I need to run my own email server for some of my domains, because the providers that I usually use don’t support them (they use Unicode characters, and not everyone supports that yet). I have a small VPS that I run a few Docker containers on, and I’m wanting to try and run an email server on it as well. What containers are good for a low-hassle email setup? I don’t need a mailbox webui (ex: round cube), but it would be nice to have a UI for management. I do need multi-domain support, however.
Stalwart
Written in rust, contains SMTP, IMAP, JMAP, Sieve, CalDAV, CardDAV, WebDAV. Has an admin web ui. Sane defaults, minimal foot guns. No zoo of containers needed.
Beware it’s very heavyweight. My dedicated oldish server with 8gb ram and spinning hdes couldn’t even handle one single domani and a few users…
Was 6 months ago, tough.
I had to play with database types, because apparently out of the box setup works only on SSDs (??) And do a bunch of other stuff to improve performance.
End result was way worse than installing postfix+dovecot+dkim/dmark/etc stuff directly.
Quite unusable, but the hardware was limited
True. The default rocksdb is completely unusable on HDDs. For me it runs pretty good with PostgreSQL. Dovecot was certainly easier to handle with its file based storage and was super fast. But Postfix was a pain and I can’t count how often it bit me over the years (and since it’s SMTP, that means something broke in receiving, delivery or was suddenly a spam vector, which all sucks quite hard).