7 ms·

Stalwart mail server (self-hosted all-in-one mail server) now as an admin webui

214 points by clemiclemen 2y ago

cvalka 2y ago
The best smtp server out there!
- kldx 2y ago
  How reliable is mail delivery ootb with dmarc, spf and dkm in your experience? (I guess it really depends on the reputation of the IP and not the mail server)
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    It’s frustrating if you’re unlucky and have an IP with bad reputation, or accidentally send emails with low performance. Getting unblocked is sometimes not possible if you’re on your own. Authentication helps but it’s not enough in practice still.
ranger_danger 2y ago
[flagged]
- bks 2y ago
  Handling lots of production email for hundreds of domains for the past 10 years on https://www.iredmail.org/ https://www.iredmail.org/
codetrotter 2y ago
Looks nice! I could see myself reconfiguring my current OpenSMTPd based setup to have OpenSMTPd relay incoming mail to Stalwart and having Stalwart make the decision about which mails to keep or discard. Def gonna experiment with that this weekend :D
Nerada 2y ago
I've been a happy MailInABox user for many years, but this looks great.
tetrisgm 2y ago
Is there a reliable solution we could use for our small startup? We want to shoot out daily emails to our users, like Bandcamp or Substack do. We could ofc use Mailchimp but always happy to explore self hosting. Would this or another solution work?
- 0x457 2y ago
  This is more of a GMail alternative. Sending personal emails and sending marketing emails are two very completely different beasts.
- _eht 2y ago
  The biggest issue you will likely encounter is having clean IP addresses to send from. If you have that problem solved, the next hurdle will be realizing that Stalwart is more than you would need to manage sending daily emails. If you have the IP addresses, you could just use a script that grabs email addresses to send to for the day, and ship them with a fairly straightforward SMTP daemon (sendmail) installation on a VPS. Stalwart might be a good use case for your business/employee mail account handling, however.
  - tetrisgm 2y ago
    Yeah looks like based on the replies it's more of a Gmail alternative. Which is great but not about sending so much. Have you had a chance to setup sendmail? how we've been using our own baremetal setup on hetzner (ipfs box) and could use that for sending too. Any recos on how to make sure the IP is seen as clean?
    - _eht 2y ago
      [dead]
- jen729w 2y ago
  Roll your own with Amazon SES. Bang up a little script and call the CLI. for recipient in "${recipients[@]}"; do aws sesv2 send-email \ --from-email-address "$sender" \ --destination "ToAddresses=$recipient" \ --content "Simple={Subject={Data='$subject',Charset='UTF-8'},Body={Text={Data='$body',Charset='UTF-8'}}}" \ --region "$region" done I got that script from their website. Should be easy enough to knock something up in Deno or whatever. 50,000 emails/month free! Amazing. If you want an actual product, check out Buttondown. Indie, great support, and amazing APIs.
x3n0ph3n3 2y ago
I'm personally a user and fan of poste.io. Other than just being open-source, is there a good reason I might want to switch to Stalwart?
jonotime 2y ago
This is fantastic. I'm in the process of setting up a personal mail server. I have played a bit with mailcow in the past but my new server is running NixOS, so I'm looking for something that has been implemented there. And happened to stumble upon stalwart for the first time today. A web admin will certainly make the switch from mailcow easier. The other contender was getting nixos-mailserver up and running alongside postfixadmin. But with stalwart I wont have to do that wiring up. Side note: I route outgoing messages to sendgrid.
notyoutube 2y ago
It's interesting how there is now * Maddy: https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy * Mox: https://github.com/mjl-/mox https://github.com/mjl-/mox * and Stalwart which all see to aim for more or less the same niche. I wonder if we'll see two of those merge eventually.
- softjobs 2y ago
  Only Stalwart supports JMAP, which imo is the future of mail/calendar/contacts client-server communication. https://jmap.io/ https://jmap.io/
  - logifail 2y ago
    It seems JMAP isn't universally loved, see for instance the spirited discussion in [0], although I've no direct experience. My Maildirs "justed worked" though, and have been moved across dozens of servers - not to mention worked in so many different filesystems - over the years. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19876710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19876710
- infogulch 2y ago
  Maddy and Mox are written in Goo, but Stalwart in Rust. So perhaps the first two, but unlikely the last.
  - karamanolev 2y ago
    They're written in Go, but I think I like the concept of a language called Goo. Maybe they should've named it that instead.
    - orthoxerox 2y ago
      Goo is a nice name for object-oriented Go.
RyeCombinator 2y ago
Stalwart is great and has out of the box JMAP support - I don't believe there's anything else out right now that checks all the boxes like Stalwart for an AIO mailserver.
throwiforgtnlzy 2y ago
Once upon a time, ran scaled, HA Zimbra instances as a commercial service. Is there anything approaching "Microsoft Exchange" today without the Microsoft or commercial pseudo-FOSS?
infogulch 2y ago
