Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 131 posts

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

#121

Post by infogulch »

muyuu wrote: post #115
infogulch wrote: post #107

Email servers are notoriously difficult to configure, hence all these solutions ranging from tutorials to "everything included" systems. Recent activity on HN about mail servers: Mox, Poste.io from yesterday [1], Mailinabox, mailcow, ispmail, maddy, stalwart jmap, etc. Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. What I'd like is a "mail reverse proxy" that does all the work to…

it's also wasteful in a different way: a lot of effort put towards building on top of a remarkably bad pseudonymous protocol based on anachronistic trust assumptions from that point of view the refactoring to do is separating identification from transport and storage/lookup - for these things there are very good solutions but there is no cohesive protocol that is solid and widely adopted, and it's unclear if that wil…

The way I look at it is that we're gonna have email for a long time, realistically at least another 50 years, probably 100. So if we're stuck with it, we might as well make it as painless as possible.

I totally agree that we should look for better protocols, for example Matrix looks like it could eventually be a good replacement for email. But whatever email is replaced with will definitely need some kind of way to interface with email during the transition, and a pre-built mail reverse proxy / IP gateway will only help with that.

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

#122

Post by adr1an »

mjl- wrote: post #114
infogulch wrote: post #107

Email servers are notoriously difficult to configure, hence all these solutions ranging from tutorials to "everything included" systems. Recent activity on HN about mail servers: Mox, Poste.io from yesterday [1], Mailinabox, mailcow, ispmail, maddy, stalwart jmap, etc. Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. What I'd like is a "mail reverse proxy" that does all the work to…

> Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. There certainly is duplication of effort, but all these systems try to bring something new to the table. > Why doesn't this exist already? Because you haven't written it yet? (; But seriously, I've had a somewhat similar thought. But instead of running a "reverse mail proxy" on a VPS, I was hoping to take a VPS, set up some tunnel…

Wireguard itself can help you out with the task of forwarding traffic or creating an overlay network. There's also ngrok and tailscale for forwarding traffic and doing NAT traversal. Except for wireguard, these are commercial platforms, the open source alternatives I know of, are (respectively):

- https://bore.pub && https://sslip.io - https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

I don't think there's anyone using this kind of tools for emails, the technical limitations elude my understanding TBH. This comment might be border to off-topic, but I think the tools fill in the niche use-case you just mentioned. Have fun!

edit: might be of your interest to check this list! https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling#recommenda...

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

#123

Post by PLG88 »

adr1an wrote: post #122
mjl- wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. There certainly is duplication of effort, but all these systems try to bring something new to the table. > Why doesn't this exist already? Because you haven't written it yet? (; But seriously, I've had a somewhat similar thought. But instead of running a "reverse mail proxy" on a VPS, I was hoping to take a VPS, set up some tunnel…

Wireguard itself can help you out with the task of forwarding traffic or creating an overlay network. There's also ngrok and tailscale for forwarding traffic and doing NAT traversal. Except for wireguard, these are commercial platforms, the open source alternatives I know of, are (respectively): - https://bore.pub && https://sslip.io - https://github.com/juanfont/headscale I don't think there's anyone using this kind…

Another open source option is zrok (https://zrok.io/), we have just released v0.32. Its built on top of OpenZiti.

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

#124

Post by ghoshbishakh »

adr1an wrote: post #122
mjl- wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. There certainly is duplication of effort, but all these systems try to bring something new to the table. > Why doesn't this exist already? Because you haven't written it yet? (; But seriously, I've had a somewhat similar thought. But instead of running a "reverse mail proxy" on a VPS, I was hoping to take a VPS, set up some tunnel…

Wireguard itself can help you out with the task of forwarding traffic or creating an overlay network. There's also ngrok and tailscale for forwarding traffic and doing NAT traversal. Except for wireguard, these are commercial platforms, the open source alternatives I know of, are (respectively): - https://bore.pub && https://sslip.io - https://github.com/juanfont/headscale I don't think there's anyone using this kind…

A simpler platform but not suitable for hosting serious stuff yet I guess is https://pinggy.io

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

#125

Post by tinus_hn »

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

There’s more services that have free tiers but I doubt that is sustainable and I’m really not interested in periodically rushing to fix things if the next service starts turning the thumbscrews.

