www.soyoustart.com/ie/essential-servers/ http://www.soyoustart.com/ie/essential-servers/) which is also a brand by OVH.
- icebraining 12y agoTransIP offers VPS with SSD at comparable prices to DO, and more disk space. It's also not an US company, if that makes any difference. No affiliation, just a happy customer. Regarding blacklists, I run my outbound email through Mandrill. I know it cuts down on the privacy aspect, but I send very few emails anyway compared to what I receive.
- oops 12y agoSee also: https://github.com/al3x/sovereign https://github.com/al3x/sovereign
- lukeholder 12y agowow, that look awesome, thanks for sharing. Especially like that it is a ansible playbook!
- lemming 12y agoSovereign is awesome, I run the VPS for my product off a customised version of it. Highly recommended. I especially like that you can run the unit tests locally against Vagrant, it's great.
- mrmondo 12y agoLove the idea, I do wish it was based on Debian and not Ubuntu though. Ubuntu's package testing team leaves a lot to be desired and I've found Debian in general a lot more stable and secure over the years.
- sanbor 12y ago> Why build this? > Mass electronic surveillance by governments revealed [...] Then why are they suggesting to use DigitalOcean? I think they have to respect the sames laws than Google, right?
- ClashTheBunny 12y agoBecause then you get the warrant or NSL?
- scott_karana 12y agoWhy would you get the warrant or NSL? They could still give that to DigitalOcean, and simply see your VM's filesystem through the host server, see all your traffic, etc...
- serf 12y agodoes ownCloud still throw webdav errors for self-signed certs?
- ausjke 12y agocan owncloud do mail at all? its calendar works, but no support for tasks, I don't even know it does email
- serf 12y agono, but the linked product (mail-in-a-box) uses ownCloud's webDAV/calDAV implementation rather than providing a separate means. in my experience if ownCloud is supplied with a self-signed cert, the webDAV module throw errors but still works correctly. It's really obnoxious and causes a nag-window at the top of the main settings UI until either you comment out the nag window or buy a signed cert.
- techsupporter 12y agoIf you want to do something similar yet hands-on, I really like Ars Technica's series: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-to-run-your-own-e-mail-server-with-your-own-domain-part-1/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-to... Also, for those of you with mobiles that have ActiveSync clients, Francisco Biete's fork of the Zarafa ActiveSync (Z-Push) implementation is really stable, it will do calendar and contact syncing with ownCloud, and it supports remote wipe from your own CLI. https://github.com/fmbiete/Z-Push-contrib https://github.com/fmbiete/Z-Push-contrib
- treenyc 12y agoHow does it compare to iRedMail? http://www.iredmail.org http://www.iredmail.org Does it support multiple domains?
- 69_years_and 12y agoTo add to the fray: https://yunohost.org/ https://yunohost.org/ is an option too for easy install and setup of a mail server - there was a recent HN item on them a while back. Been using it for a month or two and it's worked great so far. Needs Debian. Supports multiple domains.
- csixty4 12y agoI keep forgetting Yunohost can do that. Is there a guide to setting up email services?
- hrjet 12y agoI had good experience with Citadel for an internal mail solution. It's a little old fashioned, but good enough for our needs. The setup was especially easy with the default ubuntu packages.
- ausjke 12y agoI'm also testing citadel for a small team, the issue is that I can't get thunderbird/lightning to sync the calendar with citadel, email works fine, will be checking kolab soon
- hrjet 12y agoJust FYI, we are not using the calendaring system from Citadel; so can't give any report for that.
- corv 12y agoiRedMail has been around much longer. Mailinabox has a simple admin web-interface to add users whereas iRedMail charges $400 for a web-interface. iRedMail also doesn't include z-push (i.e. push mail). Edit: Mailinabox does support multiple domains, by default it will only use itself as DNS which currently does not support backup DNS.