How does the directory management ui work with an external directory, say LDAP? I've been looking at both Stalwart and Kanidm, I suspect they would be a good pairing. https://kanidm.com/ https://kanidm.com/
- docc 2y ago
  i paired it with ldap. So users and adresses are managed by ldap ldap is currently a second citizen in stalwart tho so there are rough edges and missing features. But the basics are there
- MathiasPius 2y ago
  I'd be very interested to know as well. Although the last time I attempted to run kanidm in a containerized fashion it left a lot to be desired. The software is (perhaps expectedly) not really built to support semi-ephemeral lifetimes, so it took quite a few hacks to get it running in Kubernetes the last time I tried. As I recall, the primary issue I had was with exposing the certman-provided Let's Encrypt certificates to the kanidm process inside the container in a reasonable fashion. I don't think I found an elegant way of signalling to the kanidm process that the certificates had been renewed and should be reloaded.
pydubreucq 2y ago
Really interesting project with JMAP support ! I would like time to test it !
elric 2y ago
"No runtimes or garbage collectors." seems like an odd thing to advertise. Have either of these been the cause of problems in mail servers in the past? I'm guessing not?
- addandsubtract 2y ago
  Who takes out the junk mail when there are no garbage collectors?
fffrantz 2y ago
Just tried to set it up on a fresh Ubuntu free VM on Oracle cloud and I can't seem to be able to even login after setup. Oh well, might look into it when I have more time. Looks promising though!
- fffrantz 2y ago
  Hmm, interesting, it only binds on the IPv6 address. It does work but IPv4 does not seem to be working.
jasode 2y ago
From the main project page, it mentions it has typical alias support: >Email aliases, mailing lists, subaddressing and catch-all addresses support. Another feature that would be nice to have built-in is masked hide-my-email aliases for privacy like the cloaked email services from iCloud, FastMail, SimpleLogin, Cloudflare email routing, etc.[1] For now, I use the typical aliases addresses in Dovecot but it doesn't hide the real email when replying. Also, creating new aliases in Dovecot-based email systems is very tedious and cumbersome because you have to go through the cPanel interface to create them. (Some suggest using the "catchall" feature to avoid the need to manually create new aliases but that advice is not workable when spam robots constantly send emails to new random addresses in your domain.) The cPanel/Dovecot aliases also don't have any metadata so you can add details on what the alias is for and when it was created. [1] masked email services examples https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078 https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078 https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Masked-Email https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Ma... https://simplelogin.io/ https://simplelogin.io/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing EDIT ADD to reply : >On Stalwart you can implement masked e-mail using address rewriting Stalwart's feature of "Sieve scripts" for custom rewriting/filtering is interesting but it's not UI friendly for endusers to create new masked email addresses (and also later delete them). There's also no user-defined metadata. It's also not clear if Sieve scripts can run on outgoing mail rather than just incoming mail. Example of how UI workflow in Apple's Hide My Email is simpler than Stalwart Sieve scripting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRrkJy0vUk&t=34s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRrkJy0vUk&t=34s
- StalwartLabs 2y ago
  On Stalwart you can implement masked e-mail using address rewriting: https://stalw.art/docs/smtp/rewrite/address https://stalw.art/docs/smtp/rewrite/address
- e12e 2y ago
  The project name escapes me, but there was a python project that generated email addresses with a hmac, and rejected invalid addresses (some-prefix-c679ba1@example.com). I think it came out a little before the rise of grey listing.
BartjeD 2y ago
What does the update process look like? After I install this via the install script on, say, Debian. An update comes along. What do I do? Run the install script again? Or does the web UI have a process for initiating an update? I couldn't find any information on this on the website: I consider this essential information. [Edit] I found it: https://stalw.art/docs/management/webadmin/usage https://stalw.art/docs/management/webadmin/usage
- e12e 2y ago
  > With every subsequent restart of Stalwart, the server fetches the Webadmin binary from the blob store, extracting it into a temporary directory. This process guarantees that the Webadmin is always available and updated That's a little too efficient for my taste.
hannofcart 2y ago
Have been running Stalwart for around 6months now. Works great so far. Setting up DKIM, DMARC, SPF etc. was a breeze. Now I am able to send reliably to Gmail, and semi-reliably to Outlook. My mail volumes are very low however. I just setup this as my SMTP server just for the heck of it.
saddist0 2y ago
noob question: how does this compare to something like vestacp, which install a lot more and mail (roundcube frontend)? I have been using it since 5 years and always work like a charm, maybe HN give me the reason to move on. :')

