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What is the nest all-in-one solution for self hosting email?
I recently switched to Zoho and while it's OK, it has blocked my admin account twice already because I use different VPNs to different country to access some content. I have to remember to close my IMAP email client otherwise they notice and block after connections to different countries in a certain amount of time.
I used to self host email ages ago and I kinda promised to myself "never anymore", but I know that these days it's much easier and I can use an SMTP relay (I use Mailpace for some stuff and it's great and cheap) to resolve deliverability issues.
I got a new AX41-NVME server from Hetzner a couple of days ago to set up a lot of stuff for the family, so I may add email if there is something easy and secure I could use.
Any suggestions? I would love to hear pros and cons of the solutions you have tried or used. I prefer your opinions to random posts on the Internet 
Comments
IRedMail and Mailcow are both amazing solutions, I would have trouble choosing between them. I actually have an iRedMail pro license I love it so much. I feel like that's high praise considering it could be viewed as a competing option to paying me
Can IRedMail be installed with Docker? Also in terms of security are they equivalent?
You could probably make it run in docker but it's not built to be. They're equal in security as far as what is known. Never know what tomorrow brings.
Gotcha. I think I'm gonna try Mailcow with one domain and see how it works. Thanks!
I am running both iRedMail and Mailcow. For me, iRedMail is easier to tweak since it has better documentation, examples, and forum. But if you are familiar with docker, you can go with Mailcow.
I use mailcow and route outbound through mxroute, it's been solid for the past 2-3 years.
Yeah I was thinking to use Mailpace as SMTP relay. I use it for other things and it's very reliable and super cheap
I am confused as to what you get for free with iRedMail
The free version is enough for me. I can directly use command line and mysql query for tweaking. The Pro version give you API and full featured web interface.
I'll try it too then to see if I like it. Thanks!
mail-in-a-box is really nice. Not sure if I would self host on Hetzner tho.
I think it's not Docker out of the box?
Why?
Check sogo.nu if you like active sync and Outlook like system. You can also use SMTP relay and only self host panel.
I find Mialcow really nice.. But I ditch them when they went docker only. There is people out there that hate docker.
In the end I made my setup(s) even better but I have to admit their UI is nice and feature rich
I am lazy.
@MikePT ’s reseller plan(unlimited domain and seats) with Nextcloud installed (to also get CalDav) + (potentially) inbound SPAM filtering by Mailgun/SendGrid plus built in Spamassassin, running JetBackup to S3 and DA backup to FTP space(1ficher is actually pretty good for this use case, basically retaining 30 days of backup for me).
Should I want to be more hands on I will setup MailCow in Docker on a VPS with outbound SMTP relay via Mailgun/SendGrid/SparkPost and similar inbound SPAM filtering setup that runs daily backup. I can’t see myself going back to running anything directly on “bare metal” anymore except for Nginx as load balancer and SSL termination.
Bonus: I am testing Onlyoffice and Collabora CODE with Nextcloud and have to admit that Onlyoffice is much more modern and closer to how Google Docs runs, but licensing and the developer’s backstabbing to the community is nasty. CODE is more Libreoffice on browser so takes much more resources to run. Having said that I have not find any SaaS PowerPoint replacement that can insert video file in the slides directly so I suppose Office is here to stay.
I currently use Mailcow for a number of my domain zero issues outgoing was originally via Mxroute since the provider my server was originally setup at was blocked at Outlook but don't use Mxroute for outgoing at the moment since moving server to new provider which got a cleaner ips Outlook is fine from it.
Am actually considering stop self hosting mail and just move all my domain to Mxroute.
modoboa has not been mentioned yet I think. I think it's less RAM hungry than mailcow.
Mailcow probably dose use more ram, the hogs are Clamav for viruses scanning, Solr for indexing quicker search and Sogo for Activesync.
The rest of the stack isn't too bad on ram usage.
I set up Mailcow with a domain and I love it! I can send and receive but when I do tests with some tools to check health of the mail server I get
What do I need to do? Is it related to Let's Encrypt being disabled in the Mailcow config?
I disabled it because I am using Nginx Proxy Manager already for all the apps.
I use mailcow and SES for the outgoing email. So far it is good. It is not my main mail account though.
What tools do you use to check this? I will try to check my mailcow setup
I don’t bother to custom many things on my mailcow to lower the maintenance effort, so I use their default reverse proxy and letsencrypt in empty VPS
There are several tools to check mx stuff etc. I resolved by the way by copying the certificates from NPM. It works great now
Now I am testing backups and if all looks good I am gonna migrate the main domains.
Let's encrypt on mailcow is used for the webui admin and Sogo, it also used to get certificates for IMAP and SMTP.
Edit just noticed you already resolved by copying cert's from NPM.
I finished the complete migration. I absolutely love Mailcow. The sync jobs to migrate the emails from another providers where so quick and easy, and another feature that I love is that you can log in to the web ui and download a profile that when opened creates the email/calendar/contacts accounts in macOS and iOS automatically! Truly awesome.
I have recently started using AX41-NVME + Cloudflare with its email security and every email is delivering to gmail right out of the box. No need to use SMTP relay and so on.
It’s safer IMO. Mailpace as SMTP relay costs only 3/mo for 1000 emails and guarantees better deliverability. I was already using it for some projects so it doesn’t cost me any extra.
I use Mailcow and love it. Really nice software package, uses Docker, and very easy to get started with.
I'm hosting mine on a HostHatch 16GB RAM + 80GB NVMe VPS from Black Friday 2020. Currently that server is using ~8.5GB RAM but that includes Mailcow, Plex (for my personally ripped music collection), Seafile, Syncthing, and a bunch of other things. I think Mailcow is using <5GB of that RAM at the moment.
There's nothing intrinsically different about Mailcow's RAM usage, it's just that it's a complete package including email, virus scanning, great spam filtering using rspamd, ActiveSync support, calendaring, blazing fast email search using Solr (soon to be migrated to Xapian), etc. Virus and spam scanning use a noticeable amount of RAM.
Mailcow do recommend 6GB minimum, and 8GB RAM for 5-10 users.
You can cut down RAM usage by disabling Solr and ClamAV, but then you'll lose fast searches and virus scanning, respectively. On my system, ClamAV is currently using ~1.3GB of the RAM, for whatever reason. Searches still work without Solr but they're very very very slow since it has to basically grep across the entire mailbox to do so, compared to using a properly indexed search database.
I use MXRoute for outbound relaying, just because it would take me forever to get good IP reputation anywhere near theirs.
I ran Mailcow for about 3 years without any major issues. I just...got tired of running it, so I dumped it and managed to get an expired MXRoute plan (that ended up coming in handy later with the Google Suite migration). I did disable a lot of stuff like rspamd and Solr to save on RAM, but it's definitely a recommended "single host" application, despite being in Docker because of it's usage.
Docker probably makes it more ram-hungry.
Modoboa is fine on 1GB RAM with no virus scanning, a bit more being better. With virus scanning 2GB are not enough, 3 are needed.
I did run Mailcow on a 1GB box, but it was a long time ago, before the switch to docker, and of course with no ClamaV.
Docker shouldn't really make a significant difference. Sure, there's libraries in shared memory that can't be shared with the host system any more, but overall that's not a huge amount of RAM.
My secondary/backup Mailcow server is running on a system with 4GB RAM, albeit with virus scanning, Solr, and Sogo disabled (since it's just a relay). I'm not at my computer at the moment but I think Mailcow is using <2GB on that system.
I have 64GB on the server and with Mailcow plus a ton of other apps I am still at only 16GB of usage
> @daxterfellowes said:
Why did you get tired of running it?