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Courier Mail Server

courier-mta.org

I've been hosting my own friends & family mail since the late 90's and switched to Courier probably maybe 15 years ago (I used Cyrus before). If there is a next iteration, it will be Dovecot. I do not know whether there will be one: I do not see much benefit anymore, I haven't kept up with the latest advances and I'm increasingly removed from practizing sysadmin - so next major incident (we haven't had one since a busted disk a decade ago) we'll probably find that our MTTR is terrible. The main benefit I see is taking a stand against the mail oligopoly - I could still get that using a small mail host. Or maybe I'll join a bigger co-op than us three-old friends who don't sysadmin much anymore...

The idea of a co-op is interesting. Do you have any examples?

>Or maybe I'll join a bigger co-op than us three-old friends who don't sysadmin much anymore...

That's something i though about for a long time, something like sdf, with own hardware and a service that is comparable to google's (with the exception of search), some mail, some next-/own-/seafile cloud, mobile sync (push contacts calendar) could be done with SoGo..etc.

I have been running Courier (for imap) for years, quite happy with it. I usually run it together with postfix for SMTP. and use virtual accounts with courier's authdaemon.

Funny to see this on the frontpage for the first time

Why do you run your own mta/smtp?

the self-hosted community is still a good sized one. I run my own so I can continue to maintain control over my own email, email address creation, spam filtering, etc.

I suspect you'll see a uptick soon with the new realization of how google rapes your privacy.

Because he can? It's fun to know where your data lays :)

Why not? :)

If you aim to be a sysadmin, knowing the ins and outs of how email works is a pretty invaluable skill to have, and running your own mail server is a surefire way to accomplish that. Plus, it usually forces you to get your bearings around servers in general. Being independent of bigger players like Google and Microsoft is a nice bonus.

I've been running mine for about a decade now. It's gone through a couple iterations, but the current one uses OpenSMTPd and Dovecot on OpenBSD, and hosts a quick tutorial[1] on how to set itself up (mostly so that I can remember what I did if I ever need to rebuild it again, but I figure it doesn't hurt to share my steps with other folks, too).

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[1]: https://mail.yellowapple.us

I don;'t know anybody who uses Courier as an MTA, but the maildrop/mailfilter language is superb: you can write a decent filter after five minutes of reading the man page; it will be readable by non-experts, reasonably performant, and debuggable.

Doesn't one need server-side access to do this?

I was under the impression that for client-accessible filtering Sieve was now the way to do things.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language...

Nope, both fetchmail and getmail can deliver to a local MDA[fixed], and that's how I filter my incoming mail with maildrop into a set of maildirs.

if they're delivering to procmail or maildrop they're delivering to an MDA; if they're delivering to a local mail server, it's either an MTA or MDA (but almost always MDA)

Thanks, fixed.

Wow! I used to use this one but switched to Dovecot for IMAP like a decade ago. IIRC it was related to SQL integration. Maybe I should give it another look, at least update my docs.

Same thing. I was a courier map guy for a long long time until I took the plunge with Dovecot.

It was also mysql integration related too.

I've been running this for the better part of two decades for SMTP/IMAP/POP, but I want more, like fulltext search via IMAP. Considering moving to Mailcow for a more full-featured experience, without having to tie all the different parts together myself. Thoughts?

> You need Docker and Docker Compose

> mailcow requires the latest version of docker-compose. [...] Package managers (e.g. apt, yum) likely won't give you the latest version

I read no further.

I tried some of those solutions and gave up none of them included sieve at the time.

Yes checkout iRedmail:

https://www.iredmail.org/

iRedMail is fine, pretty good set of components auto configured to cooperate, but it's a resource beast. 2GB of ram really isn't enough to operate it (mostly due to the virus scanners and its default config). I know we march towards ever increasing system ram, but it used to be trivial to run mail and web (plus small db and a server side language) in 512MB of ram

Well you can disable/enable everything like you want it.

You can disable spam/virus scanning by following this tutorial: https://docs.iredmail.org/completely.disable.amavisd.clamav....

Oh absolutely, and based on your initials I imagine you're the author (thank you for your work!) I didn't mean to suggest that iRedMail is setting `suck=11;` just that an individual might be surprised that it's not as trivial as it used to be to run a mail server (although it's more secure)

Yes i'm author of iRedMail project. :)

Switch to Docecot which has full text search and seive.

Sadly there aren’t any good seive clients, though logging in and using Emacs is not much of a burden.

Rainloop is solid.

Thanks.

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