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Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

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Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#61

Post by mjl- »

theK wrote: post #59

Wow, 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…

> How long was the incubation time of this project? I see that the initial git commit already contains quite a lot :-)

I started prototyping about 1.5 years ago. Then work took over. But managed to work on this for the past ~6 months nearly full-time. I worked from git staging, keeping it all working with tests.

> 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!

Mox is still very young. I think updates will probably require some admin intervention until the dust settles. But I typically build some support in my applications for automatically upgrading data to keep manual intervention to a minimum.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#62

Post by nvarsj »

p4bl0 wrote: post #17

The 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…

Ditto. Although I keep thinking about going back to it.

99.9% of the time self hosting is fine. But then a critical business email is never received (like replying to an interview request or business proposal). The worst part is you never even know it failed to be received. The worst offenders are outlook.com and yahoo.com in my experience of self-hosting email for about 10 years. I stopped around 4 years ago after a critical email disappeared and impacted me financially.

Only way to guarantee your emails are always sent and received is to use a major email provider, sadly. Or hire a team to actively look after your domain and make sure large providers are not filtering your emails.

However, given my emails now are pretty much just for personal usage, I may look at moving back to self hosted. Greylisting is the superior approach to spam control imo and you can only get this with self hosted. Mox looks really great and I'll def consider it.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#63

Post by mjl- »

oron wrote: post #58

Can 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…

> Can this scale to 10's of 1000's of users on a big server?

No, probably not.

Indeed disk space may become an issue (though you can get large disks nowadays; also, if you want to be that big, modifying the code to storage the raw emails (or only the large ones) externally should be worth the time). And if you are that big, you probably want a backup mx, which pretty much requires replicating the index database to another place, which isn't supported yet.

But more importantly, mox doesn't have a spam filter or rate limiter for submitted (outbound) email. So it will currently take 1 compromised account to damage your IP's reputation. It's on my todo list.

I heard dovecot has an option to store messages to s3. It seems to be part of a paid variant.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#64

Post by obituary_latte »

c0l0 wrote: post #2

This 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…

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.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#65

Post by oron »

mjl- wrote: post #63
oron wrote: post #58

Can 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…

> Can this scale to 10's of 1000's of users on a big server? No, probably not. Indeed disk space may become an issue (though you can get large disks nowadays; also, if you want to be that big, modifying the code to storage the raw emails (or only the large ones) externally should be worth the time). And if you are that big, you probably want a backup mx, which pretty much requires replicating the index database to an…

Not sure I need to be in that scale , I can leave with some downtime , I am not Google, and it's a low cost solution , re outgoing emails I can rate limit with some Redis counters and maybe ratio limits on send / received emails.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#66

Post by thunderbong »

I've set up my email using Mail-in-a-box [0] and it's worked wonderfully. How does this compare with Mail-in-a-box?

Also, webmail, calendaring are future features in this product. I wonder how critical are those for people setting up their own email.

[0]: https://mailinabox.email

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#67

Post by chefandy »

robertlagrant wrote: post #47
tinus_hn wrote: post #35

Earlier 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

I use sendgrid to send mail I host on Linode I manage with Cloudron which works with sendgrid and others out of the box. Cloudron is a cool paid server management app but their free tier includes email. Literally give the app your DNS provider details and API key, your sending service details (or internal smtp if you hate it when people actually recieve your email) and the rest is 100% automatic. The free tier limits how many one-button-press apps you can install. They're all regular open source apps, but they nicely maintain docket images for them all and the setup, including DNS for subdomains, is automatic and really smooth. I havr nothing to do with them but I was surprised by how smooth it was.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#68

Post by superkuh »

I highly suggest that technical people like HN readers use the https://workaround.org/ispmail tutorials instead and set up postfix/dovecot from their OS repos. You'll learn enough on the way to fix things when they do go wrong rather than relying on some turnkey stuff who's internals are obscure and hard to fix when the inevitable problems happen.

Setting up a proper mailserver this way does take a few hours (from VPS setup to sending mail) but once it's set up it's good to go for a decade. And when the time comes to update the distro you're running it on you'll know how to port your data/config to the next VPS.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#70

Post by mjl- »

thunderbong wrote: post #66

I've set up my email using Mail-in-a-box [0] and it's worked wonderfully. How does this compare with Mail-in-a-box? Also, webmail, calendaring are future features in this product. I wonder how critical are those for people setting up their own email. [0]: https://mailinabox.email

> Also, webmail, calendaring are future features in this product. I wonder how critical are those for people setting up their own email.

I wonder the same. (: I would personally use the calendaring.

One of the goals of mox is to make it easy to host mail yourself instead of go to/stay at one of the few large providers. I think folks commonly use the calendaring that comes with their free email address. And it seems many people enjoy their webmail over locally installed mail clients.

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