Microblog Entry: 2025-03-08
mox
E-Mail is one of the oldest, most foundational services on the Internet. Still crucial in terms of identity and authentication (think "password reset"). Risky to host as it is a very vulnerable and a high profile target for attackers/spammers. Complicated due to multiple protocols and a plethora of standards involved. If you ponder self hosting a mail server: Do as I do and give "mox" a try!
About mox - description by its author, Mechiel Lukkien:
A modern, secure, all-in-one mail server. The goal is to make it easy to run your own mail server. So you can stay in control of your data, and help keep email decentralized. Mox implements the essential protocols for accessing/sending/receiving email, such as IMAP4/SMTP/SPF/DKIM/DMARC/MTA-STS/DANE, takes care of junk filtering, implements Internationalization, ACME for automatic TLS certificate management, comes with a webmail client, and more.
Given its young age and low version number (project development started in 2021), it is surprisingly full featured and stable. The developer was able to work on it almost full time, having been funded through the NGI0 Entrust Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme.
NLnet foundation mox project page
I run it on a (the cheapest) €5 Hetzner ARM instance and not on my local Kubernetes HomeLab, because handling DNS verification and various other aspects would be tough to configure correctly. High availability is mostly a non-issue with mail in general due to the asynchronous and re-try based nature of it anyways.
Admittedly, the web admin and webmail interfaces are very "brutal", but minimalistic approaches seem to resonate with me recently and as interaction with the system happens with dedicated mail clients, this should be no big deal for anybody else.
Did I mention it is a single golang binary, which makes updates a breeze?
One step closer to full digital independence!
Tags: #email #SelfHosting