But is there any real benefit over Postfix + Dovecot other than "it's new and written in Rust?" Postfix and Dovecot have been around for decades and respect the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well.
It's one tiny binary that does everything you could possibly need for hosting a mail server, including an admin UI, and you get a bunch of modern and convenient features for free.
For example, it automatically handles Let's Encrypt certs for you. You get JMAP, CalDAV, WebDAV, CardDAV, IMAP4rev2, DKIM/SPF/DMARC, MTA-STS, DANE, spam filtering, SQL+blob+object storage backends, search, clustering, OpenTelemetry, etc all in one tiny binary.
Downsides: some features are gated behind an enterprise version and I think the dev team is one guy, or at least it was a while ago.
Having ran both for a long time, I'm sticking with Stalwart from now on as long as development continues.
> Downsides: some features are gated behind an enterprise version
I treat this as an insurance policy. Even in this thread people mentioned how Maddy, which is an alternative modern full stack email solution in a single binary, lacks development efforts.
This is why we have this fantastic release for Stalwart - free shit.
Also as of now enterprise is for $0.2 per account per month which is extremely cheap unless somebody wants to build a big spam farm, of which as civilized Internet user I don't support. Obviously this might change, but even if you can always built multi-tenancy layer by yourself if you really need it - rest of the codebase is AGPL.
The features are toggles or allow you to slot in your own infrastructure where need be, from what I can see. It's not that you have to use it, it's that it's there if you want it, and I want it.
Suits my needs, but I can see why it wouldn't suit everyone's.
But the messages are accessible by every open standard: POP, IMAP, JMAP. You can also pick your storage backend, your database backend, your full text/search tool or provider, directory backend. It is amazingly versatile.
Between all the options, you can design incremental backups, snapshots, or whatever with 3rd party tools to write a script to backup your mailboxes to be restorable in any other email service or software. I have tested it with rsync, restic, database dumps, mc/aws-cli depending on the backends used, of which I have tried them all, and found it designed to be very straightforward.
The monolithic aspect is a necessary aspect of being built for HA and distributed environments that it is all the more impressive how versatile it is.
Well yeah, they do one thing, but to do email well you need more than one thing. Dovecot is also kinda shit with UTF-8 support amongst other things. There are plenty of reasons to not use that combination.
For example, it automatically handles Let's Encrypt certs for you. You get JMAP, CalDAV, WebDAV, CardDAV, IMAP4rev2, DKIM/SPF/DMARC, MTA-STS, DANE, spam filtering, SQL+blob+object storage backends, search, clustering, OpenTelemetry, etc all in one tiny binary.
Downsides: some features are gated behind an enterprise version and I think the dev team is one guy, or at least it was a while ago.
Having ran both for a long time, I'm sticking with Stalwart from now on as long as development continues.