214 points by clemiclemen 2y ago

cvalka 2y ago

The best smtp server out there!

kldx 2y ago
How reliable is mail delivery ootb with dmarc, spf and dkm in your experience? (I guess it really depends on the reputation of the IP and not the mail server)
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  It’s frustrating if you’re unlucky and have an IP with bad reputation, or accidentally send emails with low performance. Getting unblocked is sometimes not possible if you’re on your own. Authentication helps but it’s not enough in practice still.

ranger_danger 2y ago

[flagged]

bks 2y ago
Handling lots of production email for hundreds of domains for the past 10 years on https://www.iredmail.org/ https://www.iredmail.org/

codetrotter 2y ago

Looks nice! I could see myself reconfiguring my current OpenSMTPd based setup to have OpenSMTPd relay incoming mail to Stalwart and having Stalwart make the decision about which mails to keep or discard. Def gonna experiment with that this weekend :D

Nerada 2y ago

I've been a happy MailInABox user for many years, but this looks great.

tetrisgm 2y ago

Is there a reliable solution we could use for our small startup? We want to shoot out daily emails to our users, like Bandcamp or Substack do. We could ofc use Mailchimp but always happy to explore self hosting. Would this or another solution work?

0x457 2y ago
This is more of a GMail alternative. Sending personal emails and sending marketing emails are two very completely different beasts.
_eht 2y ago
The biggest issue you will likely encounter is having clean IP addresses to send from. If you have that problem solved, the next hurdle will be realizing that Stalwart is more than you would need to manage sending daily emails. If you have the IP addresses, you could just use a script that grabs email addresses to send to for the day, and ship them with a fairly straightforward SMTP daemon (sendmail) installation on a VPS. Stalwart might be a good use case for your business/employee mail account handling, however.
- tetrisgm 2y ago
  Yeah looks like based on the replies it's more of a Gmail alternative. Which is great but not about sending so much. Have you had a chance to setup sendmail? how we've been using our own baremetal setup on hetzner (ipfs box) and could use that for sending too. Any recos on how to make sure the IP is seen as clean?
  - _eht 2y ago
    [dead]
jen729w 2y ago
Roll your own with Amazon SES. Bang up a little script and call the CLI. for recipient in "${recipients[@]}"; do aws sesv2 send-email \ --from-email-address "$sender" \ --destination "ToAddresses=$recipient" \ --content "Simple={Subject={Data='$subject',Charset='UTF-8'},Body={Text={Data='$body',Charset='UTF-8'}}}" \ --region "$region" done I got that script from their website. Should be easy enough to knock something up in Deno or whatever. 50,000 emails/month free! Amazing. If you want an actual product, check out Buttondown. Indie, great support, and amazing APIs.

x3n0ph3n3 2y ago

I'm personally a user and fan of poste.io. Other than just being open-source, is there a good reason I might want to switch to Stalwart?

jonotime 2y ago

This is fantastic. I'm in the process of setting up a personal mail server. I have played a bit with mailcow in the past but my new server is running NixOS, so I'm looking for something that has been implemented there. And happened to stumble upon stalwart for the first time today. A web admin will certainly make the switch from mailcow easier. The other contender was getting nixos-mailserver up and running alongside postfixadmin. But with stalwart I wont have to do that wiring up. Side note: I route outgoing messages to sendgrid.

notyoutube 2y ago

It's interesting how there is now * Maddy: https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy * Mox: https://github.com/mjl-/mox https://github.com/mjl-/mox * and Stalwart which all see to aim for more or less the same niche. I wonder if we'll see two of those merge eventually.

softjobs 2y ago
Only Stalwart supports JMAP, which imo is the future of mail/calendar/contacts client-server communication. https://jmap.io/ https://jmap.io/
- logifail 2y ago
  It seems JMAP isn't universally loved, see for instance the spirited discussion in [0], although I've no direct experience. My Maildirs "justed worked" though, and have been moved across dozens of servers - not to mention worked in so many different filesystems - over the years. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19876710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19876710
infogulch 2y ago
Maddy and Mox are written in Goo, but Stalwart in Rust. So perhaps the first two, but unlikely the last.
- karamanolev 2y ago
  They're written in Go, but I think I like the concept of a language called Goo. Maybe they should've named it that instead.
  - orthoxerox 2y ago
    Goo is a nice name for object-oriented Go.