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

#126

Post by ajdude »

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 if you visit box.yourserver.tld/cloud do you have a fully working Nextcloud instance.

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

#127

Post by baudehlo »

infogulch wrote: post #107

Email servers are notoriously difficult to configure, hence all these solutions ranging from tutorials to "everything included" systems. Recent activity on HN about mail servers: Mox, Poste.io from yesterday [1], Mailinabox, mailcow, ispmail, maddy, stalwart jmap, etc. Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. What I'd like is a "mail reverse proxy" that does all the work to…

You just described Haraka.

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

#128

Post by mjrpes »

mjl- wrote: post #116
mjrpes wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't look like it supports mailbox sharing or public folders, which are very helpful for collaborating in a SMB, especially with shared email addresses (e.g., sales@business.com).

Do you know how this is typically used/configured? Do accounts get this shared account (mailbox(es)/folders with messages) as folders in their own account? So next to your own Inbox and Trash, you would have Sales/Inbox and Sales/Trash? If you delete a message from Sales/Inbox, does it automatically go to Sales/Trash? How is that done? Perhaps IMAP namespaces? I have figured folks can just add another account (IMAP c…

I use dovecot and there is a lot of configurability for shared and public folders.

Public folders are much nicer than having to add separate IMAP accounts; users can subscribe to whatever public folders they want/need from a list. All subscribed folders show up underneath the root namespace folder. I have about 6 types of inboxes based on business roles (sales, pr, hr, it, etc). I have many more folders, beyond general inboxes, that get filled based on sieve filter rules. For example, voicemail alerts get filtered into a special voicemail folder.

Dovecot lets you configure whether the read state is shared or per user.

We use a system where people can flag messages as to whether they are taken for action, are critical, or are completed. These show up in Thunderbird/Roundcube mailbox list as color coded, and this aids in people knowing if emails have been dealt with.

You still have strict control for access/permissions on a per-mailbox basis, with ACL.

All of this could have been done with shared folders under a "shared" user account (either one or multiple shared account, such as sales, hr, etc) with similar results.

Exchange also has shared/public folder support, but it looks like permissions aren't (maybe?) as fine grained as IMAP/Dovecot/etc? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/collaboration-exo...

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

#129

Post by taskforcegemini »

infogulch wrote: post #107

Email servers are notoriously difficult to configure, hence all these solutions ranging from tutorials to "everything included" systems. Recent activity on HN about mail servers: Mox, Poste.io from yesterday [1], Mailinabox, mailcow, ispmail, maddy, stalwart jmap, etc. Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. What I'd like is a "mail reverse proxy" that does all the work to…

> What I'd like is a "mail reverse proxy" that does all the work to manage DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc and handles sending and receiving emails, but doesn't do any storage or user management.

spf, dkim and dmarc are all dns related. Running nameserver and mail servers on the same system doesn't sound like a good idea, nor does having a mailserver with write access to dns-records. using a central administration for both however sounds beneficial. but then why stop there and not add all kinds of other useful features and voila, you have a full blown control panel far away from being a simple solution for mail.

I think dns for mail needs to be complicated, otherwise people lightly just set their spf records incorrectly which gets their mailservers blacklisted. or they just will never know why their mails get blocked. if they even find out about that.

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

#130

Post by snotrockets »

infogulch wrote: post #107

Email servers are notoriously difficult to configure, hence all these solutions ranging from tutorials to "everything included" systems. Recent activity on HN about mail servers: Mox, Poste.io from yesterday [1], Mailinabox, mailcow, ispmail, maddy, stalwart jmap, etc. Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. What I'd like is a "mail reverse proxy" that does all the work to…

For small loads (<100k emails/month) and a $5/month budget, you can get this with AWS SES and a few lines of code on Lambda.
Post reply on HN