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Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by xyzzy_plugh on Saturday November 21, 2020 @09:25PM (#25174370)
I've had a lot of discussions with technical-minded peers about how the only real options for email on your own domain are fastmail or gsuite, which work out to about the same amount of money for a family of 5+, which is a surprisingly large amount (imo worth it).

This looks like something worth combining with alps[0] for easy self-hosted email. I might give it a go and ditch gsuite!

[0] https://git.sr.ht/~migadu/alps

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by RcrdBrt on Sunday November 22, 2020 @04:03AM (#25176053)
I've been using a docker mail server[0] pre-configured for years without issues. I switched from DigitalOcean to Vultr and finally landed on Hetzner. Always had no issues delivering or receiving messages from/to the big guys. I'm also addicted to watchtower[1] to keep it automatically updated without hassle.

[0] https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver [1] https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by Kwpolska on Sunday November 22, 2020 @07:24AM (#25176901)
I moved from DigitalOcean to Hetzner, and Gmail started marking all my emails as spam, most likely due to bad IP reputation. I moved to Zoho Mail [0] (at €10.80/user/month), which doesn’t have problems like these, and requires less work to manage.

[0]: https://www.zoho.com/mail/

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by bierjunge on Monday November 23, 2020 @08:21AM (#25186450)
That's weird. I'm running a mail server at Hetzner for years now and never got a mail rejected. Maybe you just got bad luck with the IP, which could be flagged at Spamhaus, etc.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by illuminated on Sunday November 22, 2020 @03:02AM (#25175824)
With mailcow [0] it's pretty simple to setup your own email server in about half an hour with all the security included and having your email not being treated on reception as spam. It also ships with a webmail interface (SOGo [1]), rspamd UI and an admin interface for your server.

I used to be a Kolab [2] user and "promoter" for many years but the project seems stalled a bit recently and although it is still being worked on and developed, it is lacking documentation for the latest releases.

I have moved to mailcow recently and am amazed at how easy it is to setup and maintain as opposed to Kolab.

The thing I miss from Kolab in mailcow is the integrated LDAP storage and custom built UI (if anyone knows a good and reliable LDAP administration UI as a web app, please let me know!), which I got used to using for user authentication in other services. Luckily, there are some efforts in LDAP integration into mailcow [3], although, still not mature yet and not that tightly integrated.

[0] https://mailcow.email/ [1] https://sogo.nu/ [2] https://kolab.org/ [3] https://github.com/Programmierus/ldap-mailcow

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by 1MachineElf on Sunday November 22, 2020 @04:58PM (#25181498)
The recent addition of FIDO to mailcow seems pretty exciting! https://mailcow.email/2020/11/16/welcome-fido2-web-authentic...
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by beagle3 on Sunday November 22, 2020 @03:28AM (#25175917)
There are a lot of smaller providers (but not fly-by-night, like dreamhost and 34sp which both have >20 years record) which will give you a domain with up to e.g. 100 emails for $5-$10/month, which is significantly cheaper than gsuite or fastmail.

Another good alternative is migadu (who sponsored the webmail you linked above, and IIRC are already using it). They do charge about $20/year for a micro plan that lets you have any number of addresses and domains , with some throughput limits, and $90/year for a full plan without those limits. Something similar to the micro plan was free until recently - personally, I'm on the $90 plan with a few domains and emails, which would have cost about 10 times on much on gsuite and fastmail.

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by foxcpp on Sunday November 22, 2020 @05:01AM (#25176271)
alps was created by the same person who started maddy, by the way.

It is not me. Just wanted to give a little tribute to the amazing person who put a lot of work into email libraries for Go: https://github.com/emersion/

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by orware on Sunday November 22, 2020 @09:27AM (#25177676)
Not sure if Maddy covers this use case specifically (I didn't see it covered in the documentation, but I figure it actually is possible).

I'm hoping to use a Golang-based application as a simple SMTP Relay, which also allows for ranges of IP addresses to be whitelisted to connect openly to it from within our campus network.