- alexchamberlain 12y agoJust checked out the [system architecture diagram][1]... We really need to fix email. A modern system would never get away with proposing such a design. [1]: https://mailinabox.email/static/architecture.svg https://mailinabox.email/static/architecture.svg
- allegory 12y agoIt's fine. It's a loosely coupled system that uses quite a few components. It's also a complicated problem to solve. This is trivial compared to our product for example which is an integration hub for financial services companies. There are over 300 of those little boxes. Going back to the original point though, compare to Exchange 2010: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5764 http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5764
- illuminated 12y agoHow does this compare to Kolab.org? For quite some time I want to migrate my emails to my own server and the first contender on my list was Kolab.
- ausjke 12y agoSame here, tried citadel and am interested in kolab
- gingerlime 12y agoOne thing worth noting if you consider running any mail server yourself - is checking the IP address / range that your VPS provides you. I've had outbound email blocked or blacklisted with IPs from DigitalOcean - especially on Yahoo, whereas Linode or AWS give you better reputation. It was virtually impossible to get unlisted on Yahoo for IPs that are owned by the hosting provider, and I'm not sure all providers would make the effort of doing this on your behalf. I suspect lower-end VPS providers are even worst in that respect.
- joshdata 12y agoMail-in-a-Box includes a check like this in its setup script, actually. [I'm the guy behind the project.]
- gingerlime 12y agoThat's cool. I just had a look, and noticed a couple of rbl checks. Very smart idea. However, I have to say, I had occasions where the IP was not listed on any RBL, but Yahoo was still flagging my IP. I don't remember the exact error Yahoo were returning, but I think it was basically blocking all email... Perhaps even from the entire network range, since it was listed as residential or something of that sort (apologies, but I really don't remember the exact details, it was quite a while ago)
- joshdata 12y agoYup, didn't mean to imply that I had solved the whole problem. :)
- chj 12y agothere is still one touch problem, how can you make sure your outbound mails won't be rejected by other servers?
- jwr 12y agoFinally! As someone who has been running his own email server for many years, I've been waiting for this to happen, so that I can tell my friends to do the same thing. Best of luck to this project. It is very, very needed.
- foolinaround 12y agoI am trying to set up an email server for an Asian non-profit (about 1000 accounts) on a hertzner server. They do not need all the bells and whistles however? Is this good enough for that many number of users?
- corv 12y agoWhy not find a host in Singapore or Hong Kong, rather than Hetzner that is 300-400ms away? (Nothing wrong with Hetzner, just saying)
- stinos 12y agowhat you need: A completely fresh Ubuntu 14.04 machine Bummer. I already have a server running and don't plan on paying for an extra instance just for mail. Has anyone tried this with VirtualBox or some other virtualization? Should work if the correct ports are forwarded, no?
- higherpurpose 12y agoDoes it at least use StartTLS by default?
- joshdata 12y agoYes, it uses STARTTLS, HSTS, modern cipher settings, DNSSEC and many more security best practices! [I'm the guy behind the project.]
- shocks 12y agoWhat about a backup SMTP server? I ran my own mail server for a year and found it incredibly stressful. Switched to runbox.com and I couldn't be much happier atm.
- linuxlizard 12y agoThanks for the runbox.com mention. That looks like just what I need for my server.
- shocks 12y agoNo complaints from me! :)
- jabits 12y agoAny other long-term experience with runbox.com?
- shocks 12y agoNot really. I moved over about a month ago (which was really easy). A friend of mine recommended them and he's been happy for around six months now.
- icebraining 12y agoUnless you have very long downtimes, a backup server shouldn't be needed. SMTP is designed to handle such problems and keep trying for at least four or five days.
- manishsharan 12y agoThe problem is not setting up an email server; the problem is in ensuring you email is delivered/visible. I set up an email server vps with my domain and domain keys etc but my test emails to my family ,who use Yahaoo and Gmail, would not get delivered. I gave up !
