> If I were to start over my personal email setup (postfix with postscreen, dovecot with fts, opendkim, amavis/spamassassin), I sure would try it with this.

I am tempted to give that sort of thing a try, as successor for the franken-"postfix with postscreen, dovecot with fts, opendkim, amavis/spamassassin" contraption (actually Courier, not to mention LDAP, greylisting, a couple webmails, OCR, blacklists etc.) that we have been maintaining for two decades in service of friends & family.

But, for all its flaws, once put in production that setup on Debian packages Just Works - with upgrades and distribution version jumps handled almost flawlessly. I doubt that any of the new generation of integrated "mail things in a box" products that pop up since a couple of years have anywhere near that staying power. Does someone here know some that put long-term maintainability at the top of their priorities ? It seems to me that they all optimize for quick onboarding.

Same. There is a large vocal contingent who confidently declare in any online space that hosting your own email is impossible these days. And yet, those of us who have been for years are managing it just fine.

Yes, it takes some understanding of how things work. Mine has been chugging along for longer than I can actually remember with very little maintenance needed, aside from regular package upgrades. The only time I ever had an issue with mail providers rejecting mail from my domain was when my wife started sending out school newsletters containing links to a shady URL shortener, but that was fixed pretty easily.

Yeah, that's my impression as well. I've been wondering about this sort of setup for a while – there's a lot of moving parts in traditional email servers, and projects like poste or univention/zimbra/… that just try to glue these massive stacks together have always been far too fragile and involved for any setup that's smaller than "we can afford a dedicated sysadmin for emailling".

The only feature I'd still want is Sieve, then it'd be good enough for not just home setups, but probably also SMBs.

It doesn't look like it supports mailbox sharing or public folders, which are very helpful for collaborating in a SMB, especially with shared email addresses (e.g., [email protected]).

Do you know how this is typically used/configured? Do accounts get this shared account (mailbox(es)/folders with messages) as folders in their own account? So next to your own Inbox and Trash, you would have Sales/Inbox and Sales/Trash? If you delete a message from Sales/Inbox, does it automatically go to Sales/Trash? How is that done? Perhaps IMAP namespaces?

I have figured folks can just add another account (IMAP connection) to their mail client. Either a shared account (e.g. sales@), or account of a colleague. And then the account (mailbox) is shared.

Perhaps it's because webmails are just for a single account and folks would have to have multiple mail browser windows open? Or business folks are just not used to this approach? Or perhaps they want an admin to inject some shared mailbox into an existing account without requiring any user action?

Public folders sound a bit like a mailing list, from what I just skimmed from Exchange documentation. I presume the message flags (Seen/Read) are per-user? So it's more like delivery to each members copy of the public folder, instead of an actual shared folder?

I use dovecot and there is a lot of configurability for shared and public folders.

Public folders are much nicer than having to add separate IMAP accounts; users can subscribe to whatever public folders they want/need from a list. All subscribed folders show up underneath the root namespace folder. I have about 6 types of inboxes based on business roles (sales, pr, hr, it, etc). I have many more folders, beyond general inboxes, that get filled based on sieve filter rules. For example, voicemail alerts get filtered into a special voicemail folder.

Dovecot lets you configure whether the read state is shared or per user.

We use a system where people can flag messages as to whether they are taken for action, are critical, or are completed. These show up in Thunderbird/Roundcube mailbox list as color coded, and this aids in people knowing if emails have been dealt with.

You still have strict control for access/permissions on a per-mailbox basis, with ACL.

All of this could have been done with shared folders under a "shared" user account (either one or multiple shared account, such as sales, hr, etc) with similar results.

Exchange also has shared/public folder support, but it looks like permissions aren't (maybe?) as fine grained as IMAP/Dovecot/etc? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/collaboration-exo...

The scope isn't revolutionary - I've used https://mailu.io/ for years for a few 10s of users, and I really like it. I've heard similar good stories from Mailcow users.

On a quick skim I couldn't tell what was new relative to these older compose-based solutions but (as co-author of similar solution 10-15 years ago) I'm interested to know!

What's revolutionary is that mox implements the entire stack itself as tightly coupled monolith.

With mailu and everything else you get a gargantuan stack of half a dozen massive, enterprise scale servers that are held together with duct tape and prayers. They can scale out to hundreds of thousands of users, but if anything breaks they expect there to be dedicated sysadmin staff to fix it, and gluing leaky abstractions on top doesn't really solve these fundamental architectural challenges.

Ooo that's really cool and I'd like an excuse to try it. I had a career in duct tape and prayers so very comfortable in that domain :)

“Duct tape and prayers” is a fantastic description that scales well from tiny shop through to 10000+ engineers!

I suppose it's mostly from a technical perspective: Single code-base, single binary, written in modern language (Go).

There are advantages to an integrated solution: The junk/nonjunk flags you set in your mail client are used to assess incoming email (based on full sender/domain/orgdomain/spf/dkim/ip/ipsubnets). I'm not sure how common/feasible that is with solutions that combine mail server components. I've used postfix & dovecot before mox, I admittedly didn't closely look into it but assumed that combo cannot do that.

With component-based solutions like Mailu, the junk/non-junk categorization you do in your mail client (via folders, not flags) indeed does inform the training of the spam filter used on incoming mail.

I have used https://mailinabox.email/ for about 1.5 years. Installation was dead simple, and no technical problems after.

I've heard that using your own mail server can give issues with your email ending up in spam. Is that the case if you use this?

That is most often caused by reputation issues around the IP where your mail server lives. If you host it at home or in any “residential” block of addresses, then most definitely. Same if hosted on a VPS or with a provider whose address space may have been burned by spammers spinning up machines and then redeploying them when they start getting blocked. As someone said further down below, you can still host at home and use Amazon SES as your verified outbound relay. I do that with the Axigen free email server, and I have no issues with reputation.

1. I was very careful to make sure that the IP address I was assigned was not on any blacklists.

2. I don't know if it actually helped. But after setting it up, I got a whole bunch of family/friends to email me from their gmail/hotmail/o365 addresses first, and then I replied to them. The theory was that gmail/hotmail wouldn't mark me as spam if their own addresses were initiating the conversation. Seemed to have worked well.

I have had only one case of my email getting completely blackholed (not put in spam, just rejected outright) is when I emailed a friend with a @amd.com address. Right now, I am still using gmail for essential professional emails, but slowly getting all my online-services converted to the new email address.

Only thing I see that would really be missing is Sieve, it's soo much nicer to have server side filtering/categorizing

Sieve is becoming a commonly requested feature. (;

For now, mox supports delivering to mailboxes with configurable rules, search for "Rulesets:" on https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/mjl-/mox/config. You can edit the config file (if you're the admin), or use the account web interface to add/remove/edit rules. I use it to get mail from mailing lists to the right mailbox.

Just throwing my 2c in the ring: I've been using iRedMail for I want to say 10+ years now. Just simple linux no-frills webmail with nice admin and default webmail. Best part is it is dead simple to set up, the developer is very nice and responsive on his forum and it has been rock-solid. Granted, I don't send a lot of mail from it but it has been running as a journal for many years without issue. I do send some mail from it--mostly from devices--to my gmail and have never had a problem with blacklisting. I think this mostly depends on your IP reputation so your host and how you host it is important.

I set up docker-mailserver[0] Monday in ~6 hours, most of which were me trying to be fancy using podman instead of docker and dealing with SELinux. But then again I did choose it over mail-in-a-box for just that level of customization. Obviously I can't tell how reliable it will be in the long run yet, but since it's using the classic Postfix/Dovecot stack I expect it'll be pretty stable

[0] https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver