A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Mailcow-dockerized. I've used it for nearly a decade, it's been flawless. Very easy to set up with the admin webpage and has a webmail client, or use Roundcube with it.
Make sure you have your DKIM, SPF and Dmarc records in order and tested against MXtoolbox before you start.
What happens if your server is offline and an email comes in? I'm genuinely curious what it would do. Or must you VPS host your mail server for maximum uptime?
All MTAs have retries baked in, so running a self-hosted email server that receives mail is actually one of the most forgiving services in this respect. If your server is offline, the sending server will retry several times over 24-48 hours before it gives up. Even the big cloud email providers will do this.
That said, there are other aspects of running an email server that require some extra rigour, but they're more on the sending side (making sure emails you send to other people actually land in their inbox). Doable, but one of the more challenging things to self-host.
What's the resource usage like? I've looked into mailcow before but the recommended system specs are too expensive to make it worth it on a VPS.
Seems really low. I run it on a docker LXC with Nextcloud and bunch of other stuff, on 8 cores of an ancient dual Xeon Dell. I never seem to have to deal with latency on it.
mox. just one go binay. pure bliss: https://www.xmox.nl/
Oh this is one to watch! Thanks for posting. I'm currently running docker-mailserver (which is quite mature and stable) but xmox looks very interesting.
This is so cool... Didn't know about it... And also european... Will try it for sure
Stalwart
Written in rust, contains SMTP, IMAP, JMAP, Sieve, CalDAV, CardDAV, WebDAV. Has an admin web ui. Sane defaults, minimal foot guns. No zoo of containers needed.
Beware it's very heavyweight. My dedicated oldish server with 8gb ram and spinning hdes couldn't even handle one single domani and a few users....
Was 6 months ago, tough.
I had to play with database types, because apparently out of the box setup works only on SSDs (??) And do a bunch of other stuff to improve performance.
End result was way worse than installing postfix+dovecot+dkim/dmark/etc stuff directly.
Quite unusable, but the hardware was limited
True. The default rocksdb is completely unusable on HDDs. For me it runs pretty good with PostgreSQL. Dovecot was certainly easier to handle with its file based storage and was super fast. But Postfix was a pain and I can't count how often it bit me over the years (and since it's SMTP, that means something broke in receiving, delivery or was suddenly a spam vector, which all sucks quite hard).
Rocksdb has tuning options for hard drives, but not sure Stalwart exposed them
I've had a good experience with mailcow. It's not the most lightweight tho, and spins up quite a few containers.
+1 for mailcow, i've been running my mailserver for over 2 years now, very efficient, no hassle setup.
This is what I use as well and it’s pretty painless after setup.
You're gonna have a bad time if you have to email MSFT/GOOG. MSFT was worse in my experience. their DumbScreen tech was horrible. Even the tech couldn't get my emails to not go to spam. Gave up in the end. The likes of MSFT and Google make it nigh on impossible for people to self host their own email.
Been running my own mailserve for last 20 years and never had big issues.
Do dkim dmark stuff and DNS records properly and you will be fine. Also don't spam and beware of spam-related subnets, and you should not have issues.
Have you considered that the reason why your mail server is trusted is because it's been around for 20 years?
Have you tried to set up mail from scratch on a new domain/ip recently?
I've been running my own email server for 15+ years. One year ago I needed to change VPS providers and thus get a totally different IP. I worried about this a bit, but actually had no issues whatsoever. Of course, I wasn't starting completely from scratch as I had the same domain, all my personal experience, and a battle-tested configuration for docker-mailserver. But yeah, the lack of IP reputation itself didn't seem to be an issue at all. Maybe I got lucky. Or maybe it's because I chose a relatively small Canadian VPS provider rather than one of the global cloud giants (I assume their IP address space gets pretty trashed with scammers).
What about domain reputation?
I'm still looking for a good solution that includes support for notes. I'm migrating off Exchange Online and using mailcow temporarily but the built in notes feature is sorely missed.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| IMAP | Internet Message Access Protocol for email |
| LXC | Linux Containers |
| SMTP | Simple Mail Transfer Protocol |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #52 for this comm, first seen 1st Feb 2026, 10:01] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I use mailu, find it quite lightweight as well.