It is 2024 and I want to install an email server on my currently working as a web-server Digital Ocean Fedora 41 ‘Droplet’.
Yes, I can install Dovecot and Postfix and etc, but the learning curve is there and I will do this if I have to.
Is there an easier way in 2024 to deploy and configure the packages more easily? For example, is there an Ansible Playbook for this yet?
I found this … do not know if this is what you are looking for?
I’ve been using Mailcow for some time now and I am very happy with it.
Thanks ilikelinux, this is almost the kind of thing I am looking for. It says it is for Ubuntu, do you think it will work out-of-the-box with Fedora?
Thanks Patrick,
mailcow looks exactly like what I want.
I have not used docker before but I guess that is what holds all the individual items together in a coherent container.
I tried the demo from their site, and it uses just under 2GB of RAM, does your installation use this much? I only have a little VM, so I have to keep it as light as possible.
Excellent suggestion,
Thanks again.
I gave mine 8GB with all options activated; it uses 4GB, of which 2.7GB are buff/cache. But then it’s not very active.
Quoting this:
ClamAV and Solr can be greedy with RAM. You may disable them in mailcow.conf by settings SKIP_CLAMD=y and SKIP_SOLR=y.
It’s entierly docker-based; podman is not supported.
Deploying an email server has actually become more and more difficult. It may be easy to install, but not easy to maintain, especially if you want other email servers accept your outbound email.
The real email solution that still exist are MS exchange and google mail. I would argue there is no easy solution to self hosted email.
Maybe you can try docker-mailserver. It is pretty lightweight and only consumes 300M memory in my setup.
It does not come with a WebUI but you can deploy roundcube-docker together with docker-mailserver.
Very nice D Vitamin,
I have a 1GB host so that will go nicely.
No SQL database included, but everything else like DKIM is present so should play nicely with most major providers.
It has IMAP, so with K9 or Thunderbird I probably wouldn’t even need the webmail.
Cheers,
Over the past 35 years I have had probably as many email account with as many providers. In all this time I would have seen maybe half a dozen ‘rejected’ emails.
I would never even think of using MS mail, the whole point of open source software is to avoid organisations like that which I have zero trust in.
You have not provided any evidence, even anecdotally, of your argument.
So forgive the impertinance as I imagine you were trying to be helpful, but I feel inclined to say “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”