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This is indeed very a very helpful tutorial!
This is cool, I can see why this is useful. Being able to have more control over your data and having that responsibility. Might be worth getting a cheap BuyVM or Hetzner box and mess about with this.
Minimum ram is kinda high if you're using the whole suite
That is pretty much what keeps me from switching to mailcow: there is no (easy) way of disabling unused services from the stack...
It works pretty well for me. I'm using the standard rspamd config, plus @jar's MXRBL, and just tweaked the scores of a few rules.
I have a catchall account and use a separate email address per site (e.g.
In particular, the address I used to use on LinkedIn gets a LOT of spam.
[email protected]), so when a site is compromised and the data is leaked, I can just block all incoming emails to that particular addressYou can disable ClamAV and Solr, as those two components take the most RAM. The options are documented here: https://mailcow.github.io/mailcow-dockerized-docs/prerequisite/prerequisite-system/. You'll lose virus scanning and fast search though.
I'm running a secondary server on a system with 4GB RAM, but I disabled ClamAV, Solr, and SOGo.
VPSes with 8GB RAM are quite cheap these days though. There's nothing in particular about Mailcow itself that takes RAM, it's just the full-featuredness of the suite. Manual configuration of all the same components would use a comparable amount of RAM.
Thanks, I'll check that out.
Thanks for pointing that out.
Checked that already, but this are unfortunately the more relevant parts...I would be more happy to leave out the SOGo part. :P
I get that there are other, more "minimal" solutions out there, but somehow put an eye years ago on mailcow and can't let the idea go.
The tricky thing is the SOGo provides the ActiveSync server (which is needed at least by the default Android email client to get real-time push) and the CalDAV server (for viewing calendar in your email app). If you use an email client that supports IMAP IDLE (like FairEmail) and don't need the calendar, it should be OK to disable SOGo? I've never tested it on a live server though.
@Daniel15 thanks for the tutorial!
btw can you tell when will the Indian location be available again on dnstools.ws?
thanks
I was using a WebHorizon NAT VPS for it, but they discontinued their Indian location. Looking at moving it to MrVM if they have stock available, I'm just waiting to hear back from @mikho
Why india?
Yeah, you’d probably find it quite hard to have a non Indian VPS run a ping test from India
https://clients.mrvm.net/cart.php?a=add&pid=110 is available to order
just checked mailcow...it takes a low ram
I have been running my own mailcow instance for a while now. Generally doing well except I can't find a host to run it on that has good rep with hotmail/microsoft. So I just signed up for the mxroute service so I can relay my mailcow stuff through it and have a better chance at being delivered. However I have a few questions. My mxroute instance is on DirectAdmin, not the cpanel like the op has. @awooooool, you say you just create another account for relaying. Do you mean just any general email that is not used in mailcow? For instance like [email protected] and [email protected] would work? Any help is appreciated.
Mailcow eats memory like chrome.
I suggest https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest/
Testing it since a few days, no database, just files, low memory usage.
Yeah, do that and then disable inbound mail for the domain in DirectAdmin. (Because you'll hit this: https://mxroutedocs.com/troubleshooting/nosuchrecipient/)
Mailcow eats memory because it includes a full groupware suite (SOgo), virus scanning, etc. If you set up the same systems manually, you'd also see similar RAM usage. You can disable some of that functionality if you want to by modifying the
mailcow.conffile, but note that disabling SOgo also disables ActiveSync. Mailcow's web UI is also very good.Mailcow asked me if it should disable them, I said yes.
Despite that, It needed 2GB of Memory.
So yea, the Dockerized mailserver uses 300MB.
Which parts are using the memory? Did you check it e.g. with
htopordocker stats?I didn't really checked what specific process that was.
All I know, is that the tiny Netcup was swapping hard and nearly maxing out the 1GB swap file despite having all of that disabled.
I double checked the config, would have to reinstall it for that.
Has anyone ever tested Wildduck?
I was going to use docker-mailserver but wanted the full activesync functionality and spam filtering that mailcow offers. My host has plenty of ram so no issues here so far.
So do an email forwarder, not catchall?
And to disable inbound in DA you do it under "Modify MX records and uncheck the "Use this server to handle my e-mails. If not, change the MX records and uncheck this option." correct?
Reading this makes me wish to self host email again lol. A while ago I switched to MXRoute because I was worried about downtime etc more than anything else. Aren't you worried about this?
BTW has anyone tried https://mailu.io/2.0/?
Yeah just disabling inbound like that should do, actually.
I have daily backups that I can restore pretty easily on a new server, plus I have a secondary server that can temporarily hold emails if the main server goes down (Mailcow has a guide for this). I'm considering having a hot standby too.
A good thing about Docker is that backups are easy because the files aren't spread all over the system. Just backup the entire Mailcow directory (which has the docker-compose and the config files), plus all the Docker volumes (in
/var/lib/docker/volumeson Debian)Same - I'm running mine on a GreenCloudVPS VPS with 16GB RAM.
Not really, just monitor your services. E-mail will retry for up to 8 hours typically. So as long as your server is back online in 8 hours you should be fine. I do mine in docker and have DNS on a very short TTL so if I have to swap servers it is a few minutes, not hours.
you need this much ram for a mail server?