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by WhyNotHugo 235 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.
2 comments
heavyset_go 225 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 235 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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