Basically, the scenario is as follows: a number of internal services are older and may not support the authenticated route so we can use Sendgrid directly and send emails securely, so instead we currently have them routed to an internal Windows server which is running an older piece of IIS functionality (it's an SMTP Server in Windows that can be turned on). That piece is configured to be open (so it can receive messages on Port 25) but is also limited to a set of IP address ranges that internal servers are using (so that it's not generally usable by just anyone inside our network) and is configured to send those received messages out using Sendgrid.

I found the following Goland project just a few months back that seemed promising: https://github.com/wiggin77/mailrelay

And I'll probably need to follow up with the developer again (or try and make the contribution back to the project on my own), but the main issue it had was that the IP range whitelisting wasn't available (and even whitelisting by specific IP addresses seemed problematic, so in my testing I had to keep it completely open for it to work as expected).

If Maddy can fulfill the need instead though I can give it a shot ;-).

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by foxcpp on Sunday November 22, 2020 @10:00AM (#25177918)
There is no IP whitelisting feature in maddy. I believe it is possible to do it using whatever off-the-shelf firewall you have on your system. Could you elaborate on the reasons it is not a viable way for you?
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by e12e on Sunday November 22, 2020 @10:38AM (#25178264)
If whitelisting is "application level" it's easier to diagnose with an "application (protocol) level" error.

That is rather than a timeout or connection refused, an smtp 550 or 530 error with exlenation (access/relay denied; client ip not in whitelist)?

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by pas on Sunday November 22, 2020 @07:05PM (#25182272)
Haraka covers this. Though it's a NodeJS SMTP server.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by lifty on Sunday November 22, 2020 @06:30AM (#25176643)
Fantastic job to both of you! Really appreciate the high quality work you folks have been doing on maddy and the email libraries. Are you guys running migadu as well? I might just switch if you are related.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by foxcpp on Sunday November 22, 2020 @10:03AM (#25177940)
No, we are not running migadu. But you probably can give it a try anyway, they look pretty good.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by jacob019 on Sunday November 22, 2020 @09:41AM (#25177774)
I've been running a couple postfix mail servers on aws for about a decade for my ecommerce company, transactional messages only. It needs to be properly configured, which is non-trivial. Over the years it has been necessary to request IP unblocks from a few providers. Delivering mail to microsoft domains (hotmail, outlook, msn, live) has been problematic, so those messages only are now being delivered though SES. Incoming messages are forwarded to free gmail accounts. I spend 20 minutes a week blocking spam, we get very little now. We use about 15 rbl lists, but I also manually block client domains, sender domains, and do some header checks. Email is important to me and I enjoy doing it this way. It's super cheap, I can use several domains, and I have full control of the mail process.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by vbezhenar on Sunday November 22, 2020 @12:31AM (#25175190)
I recently set up simple standard setup (postfix/dovecot/spamassassin) and it works fine. There's small amount of spam, like few mails per week, nothing to worry about. I can receive and send mail just fine.

Though I admit that for someone who did not tinker with UNIX for years, configuring this kind of setup might be daunting.

Personal mail could be solved by some kind of daemon which provides SMTP, IMAP, built-in spam detection, DNS checks, some simple administration web interface and works with 0 configuration for typical use-cases. Maddy could be this project, so I would be happy to replace all those daemons with a single binary. I hope that they'll implement spam detection, as rspamd is a separate daemon which requires redis, so in the end it's still a complex setup with lots of moving parts.

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by djsumdog on Sunday November 22, 2020 @01:33AM (#25175456)
I've been running my own mail servers for ~15 years and yes you can run your own, but the biggest issue I've run into is other servers blocking me as spam:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/how-google-and-microsoft-made...

I still prefer to host my own though.

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by superhawk610 on Sunday November 22, 2020 @05:24PM (#25181692)
I've tried to self-host email for my domain a couple times over the past few years, and I always end up falling back to a paid host for this reason; I rarely use email these days, but when I do (or usually when I'm expecting an email from a recruiter or other business-related sender) I need some sense of confidence that it will go through correctly. The lack of ability to confidently send via self-hosted setup definitely feels intentional, which sucks.

Great article btw!

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by krageon on Monday November 23, 2020 @05:22AM (#25185289)
A lot of this is due to newness and perhaps bad IP reputation. You can fix the reputation by requesting your removal from blocklists. The newness should be fixed after a few years - have you run it on the same IPs for those 15 years? In my experience after a year or so the problems go away (admittedly this is on a much larger scale than personal email).
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by foxcpp on Sunday November 22, 2020 @04:41AM (#25176202)
My current position is that spam filtering is a whole another problem space so I am not trying to address it now while Maddy is a "single man show".

