12 Best Open Source Email Servers
But what if you want to own your email infrastructure and have the data in your control? You need an open-source email server, which should solve your problem.
If you are still curious, an email server lets you:
- Build your mail backend to store email accounts
- Take control of the security and reliability by self-hosting
- Host on your preferred server architecture
- It gives you the ability to make unlimited accounts
Of course, this is not for the end users. Sysadmins in small to midscale businesses, self hosters will find these software interesting.
The list includes mail servers and some solutions that make it possible to build/create an email server. Some might offer managed services and others can be self-hosted.
Postal is a feature-rich mail server that can be utilized by websites and servers. It is tailored for outgoing emails with no mailbox management features.
The documentation is helpful to get started with all the essentials. You can utilize a docker and configure Postal on your server.
mailcow is a mail server suite with tools that help you build a web server, manage your mailbox, and more.
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Want a simple transactional email server? Cuttlefish is a no-nonsense open-source mail server that is incredibly easy to use.
James is short for Java Apache Mail Enterprise Server.
Haraka is a modern open source SMTP server built with Node.js. If you can build it for your business/website, you do not need to look for other SMTP services.
Modoboa is an all-in-one open-source solution.
Postfix is a Mail Transfer Agent. It may not be a server on its own, but it couples with some other solutions that help you build an email server.
While mailcow includes Postfix (and you can configure it along with similar solutions), you can choose to use it separately per your use case. Postfix is also the default Mail Transfer Agent in the Ubuntu server.
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Best Secure Email Services For Privacy Concerned People
Can you call Gmail, Outlook, YahooMail etc secure email services? Well, they’re definitely secure in the way that your data is (usually) safe from outside attackers. But when we talk of secure email service, the focus is on data security and privacy. Most of these free email services snoop
Maddy is a great choice if you need a lightweight mail server implementation. The official description says it is a "Composable all-in-one mail server".
Dovecot is an open-source IMAP server that works as a Mail Delivery Agent. It can work together with Postfix as both do different things.
Poste.io utilizes mail server solutions like Haraku, Dovecot, and other open-source components. Ranging from tools for spam filtering to an antivirus engine.
iRedMail is similar to mailcow which helps you build a mail server utilizing various open-source components. You can also manage your calendars with the mail server created.
Mailu is a Docker-based mail server that gives you the best of everything while limiting some features.
With open-source tools and email servers, you can take control of your data and manage/optimize email transactions for your business or website.
As I mentioned, it takes a lot of work to do it. So, open-source self-hostable email servers can work if you want to have a customized experience and have a team that can be responsible for it.
💬 I am sure there are many more options, like mail in a box, to help you deploy a mail server quickly.
Here, we tried to pick the best ones for your convenience. What is your favorite open-source email server?