[hatzz]

I’ve always found stalwart interesting but have been a bit sceptical due to the main developer being quite anonymous. It seems that there is a company behind it as well "Stalwart Labs" but I cannot find information about it either, no linkedin and no people. I might just be used to openess as in devs not being anonymous though.

[StalwartLabs]

I understand your perspective, many open source communities are built on transparency, and it's natural to want to know the people behind a project.

That said, I personally value privacy highly, which is actually one of the main reasons I started Stalwart Mail Server. I don't maintain a personal presence on LinkedIn or other social media platforms, not because I'm trying to be anonymous, but because I prefer to focus on the work rather than promoting myself. I’ve found that platforms like LinkedIn are more noise than signal for me, especially with constant recruiter spam.

That being said, Stalwart Labs as a company is far from hidden. You can find our company page on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/stalwartlabs/. We're also active on:

* Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@stalwartlabs * Twitter/X: https://x.com/stalwartlabs * Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/stalwartlabs/

While I may not be putting my personal life on display, I’m committed to transparency where it matters most: through the project’s code, documentation, and community engagement. I hope that helps clarify things!

[hatzz]

I feel you as I also value my privacy however i believe there is a difference between anonymity and privacy: a completely unknown entity and a person which personal life is not on the internet. There is a lot of trust involved especially with something as important as an email server which is extremely important for businesses.

It's this and the project being maintained by a solo developer (unless it's a pseudonym for multiple people :D) that makes me not want to personally rely on it.

I'm not only here to complain though, it's an awesome project and I find it really impressive for someone to build a mailserver (and other features) from scratch. Thank you for investing time in open source implementations of protocols that run the world.

Follow up questions: What are the thoughts about enterprise and business support? I see that it exists but I believe there is a lot of trust involved ^^. Will there be more developers, open source, knowing the people behind the project and or support people? Do you have any customers today?

[StalwartLabs]

Thanks for follow-up. You're absolutely right that there's a distinction between privacy and anonymity. However I just want to clarify that my decision to keep a low personal profile online stems from a deep belief in privacy, not secrecy.

To give you more context about the project: Stalwart Labs was indeed started and is currently led by a single developer: myself. I have over 30 years of experience working with email technologies and have previously founded three email-related companies.

That said, I’m not working entirely alone. While I’m the core developer and founder, there are others involved in Stalwart Labs today handling support, sales, and maintaining smaller parts of the codebase (mostly changes required by clients). My plan is to continue leading development myself until the project reaches version 1.0, which I hope will happen later this year. After that milestone, the goal is to gradually expand the development team, particularly to support work on a Rust-based webmail and calendar interface that will complement the mail server.

Stalwart’s development has been largely self-funded, aside from two NLNet grants. I’ve been growing the team organically and intentionally. While I have been approached by two VC firms, I’ve chosen to decline their offers. Not just to avoid external pressure (and stress), but also because some proposed directions conflicted with promises I’ve made to the community. For example, there have been suggestions to move some open-source features behind a paywall, which I’m against and promised the community never to do.

As for enterprise support, yes, Stalwart Labs offers an enterprise license that includes premium support services. And regarding adoption, I'm happy to say that there are currently a few hundred enterprise clients using Stalwart in production. While I would need the clients' permissions to share their names, I can say that Mozilla Thunderbird is one of them. They’ve publicly announced their upcoming launch of thundermail.com, which is powered by Stalwart.

I hope that gives you more clarity and confidence in the project. Thanks.

[hatzz]

It most definitely gives me clarity and confidence in the project! I'm very happy to hear rejections from VC funding. A few hundred enterprise clients is not a small amount at all for a bootstrapped project.

Unsolicited advice from an anonymous entity online ;): Put this information on the website! It hopefully removes any trust issues that people might have (I believe I'm not the only one), it did for me!

I wish you all the best on your endeavors, I'm excited to see what you bring in the future <3

[gertop]

For better or worse there's an immense amount of anonymous developers behind major projects that you likely rely on a daily basis. I wish more core projects had a policy of no anonymous people in the core team at least, but it is what it is...