P.S. As far as I am aware, redis is optional for rspamd. I certainly run it for @hexanet.dev email without having redis installed.

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by spc476 on Sunday November 22, 2020 @05:19AM (#25176345)
Look into doing greylisting. I do that for my own setup, and I've found it easily cuts down on the spam by at least 50% and that's without even looking at the email.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by andrewshadura on Sunday November 22, 2020 @09:38AM (#25177760)
I’ve used greylisting for the last five years or so. I stopped doing so completely and moved to Fastmail. Greylisting delays, while unnoticeable with the contacts I frequently communicate with, were very annoying with new and one-off contacts, especially all sorts of confirmation emails from bank etc, which would often expire before greylisting allowed them in. Sometimes, emails were sent through cloud mailing systems, so coming from a different host each time they’d hit greylisting again and again and again.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by andris9 on Sunday November 22, 2020 @05:41AM (#25176440)
Rspamd falls back to sqlite if you do not have Redis configured
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by mtlynch on Saturday November 21, 2020 @09:45PM (#25174478)
Most people don't realize, but you can actually send email from a custom domain with a free Gmail account.[0] You have to go through a 5-minute process for each sender address, but I used it fine for ~10 years.

I recently switched to Fastmail, and one of the features I like about them is that they support wildcard sender aliases, so if I sign up for a service with [email protected], when I hit reply to any emails to that address, it automatically sends from [email protected] even though I've never specifically registered that identity with Fastmail.

[0] https://thedigitalnonprofit.com/use-gmail-own-domain-free/

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by xyzzy_plugh on Saturday November 21, 2020 @10:49PM (#25174793)
This is not the same thing. I agree with the link, in that it is most definitely a hack. This only works because your domain registrar is handling email for you to begin with, which is undesirable for many reasons.

Also, while aliases in gmail work generally, I find they leak the main gmail account address, which makes them significantly less desirable.

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by aarchi on Saturday November 21, 2020 @11:01PM (#25174828)
Why do you say that it's undesirable for your registrar to handle mail? I've considered using Gandi's mail with my domains.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by t0astbread on Sunday November 22, 2020 @06:54AM (#25176758)
It depends on your threat model how undesirable it is but essentially you're adding a permanent MITM to your email.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by OJFord on Sunday November 22, 2020 @03:47AM (#25175985)
Not GP but that's a coupling I don't want - I want to be able to change registrar without worrying about email.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by Kwpolska on Sunday November 22, 2020 @07:25AM (#25176910)
There’s also Zoho Mail: https://www.zoho.com/mail/ — starting at €10.80/user/year.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by mxuribe on Sunday November 22, 2020 @11:31AM (#25178712)
I've been testing zoho mail for the last few months (in order to find a decent alternative to g suite, and not-so-expensive as fastmail)...and so far, zoho has been performing quite well. I certainly can not complain about the price; as i'm able to use their "lite" plan at $12 per user oer year.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by krimpenrik on Monday November 23, 2020 @07:31AM (#25186055)
Considered proton?
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by mxuribe on Monday November 23, 2020 @12:09PM (#25188937)
As in protonmail? No, i have not considered them, as my understanding was that i could not use conventional mail clients (e.g. thunderbird, k9 mail, etc.). If i'm wrong, please let me know.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by fgonzag on Saturday November 21, 2020 @11:53PM (#25175035)
I pay $20/yr for unlimited accounts, 50GB of storage with mxroute. I've been quite happy with it. $30/yr for domain + email is worth it considering how important your address is for absolutely everything on the web
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by brightball on Saturday November 21, 2020 @10:38PM (#25174758)
Why not Mail-In-A-Box?

https://mailinabox.email/

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by gwbrooks on Saturday November 21, 2020 @11:42PM (#25174991)
I love MIAB, but their insistence that the mail server is also the primary DNS server for any hosted domains is beyond irritating.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by nulld3v on Sunday November 22, 2020 @12:56AM (#25175289)
I don't think "insist" is the right word here. They certainly push for it but they also make using your own DNS really easy.

