Even though I sold mailcow and stopped working on it in the past months, it warms my heart SO MUCH to see people using it. :) Really, thank you.

I have some ideas for a proper successor which would be much more scaleable, modern, flexible and would be more focused to use existing transports for piggybacking mail. A fully and safely encrypted mail storage as well as a cool interface to invite for encrypted sessions etc. Smtpd and imapd using modern Python modules.

—

Providers found out it was easier to block private senders instead of developing good filtering mechanisms. I kind of understand this decision, but spammers simply abuse services like Sendgrid or create spam accounts on MS.

So… nothing really changed in regards of spam. We just lose actually *wanted* mails or have to look into the Junk folders more often, all while newsletters get on the priority lane.

That makes me unsure about developing anything in this regard. :(

André

Hi Andrè! I just wanted to thank you for mailcow! We used it a few years ago at my previous job to getting a new domain up & running and got a porfessional, best-practices-configured email server in no time. Great experience also for day 2 operations! Nothing like the other mail solutions available at that time.

Wishing you the best in your next endeavors!

Thank you! :)

To the new owners: I googled mailcow, got to the web site and found nothing to explain what it is, not even in the docs. Eventually I noticed the "People also ask" section in the Google results page:

> What is Mailcow?

> fully managed by Elestio. Mailcow is a Docker-based email server, based on Dovecot, Postfix and other open-source software, that provides a modern web UI for administration.

Hopefully this is correct but who knows.

Hi, it is now owned by tinc.gmbh

I sold it on 04/2021

Hi André.

First of all, thanks. I used hosted my own email 20 years ago, and when I saw how easy it was with mailcow, I decided to try again.

Looking forward to the mailcow successor. Is there anything up already?

Cheers.

Hi :) Not yet. I’m in a very burned out mode right now. Need to settle a bit.

Oh, and thank you for your kind words!!

I absolutely _loved_ mailcow. Worked out of the box way better than my hand rolled solution, and ended up using it for some small orgs too.

Thanks for all your work on it!

Thank you very much. :)

Wait, what? Was mailcow sold? What does it mean for future development and features? Should we start to look for an alternative?

> 2x of docs.paperless-ngx.com/ (one for me and one for my partner) - I scan and destroy most of the letters I get.

Ah, interesting. I have been considering finding a solution like that. How do you like it? Are there other alternatives you considered?

There are alternatives. I chose paperless because was the most mature opensource solution.

Be aware that there is paperless, paperless-ng and paperless-ngx.

When I did the setup last year paperless-ngx look like the most maintained.

> When I did the setup last year paperless-ngx look like the most maintained.

Just FYI, none of those were hostile forks, but in both the community taking over after the former maintainers abandoned the project. NGX is indeed the active version.

That's clearer. Thanks

I used paperless for a while but ended up just saving pdfs to directories instead. I can find what I need without fancy OCR features by organizing and naming files sensibly. And I am fairly certain this will still work in 40 years, while paperless, or even Linux, might no longer exist.

That was sort of the approach I had been planning on going for (manual scanning and putting it in directories that get cloud backed up). I have a pretty good scanner app on my phone, and so just scanning after opening the mail for some important document or invoice, uploading to the document storage, and then shredding seemed to be pretty low fanfare.

Which scanner app are you using?

In the end, paperless also stores the original pdfs in a directory. You get some more goodies from it, like automatic OCR and a web interface, but your baselines is also included.

Why not do both? Use rsync to do a one way sync by keeping a filter list to the paperless consume directory so whenever you drop any new documents to your original folder structures, it copies THAT to the consume and paperless consumes it?

I can recommend paperless. I am running it locally in a Docker container and sync database/files with iCloud (so they are backed up). I've been thinking about putting them on the actual web to access them anywhere, but so far having paperless "just" on my computer was enough.

Thanks for sharing this list! I wasn't aware of nginxproxymanager. This is something I've been doing semi manually for years. It looks like it'll slot right in and save me some work

How do you keep the server hidden from the public?

I just don't assign public Ip addresses to private VM.

Public (with different public ips) I have:

  * Mailcow
  * Postal
  * Code server (just a dev machine with public ip)
  * Wireguard
  * NginxProxyManager

Private (without public ip) I have:

  * PiHole
  * containers (where i run most of the staff)
  * Monitoring

One option is to use Tailscale or plain Wireguard.

You can run pihole in the cloud? That is very useful information.

You could also use https://nextdns.io. It’s basically pi-hole in the cloud.

I pay $20/yr for their service it’s so good, and I can turn on/off quickly per-device when I need normal dns to work, instead of having to ssh and tweak pi-hole or whatever across the whole network

Why wouldn’t you be able to? Pihole is just dnsmasq with a frontend.

The biggest curse of the Raspberry Pi is a whole heap of stuff that has gone from “needs a UNIX server” to “but surely that requires an underpowered UNIX server with a very specific distribution of Linux”.

Pi-hole runs just fine in Docker [1]. You don't need a Pi to run it.

[1]. https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole/

You should not open its port to the internet at large (look up: open resolvers) but yes you can run it anywhere and access over VPN, etc.