RyeCombinator 2y ago

Stalwart is great and has out of the box JMAP support - I don't believe there's anything else out right now that checks all the boxes like Stalwart for an AIO mailserver.

throwiforgtnlzy 2y ago

Once upon a time, ran scaled, HA Zimbra instances as a commercial service. Is there anything approaching "Microsoft Exchange" today without the Microsoft or commercial pseudo-FOSS?

infogulch 2y ago

How does the directory management ui work with an external directory, say LDAP? I've been looking at both Stalwart and Kanidm, I suspect they would be a good pairing. https://kanidm.com/ https://kanidm.com/

docc 2y ago
i paired it with ldap. So users and adresses are managed by ldap ldap is currently a second citizen in stalwart tho so there are rough edges and missing features. But the basics are there
MathiasPius 2y ago
I'd be very interested to know as well. Although the last time I attempted to run kanidm in a containerized fashion it left a lot to be desired. The software is (perhaps expectedly) not really built to support semi-ephemeral lifetimes, so it took quite a few hacks to get it running in Kubernetes the last time I tried. As I recall, the primary issue I had was with exposing the certman-provided Let's Encrypt certificates to the kanidm process inside the container in a reasonable fashion. I don't think I found an elegant way of signalling to the kanidm process that the certificates had been renewed and should be reloaded.

pydubreucq 2y ago

Really interesting project with JMAP support ! I would like time to test it !

elric 2y ago

"No runtimes or garbage collectors." seems like an odd thing to advertise. Have either of these been the cause of problems in mail servers in the past? I'm guessing not?

addandsubtract 2y ago
Who takes out the junk mail when there are no garbage collectors?

fffrantz 2y ago

Just tried to set it up on a fresh Ubuntu free VM on Oracle cloud and I can't seem to be able to even login after setup. Oh well, might look into it when I have more time. Looks promising though!

fffrantz 2y ago
Hmm, interesting, it only binds on the IPv6 address. It does work but IPv4 does not seem to be working.

jasode 2y ago

From the main project page, it mentions it has typical alias support: >Email aliases, mailing lists, subaddressing and catch-all addresses support. Another feature that would be nice to have built-in is masked hide-my-email aliases for privacy like the cloaked email services from iCloud, FastMail, SimpleLogin, Cloudflare email routing, etc.[1] For now, I use the typical aliases addresses in Dovecot but it doesn't hide the real email when replying. Also, creating new aliases in Dovecot-based email systems is very tedious and cumbersome because you have to go through the cPanel interface to create them. (Some suggest using the "catchall" feature to avoid the need to manually create new aliases but that advice is not workable when spam robots constantly send emails to new random addresses in your domain.) The cPanel/Dovecot aliases also don't have any metadata so you can add details on what the alias is for and when it was created. [1] masked email services examples https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078 https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078 https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Masked-Email https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Ma... https://simplelogin.io/ https://simplelogin.io/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing EDIT ADD to reply : >On Stalwart you can implement masked e-mail using address rewriting Stalwart's feature of "Sieve scripts" for custom rewriting/filtering is interesting but it's not UI friendly for endusers to create new masked email addresses (and also later delete them). There's also no user-defined metadata. It's also not clear if Sieve scripts can run on outgoing mail rather than just incoming mail. Example of how UI workflow in Apple's Hide My Email is simpler than Stalwart Sieve scripting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRrkJy0vUk&t=34s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJRrkJy0vUk&t=34s

StalwartLabs 2y ago
On Stalwart you can implement masked e-mail using address rewriting: https://stalw.art/docs/smtp/rewrite/address https://stalw.art/docs/smtp/rewrite/address
e12e 2y ago
The project name escapes me, but there was a python project that generated email addresses with a hmac, and rejected invalid addresses (some-prefix-c679ba1@example.com). I think it came out a little before the rise of grey listing.

BartjeD 2y ago

What does the update process look like? After I install this via the install script on, say, Debian. An update comes along. What do I do? Run the install script again? Or does the web UI have a process for initiating an update? I couldn't find any information on this on the website: I consider this essential information. [Edit] I found it: https://stalw.art/docs/management/webadmin/usage https://stalw.art/docs/management/webadmin/usage

e12e 2y ago
> With every subsequent restart of Stalwart, the server fetches the Webadmin binary from the blob store, extracting it into a temporary directory. This process guarantees that the Webadmin is always available and updated That's a little too efficient for my taste.

hannofcart 2y ago

Have been running Stalwart for around 6months now. Works great so far. Setting up DKIM, DMARC, SPF etc. was a breeze. Now I am able to send reliably to Gmail, and semi-reliably to Outlook. My mail volumes are very low however. I just setup this as my SMTP server just for the heck of it.

saddist0 2y ago

noob question: how does this compare to something like vestacp, which install a lot more and mail (roundcube frontend)? I have been using it since 5 years and always work like a charm, maybe HN give me the reason to move on. :')