Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions

Just following up. We've been using Zimbra now for quite some time more. It's been another year. The product has improved slightly, we've had a few hiccups in patching and cert management (their system is ridiculous, but it is scripted by now.) We have improved SPAM handling dramatically. We went through an IP black list and added MailGun to handle our outgoing email reliability which has been great.

Overall, another year and extremely happy with being on Zimbra.

Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:

Just following up. We've been using Zimbra now for quite some time more. It's been another year. The product has improved slightly, we've had a few hiccups in patching and cert management (their system is ridiculous, but it is scripted by now.) We have improved SPAM handling dramatically. We went through an IP black list and added MailGun to handle our outgoing email reliability which has been great.

Overall, another year and extremely happy with being on Zimbra.

Where you on a shared IP? If not, why were you having blacklist problems?

scottalanmiller

@Dashrender said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:

@scottalanmiller said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:

Just following up. We've been using Zimbra now for quite some time more. It's been another year. The product has improved slightly, we've had a few hiccups in patching and cert management (their system is ridiculous, but it is scripted by now.) We have improved SPAM handling dramatically. We went through an IP black list and added MailGun to handle our outgoing email reliability which has been great.

Overall, another year and extremely happy with being on Zimbra.

Where you on a shared IP? If not, why were you having blacklist problems?

No, not a shared IP. That's not how Microsoft and Spamhaus do blacklisting. It has nothing to do with abuse from your IP. They block indiscriminantly.

dave_c

@scottalanmiller
My Open Source solution of choice is Mailcow. But I am looking for a good relay for cPanel and I am considering the obvious: MailChannels. But open to options.
MailGun Pay as you go looks interesting but I have read that some users have experienced some intermittent relay denials. I am guessing that they are on the free tier.
Are you on the Pay as you Go plan or other? Any problem whatsoever?

scottalanmiller

@dave_c said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:

@scottalanmiller
My Open Source solution of choice is Mailcow. But I am looking for a good relay for cPanel and I am considering the obvious: MailChannels. But open to options.
MailGun Pay as you go looks interesting but I have read that some users have experienced some intermittent relay denials. I am guessing that they are on the free tier.
Are you on the Pay as you Go plan or other? Any problem whatsoever?

I'm not sure the name of the plan, but we pay per email sent. Which comes out to something silly like $3 a month.

dave_c

@scottalanmiller
Awesome, thank you

scottalanmiller

@dave_c said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:

@scottalanmiller
Awesome, thank you

No problem. And for clarity that was the price for the whole company not per user.

IRJ

That's time of my life I can never have back....

Alex Sage

@dave_c said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:

@scottalanmiller
My Open Source solution of choice is Mailcow.

How are you liking Mailcow? Any issues?

Alex Sage

@thwr said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:

@scottalanmiller said in Finding the Best Open Source Email Solutions:

I am trying to track down the best of the open source email offerings and figure out which is good, which is bad, what is unique and why to choose one over another. So far, these are the known high end candidates of which I am aware.

Zimbra

Kopano

Zentyal

iRedMail

Does anyone have any input into what is good or bad, or any candidates that are missing from the list? I've not included some things like RoundCube which is just a client and not an email system. RoundCube could be used with any of these products, for example.

I'm a big fan of the classic Postfix + Dovecot (still in use/maintained?) + MariaDB/MySQL/PostgreSQL + SpamAssassin + ClamAV + Sieve + Roundcube combo. There's a pretty cool managesieve plugin for Roundcube which allows you to create filters from within the webmailer.

But it's a lot of work to get everything running.

Sounds like https://mailinabox.email/

dave_c

@Alex-Sage
I like it a lot. My opinion:

The good

Great features: Sieve, rspamd, SOGo (or roundcube), full access to Postifx and others for customization
Good community: @andryyy is awesome, and he is not alone!
Light
Semi white label
I will stop, you are asking for issues

The bad

There can be issues with updates, so it is a good idea to watch github for issues and also Mailcow's news feed. I learnt the bad way to wait a bit before upgrading
I believe that it is not truly ready for commercial use. The main author has been burned by commercial users not supporting the project so features mostly useful for commercial use are not a priority

scottalanmiller

It it isn't ready for use, what's it for?

dave_c

@scottalanmiller
If you are referring to my "not truly ready for commercial use" comment:
With commercial use I meant "commercial mail hoster". An example would be the fact that mailcow uses Let's Encrypt to give each handled domain a SSL certificate, but that puts a limit of a 100 domains per server: https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized/issues/461
Also, it is not easy to add high availability

Otherwise, it is a very good platform. I have production servers and hundreds of mailboxes

Edit: Commercial e-mail hoster is better than previous commercial web mail hoster