Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
1–10 of 131 posts
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#2This 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 zone during setup.
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.
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#3Looks good, but since it's a young project I would suggest to anyone interested to consider Mailu [1], which is a mature project and looks easier to configure.
[1] https://mailu.io
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#4When I tried a similar project, every email I sent from a self-hosted email server were considered spam from Gmail.
In some cases, websites weren't even allowing email registration with a self-hosted email.
Is there any general advice about avoiding such problems?
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#5This 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…
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.
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#6When I tried a similar project, every email I sent from a self-hosted email server were considered spam from Gmail. In some cases, websites weren't even allowing email registration with a self-hosted email. Is there any general advice about avoiding such problems?
Get a machine/VM at a hosting provider that takes their network seriously. Typically not the cheapest you can find.
And make sure all the DNS config is set correctly. Mox helps you with that.
I've done a few mox quickstarts at fresh VM's, and mail was accepted by gmail just fine.
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#7When I tried a similar project, every email I sent from a self-hosted email server were considered spam from Gmail. In some cases, websites weren't even allowing email registration with a self-hosted email. Is there any general advice about avoiding such problems?
Email reputation is a complex topic, but generally as long as you
• don't use an IP range classified as "consumer" (known dynamic IP DSL/cable ranges)
• set up SPF
• set up DKIM
• don't send actual spam
…it generally gets through. Mox is so far the easiest solution for SPF/DKIM I've seen, but if you don't mind spending a weekend tinkering, it should be solveable with any email stack.
> In some cases, websites weren't even allowing email registration with a self-hosted email.
I never ran into that issue. Not much you can do there, other than writing the owner angry emails via gmail.
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#8This 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…
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!
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#9Looks good, but since it's a young project I would suggest to anyone interested to consider Mailu [1], which is a mature project and looks easier to configure. [1] https://mailu.io
Mailu, like poste, zimbra, univention, and a dozen other projects like it, suffers from being just a layer of glue scripts and leaky abstractions on top of very complicated dedicated software stacks – dovecot, postfix, rspamd, etc. are all complex beasts on their own, and have 30 years worth of accumulated configuration knobs to fiddle with.
Postfix and dovecot in particular are also service orchestration frameworks of their own and don't reaaaally mesh well with docker, nor do the authors care about "this silly new fad". Don't dare asking about help with it on the postfix mailing list e.g., Wietse will rip your head off and beat you with it.
So, no, after messing around with these sorts of stacks for over a decade now, I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone. Sooner or later the leaky abstractions flood your basement and you have to clean up the mess on your own.
Mox's approach of cutting out 95% of the complexity by rolling their own good enough solutions into one monolith is far saner for small setups.
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#10This 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…
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.