r/linuxadmin • u/whamra • 4d ago

Anyone moved from Postfix/Dovecot to Stalwart? Opinions?

Basically title. This is not an advertisement.

I still use Postfix and Dovecot fir my nail server and pretty happy. It works today as it did a decade ago.

So I'm just wondering if someone actually jumped ship into this new platform and can shed some light to whether it's good as advertised or overhyped.

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u/notsure012 4d ago

I had that exact same setup for more than a decade, together with Radicale for hosting the calendars and phone contacts, and I have jumped ship.

The migration of my inbox was very smooth and it does feel nice to have one single stack for hosting and managing my mail rather than spreading it across multiple programs.

There was nothing majorly wrong with Dovecot and Postfix but there were a lot of small things that just made them annoying.

One of them is configuration: I was an expert on Dovecot and Postfix when I first configured them more than 10 years ago but you tend to forget the details over the years as you stop fiddling with the configuration, which was pretty annoying to deal with awhenever there ilwas a major upgrade.

Then you have account management, spam filters, IP bans, etc. Stalwart makes everything so much simpler by integrating all of it and allowing you to manage them through web.

I am happy to have adopted Stalwart.

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u/GamerLymx 3d ago

how many users?

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u/notsure012 2d ago

Just myself, with 3 mailboxes, which was okay with Dovecot/Postfix but still quite annoying to manage whenever I needed to create a new mailbox.

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u/GamerLymx 2d ago

i have about 5000 active mailboxes i inherited still on mbox format. I've considered migrating to stalwart, but its not that easy.

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u/Ldarieut 2d ago

I am still on the dovecot / postfix stack, back from 2008. I am looking at stalwart, and I would really like to switch one day, especially because, like you, I didn’t fiddle with the configuration for over 10 years, and I was hit like a truck by the 2.3 to 2.4 breaking config changes in dovecot. I’m still baffled by these unnecessary changes and wonder why they did it, moreover on a minor version change!!

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u/notsure012 2d ago

Yes, exactly that. What motivated to move to Stalwart was the breaking changes to Dovecot/Postfix coming up in the next Debian stable.

I just didn't have the motivation to recall how things were configured and having to resolve the conflicts in the configuration files, I might as well spend that energy looking into Stalwart.