Mailcow is another option. I’ve been using it for a few years without any problems.
Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
51–60 of 131 posts
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#52>Not supported (but perhaps in the future): >... >* PGP or S/MIME Would this mean integrated WKD (Web Key Directory) support for PGP?
> Would this mean integrated WKD (Web Key Directory) support for PGP?
Didn't know of that, thanks. I think this could be used to encrypt submitted messages before trying to deliver them?
What I had in mind when I wrote that line, was server-side signing. But I don't think it's such a great idea to have private keys on a server. It would be convenient for use with email clients that don't support signing themselves. But I don't use PGP or S/MIME myself at the moment. So my messages get stored in plaintext, are typically transferred over TLS (might want to start enforcing that!). With SPF/DKIM/DMARC and with SMTP (submission) authentication, sender addresses aren't typically forgable anymore, so signing is perhaps less important than it once was.
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#53This project's scope is rather impressive, and from what I've gleaned from skimming its docs, it might be the perfect solution for people who want to self-host email. It tries to have most of the advanced/difficult things (like getting DKIM set up right) taken care of for the postmaster, as far as that is possible within a single application. I love that it will print the DNS records you'll need to set up in your zon…
Only thing I see that would really be missing is Sieve, it's soo much nicer to have server side filtering/categorizing
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re not sending a very large amount of mail you can just get an AWS account and send through them for almost no money.
I wonder if another alternative would be SendGrid. You can send 100 emails/day with them for no money[0]. [0] https://sendgrid.com/pricing
It's also transactional emails, but Send In Blue has a free tier with 300 per day.
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#55This project's scope is rather impressive, and from what I've gleaned from skimming its docs, it might be the perfect solution for people who want to self-host email. It tries to have most of the advanced/difficult things (like getting DKIM set up right) taken care of for the postmaster, as far as that is possible within a single application. I love that it will print the DNS records you'll need to set up in your zon…
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.
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#57The project looks cool! However, I think the hard part of self-hosting email is not the tech stack, it's getting email delivered to your recipients using Google or Microsoft severe email servers. It's hard to rent a server that IP address is not in a block that big email providers consider suspicious already or will soon. And any mishaps can get you locked out and you need manual intervention to be allowed again. I u…
If you’re not sending a very large amount of mail you can just get an AWS account and send through them for almost no money.
I use Amazon SES to send system-generated messages from a couple of tiny websites I ran on EC2. When applying I needed to specify the volume, and put in a generous number in case the sites got a busy day - maybe 100-200/day (when realistic traffic probably averages single digits/day).
I promptly got approval for 50,000 mails/day!
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#58Can this scale to 10's of 1000's of users on a big server?
I wanted to open an alternative to gmail where users can use their domains and open several mailboxes for a small fee but when searching for solutions I always end up with dovcot scaling which is hard or expansive. What I am searching for is some solution where the mailbox can store large attachments on S3 / b2 and maybe also email content and just index the inbox on a local DB / Redis. Is there something like this available open source?
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#59Wow, impressive feature set! How long was the incubation time of this project? I see that the initial git commit already contains quite a lot :-)
I think this server hits a very interesting market segment of the users that want to self host a mail server but do not want to be locked in to the (some times opinionated and difficult to integrate with other infra) docker based turnkey options like mailcow or mailu.io. I certainly would take a look at it for my next iteration, even though I'm kinda very comfortable with my existing setup which is based on mailcow.
One key aspect with self hosting is how to keep the end system upgradeable. And this is where mailcow and mailu shine because internally evenrything has been worked out already. Still crossing fingers though, this looks promising!
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 abstractio…
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!