I hear a lot of conflicted things about self-hosting email, some people say it’s super difficult and never worth it because you’ll need constant maintenance and half your emails won’t go through.
On the contrary, some people say that past the initial setup, there isn’t much maintenance at all and that it’s mostly smooth sailing.
So which of these is true? Is it really that difficult to self-host email or do people over exaggerate the difficulty?
And if you do recommend self-hosting email, which project do you recommend: Mailcow, Stalwart, or Mail-in-a-Box?
I’d ask you search the forum for this topic. It’s been discussed several times. If you have a specific question after doing so,
feel free to ask and clarify.
The answer is that it depends nearly entirely on your hosting provider and their reputation. The solutions you’ve mentioned make it dead simple to properly configure a mail server if you have self-hosting experience.
I have never had issues with mail delivery or receiving using these setups, personally. However, if you are using a budget VPS host; or even worse, if you are doing it from a residential ISP; you will almost certainly encounter issues.
For that reason it’s usually not worth it for people to do. But there is nothing about email that magically makes it much harder than self-hosting anything else. It’s about the same as other self-hosted services.
Some previous discussion I’ve found for reference:
Mailcow is easier and Stalwart is nicer. I switched to Stalwart and it’s great, but it will require reading a lot more documentation. Stalwart also doesn’t have a webmail.
If you want webmail and contacts and calendar sync then Mailcow is the best. On the other hand, Stalwart is the only option with zero knowledge encrypted (PGP) storage, if that is important to you.
We continue to recommend MIAB because I am not aware of any issues with it and people who use it like it, but I’m not really sure why you would use MIAB over Mailcow or Stalwart for a brand new setup.
There is also Mox which I have not tested and therefore can’t recommend, but it looks cool.
my bad