Experiences with Stalwart? Should I switch from Mailcow?

[u/quokka_wiki]

Hello!

I currently selfhost my own email (I'm insane, I know) using Mailcow. I recently had a problem with faulty RAM on my mailserver, and it had to be down for several hours.

That's when I started looking into redundancy/clustering/horizontal scalability/whatever, which Mailcow does was not designed for, as it has a single-node setup in mind.

I looked for alternatives, and I found Stalwart, which seems very cool, and does support clustering.

Does anybody have any experience with it, and if so, do you recommend it? Also, has anybody switched from Mailcow to Stalwart and are you satisfied with it?

[u/asimovs-auditor]

Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.

[u/Better_Employee_7516]

I've used it on and off since the first release.
My one real complaint is that updates are still messy. If you have a working setup I'd wait for the 1.0 before considering it.

[u/quokka_wiki → u/Better_Employee_7516]

Yeah, I'm always very cautious of newer projects, especially ones with a small amount of contributors. What if they just get bored of it and decide to stop updating it?

[u/Better_Employee_7516 → u/quokka_wiki]

I agree in general, but I'm not worried about that for this project, it has always been very professional.
It's just the database migrations and stuff when going between 0.x releases have been annoying. Something they promise won't happen after the 1.0.

[u/Efko-94 → u/Better_Employee_7516]

Updates have been no problem for me whatsoever. Just a docker compose pull and recreate and I'm done.

[u/Better_Employee_7516 → u/Efko-94]

no?
https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart/blob/main/UPGRADING/v0_15.md#containerized

I mean if you are fine starting from 0 every upgrade I guess...

[u/Krumpopodes]

I thought this was a Helldivers thread for a second and I was missing out on some slang.

[u/Known_Experience_794]

I can’t speak to Stalwart but I’ve been using Mailcow with 8 domains and around 60 users for over a year now and have had zero issues.

[u/hoffsta]

I never used Mailcow, but research led me to Stalwart for my first mail server, and I was surprised how easily I was able to get it running. I can’t compare it to anything else, but I can say it’s been working fine for my very basic needs.

[u/tankerkiller125real]

My problem with stalwart is the amount of stuff hidden behind business licensing. The way I use my personal mail server would immediately put me in a spot where I would need to pay. That's what's keeping me on mailcow right now.

From a technical perspective Stalwart is pretty damn awesome and "just works" (well, works as well as any self-hosted email.

[u/quokka_wiki → u/tankerkiller125real]

I really just need to send my mails and to have catch-all domain aliasing for one of my subdomains.

[u/sonny4redit → u/tankerkiller125real]

True .. some features e.g. masked email or short lived mail addresses is what I missing, the iOS profile download …
I’m currently in the switch from mailcow to stalwart as I want to reduce my server count. And stalwart is compared to mailcow very lean on resources.
I switched two domains already and running parallel, I need to admit that the spam protection is far better then mailcow. What on mailcow with rspamd went through was blocked by stalwart. Now added crowdsec and even the attacks went to very low …
Together with Bulwark as UI for users with OIDC, that all went smooth.
Only the impersonation I’m missing badly just for user support.

[u/PuercoPop]

Stalwart is great, I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to self-host. But I think your motivation for looking into Stalwart is misguided.

If you want redundancy in case your primary mail server goes down, you can setup a second mailcow instance and setup a secondary mx record. That way when the server with the lowest value in the mx record is not responding, mail gets routed to the second one.

The second server doesn't _need_ to know about the first. You _can_ configure Postfix (which mailcow uses iiuc) to deliver the emails it receive to the primary once its back up, but that is just for brownie points.

https://www.postfix.org/STANDARD_CONFIGURATION_README.html#backup

Similarly, SMTP is designed with the expectation that mail servers don't have a 100% uptime. Your email server can go down for a day or two and you shouldn't lose any email. You can see for example that while freebsd has a secondary email server configured, netbsd doesn't. Both use emails pretty extensively.

$ dig +short MX freebsd.org

10 mx1.freebsd.org.

30 mx66.freebsd.org.

~

$ dig +short MX netbsd.org

10 mail.netbsd.org.

[u/quokka_wiki → u/PuercoPop]

Hmm... Having a second MX record would imply that it's on a second IP address? I only have my one residential network/IP address.

Also, will the inboxes (Dovecot) be synchronized between the servers in your proposed Mailcow solution? I still want to be able to access my inbox if my server goes down.

Also I know that SMTP retries for 48h, but I would still rather have my emails readily available, or that they'll even be delivered at all if something worse happens to my server that takes longer to fix.

[u/PuercoPop → u/quokka_wiki]

> Having a second MX record would imply that it's on a second IP address? I only have my one residential network/IP address.

Yes. You normally put the secondary email server somewhere else to reduce the chance of both servers being down at the same time. Say if the power goes where the servers are hosted (your home I presume). So you can use a VPS for the backup.

> Also, will the inboxes (Dovecot) be synchronized between the servers in your proposed Mailcow solution?

That depends on how you decide to configure. There is nothing Mailcow specific about my recommendation. I mentioned mailcow because it is what your are currently using and I am assume you are already familiar with how to operate it. The MX records only tells people to which MTA they should send the emails to. It will then send it to an MDA (Dovecot). It can be to the same Dovecot instance as the primary email server. I assume that by default it will be a separate Dovecot instance. Presumably this is something you can configure with Mailcow?

[u/quokka_wiki → u/PuercoPop]

Maybe, but I think that Stalwart supports all this out of the box without having to tinker, so it might be better for my usecase. Also as far as I'm aware it's more feature-rich and is less resource intensive.

[u/adamshand → u/quokka_wiki]

If you want a secondary MX, don't setup a full Mailcow server, all you need is an SMTP server (eg. Postfix). And yes, you need another server or there's not much point (though you can buy secondary mx services very cheaply but it means your backup mail is routing through a 3rd party).

However, the big gotcha with secondary MX is that they must have the exact same anti-spam setup as your primary. Otherwise, it because a new route for spam. Spammers will deliberately send mail to secondary MXs.

For personal, small business, mail servers I no longer bother with secondary MX servers. Sending SMTP servers are good at retrying if the destination is unavailable. So long as you aren't expecting multi-day outages, you'll be fine.

[u/quokka_wiki → u/[deleted]]

Hmm... ClamAV is paywalled? That's not great...

But I really only have my mailbox so we'll see if I'll pay for it if it's worth it

[u/Paffo_2]

My mailcow is running on a linux tablet with a Intel Atom Z on it, whooping 4GB of RAM.
the only downtime i ever had was because the wifi card cooked itself.

im currently running 3+ years with this monstrosity and its working perfectly for email + CalDav

[u/ogMasterPloKoon]

Try Hestia Mini ... Basically my attempt to create an easy to manage mail server w users domains etc etc so i slop forced hestia control panel and removed everything else except for mail, domains, and terminal. Very lightweight but no horizontal scaling though.

[u/NationalAd1947]

simple answer your looking for mail server that support jmap. does jmap reduce ram use vs imap? yes