You can just head over to the "External DNS" page where MIAB will tell you what DNS entries you need and what each entry does. Then you just copy the DNS entries you need.

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by gwbrooks on Sunday November 22, 2020 @01:08AM (#25175338)
You're right; I was being too broad in my critique.

Intellectually, I don't like domain DNS on the same box; practically speaking? It works and works well -- so well that it's often easier to disable per-domain DNS where my sites are hosted and just point A records over to the sites from MAIB.

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by eljimmy on Sunday November 22, 2020 @12:37AM (#25175213)
I’ve been running my own mail server for years. It’s definitely a PITA to setup, but it’s not _that_ difficult.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by fahrradflucht on Sunday November 22, 2020 @04:27AM (#25176144)
It's interesting that you mentioned alps but don't consider migadu an option. Mind elaborating why?
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by getpost on Saturday November 21, 2020 @11:41PM (#25174983)
Dreamhost offers email hosting for any number of addresses “free” (at no extra cost) in all plans except the starter plan, $4.95/mo.

https://www.dreamhost.com/hosting/shared

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by berns on Sunday November 22, 2020 @12:44PM (#25179320)
They also have email hosting for $ 2 per account per month. Do you know what's the difference? What's the advantage if you can have unlimited e-mail accounts with web hosting?
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by getpost on Monday November 23, 2020 @09:41PM (#25194702)
The advantage is you can have "unlimited" email accounts and "unlimited" domains for $5/mo. One domain registration is even included.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by berns on Tuesday November 24, 2020 @07:30PM (#25204658)
Well, the question was why would anyone buy the e-mail offering...
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by getpost on Friday November 27, 2020 @12:47PM (#25230839)
EDIT: Oh, yes, I see, I am not sure why anyone would do this. Maybe someone who had an address or two they want to keep at the lowest possible cost. I'm not sure how email is managed for such accounts, but it's possible Dreamhost will take care of the setup, so maybe you don't have to interact with the web control panel, which might be intimidating for some users. Could also be a legacy arrangement for an older product offering.

Original reply:

Buying domain hosting gives you "unlimited" email addresses, so domain hosting is cheaper as soon as you need 3 or more addresses.

3 addresses x $2 = $6/mo for email vs $4.95/mo for any number of addresses. I have a friend who is married with 4 children. He pays $4.95/mo for 6 addresses. You don't have to actually host an http domain to get email hosting that comes with domain hosting.

"unlimited" in quotes because obviously there are some limits and service terms. You can't start a competitor to gmail with a $4.95/mo hosting account.

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by Youden on Sunday November 22, 2020 @07:09AM (#25176828)
In what regards are Fastmail and Gsuite the only "real" options for email on your own domain?

There are tons of other options. Mailbox.org, Migadu, Protonmail, Tutanota and Mailfence for example.

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by cassianoleal on Sunday November 22, 2020 @07:20AM (#25176876)
I've been using Posteo.de for a couple years now.

Great service, E2E for everything, including contacts and calendar, and it's quite cheap (I think I pay €12/year).

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by _frkl on Sunday November 22, 2020 @09:16AM (#25177612)
You can't use your own domain though, AFAIK. Which means you won't be able to switch providers, which may or may not be a problem.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by Fire-Dragon-DoL on Sunday November 22, 2020 @11:23AM (#25178666)
https://www.migadu.com/index.html

This seems good, however for 5+ it becomes expensive too.

Is this service related to what you linked?

Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by deathtrader666 on Sunday November 22, 2020 @08:53AM (#25177436)
Doesn't Outlook support custom domains?
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by mcovalt on Saturday November 21, 2020 @11:27PM (#25174921)
Replace phone number with encoded IPv6. Run mail server on your phone. Would solve a lot of issues.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by petre on Sunday November 22, 2020 @02:14AM (#25175634)
Not really. The phone is roaming into other networks with different prefixes.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by krimpenrik on Monday November 23, 2020 @07:32AM (#25186065)
I use proton with my own domain.
Re:Maddy: Composable all-in-one mail server in Go by forest_dweller on Sunday November 22, 2020 @04:34AM (#25176171)
I host my own mail. It runs on a VPS and ti took me an evening to figure it out. Deliverability is fine as well.