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by heavyset_go 243 days ago
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.
2 comments
matesz 242 days ago
> 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.

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heavyset_go 232 days ago
Agree with your points, it's a downside if you're cheap like me and don't want to pay a penny for email at all.
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WhyNotHugo 242 days ago
What you’re describing sounds like one huge downside to me, not and advantage.

The only way to adopt Stalward is to drop everything else and use a single monolithic do-it-all?

Messages are stored in a bespoke format and not easily accessible directly?

It doesn’t sound like it’s made to be usable with other software. This isn’t an advantage in my book.

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heavyset_go 232 days ago
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.

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audelair 242 days ago
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.

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