Looks very interesting, I'm currently looking for a replacement of Mailcow
Poste.io – Complete Mail Server
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Re: Poste.io – Complete Mail Server
#12Dovecot, Roundcube, ClamAV, Rspamd are all battle-tested and reasonable choices, but the choice of Haraka, a Node.js-based SMTP server, feels dubious. Why not exim or something similarly solid and well-understood?
They do have a nice list of features: SMTP + IMAP + POP3 + Antispam + Antivirus
Web administration + Web email, ...on your server in ~5 minutes
I was running helm (a hardware device plus mail with many of those features) but they couldn't get anywhere in the marketplace.
Re: Poste.io – Complete Mail Server
#13I feel like this solution is optimizing the wrong problem.
The bulk of work with managing a mail server (these days) isn't software setup and admin. On the receiving side, it's all the work dealing with abuse and attacks. On the sending side -- and this is the tough one -- it's getting sites to accept your email. When I finally gave up managing my own mail server (about two years ago), I found that about every six months I was involved in some panic where some large mail provider (Microsoft and Google most frequently) decided they didn't want to accept email from my server. Solving these issues is neither easy nor quick.
These days I'm very happy to pay somebody else to run email services using my provided domains.
Re: Poste.io – Complete Mail Server
#14First thought: oh, huh, a self-hosted CVE generator. In seriousness, installing Roundcube on my own server circa 2006 was the cause of the first and only time I’ve had a server hacked. It’s probably improved since then or it wouldn’t still be around, but it put me off ever hosting my own email. The risks only get worse the further away you get from personal/hobby use.
There is also basic forms of protection you should put in front of everything you make public, in order to reduce the attack surface. Firewall that blocks everything by default, strip all headers unless you veto them manually, aggressive rate-limiting you increase the limit only for specific IPs and so on. Putting up any type of software on a unprotected server even in 2006 is begging for trouble.
Define “unprotected”. The particular server had a firewall and fail2ban along with other measures. But Roundcube is a webmail service, so you’re leaving 443 open in any case. No amount of firewalls or rate limiting will help you if the thing you’re running is a web service that turns out to have a SQL injection vulnerability in one of its endpoints.
Email servers in particular are going to be under attack all day long just from normal email activity, and that’s before you throw in any kind of web interface. It can be a big help to point your MX records at some other filtering service, but at that point why are you bothering hosting your own?
Re: Poste.io – Complete Mail Server
#15First thought: oh, huh, a self-hosted CVE generator. In seriousness, installing Roundcube on my own server circa 2006 was the cause of the first and only time I’ve had a server hacked. It’s probably improved since then or it wouldn’t still be around, but it put me off ever hosting my own email. The risks only get worse the further away you get from personal/hobby use.
I've used https://mailu.io. It works well, but your biggest problem is going to be getting over the spam filter hurdles of the email giants of the world. Even if everything is properly configured (including dkim / spf / whatever else they've added) your messages will get plopped in the spam folder.
Re: Poste.io – Complete Mail Server
#16If I was running a service that required parsing emails from external sources, could I easily write a script that could parse inbound emails and then do $SOMETHING with them easily? If so, where would that sit in Poste?
Re: Poste.io – Complete Mail Server
#17I really have zero complaints or reason to move off Mailcow
Re: Poste.io – Complete Mail Server
#18I evaluated it once, and ended up using https://mailcow.email
I think the fact that it includes SoGO with Cal/CardDAV and active sync was the main reason, poste.io doesn’t seem to provide a solution for contacts and calendars.
I’m still very happy with mailcow. And they include all features in the free version.
Re: Poste.io – Complete Mail Server
#19I really have zero complaints or reason to move off Mailcow https://mailcow.email/
Equally happy! Would recommend!
Re: Poste.io – Complete Mail Server
#20I feel like this solution is optimizing the wrong problem. The bulk of work with managing a mail server (these days) isn't software setup and admin. On the receiving side, it's all the work dealing with abuse and attacks. On the sending side -- and this is the tough one -- it's getting sites to accept your email. When I finally gave up managing my own mail server (about two years ago), I found that about every six mo…
No, that kind of software optimizes a very important problem. It’s quite cumbersome to set up all components of a mail server by yourself. At some point you start hosting a domain for a friend. Then then friend wants to create some mailboxes, forwardings and so on by themselves. So you just give them SSH and tell them to edit the postfix config? Having a web interface that does it all and doesn’t break things is very important.