- benjymau5 12y agoSetting up my own mail server a couple years ago i had this problem. The "best" solution seemed to be routing through a service like gmail, which defeated the purpose.
- icebraining 12y agoIt doesn't completely defeat the purpose, because they would only get your outbound emails, not received ones.
- clarry 12y agoI have another problem.. my ISP blocks incoming traffic on smtp. For no good reason. I'd have to upgrade to a business class connection ($$$). Unfiltered end to end connectivity would be nice. Preferrably on a symmetric line. I'd call that Internet access.
- ytjohn 12y agoI'm not running a mailserver anymore, but I use smtp-as-a-service for things that need to send email notifications. I've been using mandrillapp.com for over 2 years now, completely free. Other people like mailgun.com. Anytime I need to setup a nas or monitoring system that needs to send out notifications, I create a new api key then add that into whatever device needs to send email. I also for a brief period used the service as a "smarthost" for a shared mail server (not mine directly). This technically worked fine, but became an issue as end-users would get viruses and start sending spam. However, mandrill would notify you of this issue and you'd see high rejection rates. I could even view the rejected message (privacy concerns aside) to see headers of who was sending them. So while I wouldn't recommend it for a shared server, it would be fine for a personal server.
- pdonis 12y agoOne thing I particularly like about this: managesieve support. I am only aware of one major email service that uses sieve as its filter language to begin with (FastMail), and none that provides a managesieve interface to the filter rules. Since these are supposed to be the Internet standards for email filtering, it seems very surprising that practically nobody actually uses them.
- metadata 12y agoI have a Linode VPS and am happy to fire up another VPS to handle email exclusively. In fact, I already did and installed Mail in a Box as mail.mydomain.com. I have to say (being a developer with enough Linux knowledge to handle hosting and simple stuff) that nameserver setup is completely confusing. I should stop using Linode nameservers? If so, I should set up glue records and place that into NameCheap domain specification instead? And then set up www CNAME to point to original website server? Very confusing... Why not having a section in the guide titled something along: "Adding Mail-in-a-Box as additional server to your existing website"? I am not sure if that defeats security/reliability, as External DNS section message is kind of scary: "Although your box is configured to serve its own DNS, it is possible to host your DNS elsewhere. We do not recommend this. If you do so, you are responsible for keeping your DNS entries up to date. In particular DNSSEC entries must be re-signed periodically. Do not set a DS record at your registrar or publish DNSSEC entries in your DNS zones if you do not intend to keep them up to date."
- joshdata 12y agoHi, metadata. It sounds scary to set up glue records, but so is setting up all of the DNS records manually that you'd need for really good mail: MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and if you want secure DNS and/or mandatory encryption on the wire you'll want DANE records and zone signing. Mail-in-a-Box wants to take over your DNS because it wants to take care of all of this for you. If you run your own DNS, it's still secure. An alternative is to use a new domain name. Thanks for the feedback. [I'm the guy behind the project.]
- iurisilvio 12y agoI had the same problem. Also, I had some DKIM and SPF already configured to external SMTP server. I understand your message, but it is not clear in Mail-in-a-Box interface. What exactly is the problem with my own DNS server? If I want to work without DANE, I can just add all these new records to my DNS and it works out of the box? I started to setup a personal email server several times and abandoned it because it is just too difficult. This time, it was easy. Thanks!
- 12y ago
- ossreality 12y agoNo, no, no. Sandstorm.io's solution for email will be vastly simpler, easier and more secure
- foxhop 12y agoThis is sort of related. A couple weeks back I wrote some Salt States to install mailpile. My long term plan was to use mailpile as a web client. http://russell.ballestrini.net/mailpile-salt-states-for-ubuntu-or-debian/ http://russell.ballestrini.net/mailpile-salt-states-for-ubun...
- acd 12y agoThanks will look at your code!
- wtbob 12y agoIt's a pretty cool tool, but I wish that things like this were built atop Debian rather than Ubuntu.