Hello, I self host an email server and I am currently using mailcow-dockerized, however I have found their community support to be extremely lackluster, and their software having major annoyances that have either gone unfixed for years or are so specific in scope that going through the song and dance of submitting it to their GitHub using their lengthy bug reporting process isnt worth it (because most of what they ask for is unrelated to the bug I’m reporting)
I want an email server that I can allow my friends and family to use, and that can generate random aliases they can use when signing up for websites or software that can be easily deleted if they no longer use the service or want their spam. I dont have very many requirements other than that one feature, and the software either being stable enough on its own, or the community being nicer around supporting their users.
It does in fact look interesting, I’ll have to spin it up on my test machine and play with it. I’m not entirely sure it will do what I want because I dont see anything about it in the docs but I’m also skimming them at the moment.
Mailcow also has randomly generated aliases’, and thats kind of where my issue lies. When other users on my server set up any kind of alias, if that alias gets a spam email thats sent to quarantine, that email gets sent to the catch all email I have set up, which is annoying as the original person who made the alias for some reason doesn’t get the email. I wanted to file a bug report for this but GitHub told me my post was too long because of how much log info their template asks me to provide so I threw my hands up and said I want a different project because the only software I host that gives me consistent small stupid issues like this is mailcow, such as the time it deleted dhparams.pem for no reason and caused dovecot to restart constantly, or the time the webUI broke and someone tried to convince me it was because I was using Fedora Server instead of RHEL or Debian. It doesn’t help that their support forum only has a very small amount of people who are able to help, and their “live chat” is hosted on telegram which my phone number has been banned from. Its just very frustrating.
I feel maybe that’s a dovecot issue? Or a spamassassin issue?
In my setup it seems “normal” that spam sent to aliases gets in the “catch all” instead of the mailbox of the user that has that alias. Very infuriating as I had to tune down the spam filter to block only the most obvious spam as false positives get “lost”
Although since 3-4 months ago I didn’t receive any misdirected spam in the catch-all mailbox, so it might be that’s now it has been fixed (I’m one of those guys that run updates automatically unattended because my hobby is fixing problems when there’s a breaking feature after update)
I’m on 2024.04 so I’m not sure, I’ll check and see if theres an update of some sort and see if that resolves my issue. Thanks for your input though, itz much appreciated.
This looks like a neat project, I just spun up one of their local instances. Unfortunately I’m not seeing the ability for users to be able to generate their own aliases, it looks like an admin-only feature. Although the project does seem young so I’m curious to see where it will go in the future. I may be able to switch in the future If I dont find a better solution soon. Thanks for the suggestion!
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
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not sure if this fits your usecase, but nixos-mailserver
You might find this project interesting:
https://maddy.email/
It does in fact look interesting, I’ll have to spin it up on my test machine and play with it. I’m not entirely sure it will do what I want because I dont see anything about it in the docs but I’m also skimming them at the moment.
https://mailu.io
Mailcow allows users to setup their own aliases similar to gmail with a “+” delimiter. E.g. username+randomalias@domain.com.
Mailcow also has randomly generated aliases’, and thats kind of where my issue lies. When other users on my server set up any kind of alias, if that alias gets a spam email thats sent to quarantine, that email gets sent to the catch all email I have set up, which is annoying as the original person who made the alias for some reason doesn’t get the email. I wanted to file a bug report for this but GitHub told me my post was too long because of how much log info their template asks me to provide so I threw my hands up and said I want a different project because the only software I host that gives me consistent small stupid issues like this is mailcow, such as the time it deleted dhparams.pem for no reason and caused dovecot to restart constantly, or the time the webUI broke and someone tried to convince me it was because I was using Fedora Server instead of RHEL or Debian. It doesn’t help that their support forum only has a very small amount of people who are able to help, and their “live chat” is hosted on telegram which my phone number has been banned from. Its just very frustrating.
Insert logs in pastebin.com and attach links and you can open ticket on git.
I feel maybe that’s a dovecot issue? Or a spamassassin issue?
In my setup it seems “normal” that spam sent to aliases gets in the “catch all” instead of the mailbox of the user that has that alias. Very infuriating as I had to tune down the spam filter to block only the most obvious spam as false positives get “lost”
Although since 3-4 months ago I didn’t receive any misdirected spam in the catch-all mailbox, so it might be that’s now it has been fixed (I’m one of those guys that run updates automatically unattended because my hobby is fixing problems when there’s a breaking feature after update)
I’m on 2024.04 so I’m not sure, I’ll check and see if theres an update of some sort and see if that resolves my issue. Thanks for your input though, itz much appreciated.
You can use postfix + dovecot + roundcube + spamassassin + opendkim + pigeonhole. Maximum stability. Roundcube have aliases plugin.
You can start from here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Virtual_user_mail_system_with_Postfix,_Dovecot_and_Roundcube
I don’t selfhost mail but I heard of stalwart
I haven’t tried it personally, but Mox looks like a nice modern mailserver. It might do what you want.
This looks like a neat project, I just spun up one of their local instances. Unfortunately I’m not seeing the ability for users to be able to generate their own aliases, it looks like an admin-only feature. Although the project does seem young so I’m curious to see where it will go in the future. I may be able to switch in the future If I dont find a better solution soon. Thanks for the suggestion!