Any future plans about mail servers?

Server provisioning and management
#1

Like the topic says, any future plans about mail servers like dockerized mailcow, mailu etc.? cause i feel like this is a necessity for a full fledge server management panel.

#2

Hello @Lynx ,

Thanks for bringing up the topic!

Weā€™ve talked internally in the past about having a mail server solution. Honestly, itā€™s not something that comes up too often by our customers so weā€™ve never prioritized it past being something for the ā€˜futureā€™.

Usually, when the topic of mail comes up itā€™s typically linked to a WordPress site and wondering why emails arenā€™t being delivered - which the answer to that is most VPS providers lock down port 25 and require customers to make a request to open up directlyā€¦

For a dockerized solution, actually, I think it would be cool if we have a guide, or maybe even a quick script, to help users that might be interested in a mail server. We made a similar guide for Plausible, which is a usage analytics app. Iā€™ll put this on our to-do list.

Do you have a mail server solution that you prefer most?

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#3

I think you compare Cleavr with Plesk or DirectAdmin. Cleavr and similar server panels are created the right way: without email.
Itā€™s strongly recommended to separate email and website hosting.
I see similar questions in Facebook groups all the time ā€œwhat email hosting should I use with my WordPress server hosting panelā€.

My personal advice isā€¦
If you need a cheap and great email hosting go for qboxmail.com and send your website emails with services like Sendgrid or Postmark.

2 Likes
#4

I am also not a fan of implementing a full email server stack. But would love to see support for something like msmtp, so you can specify a default SMTP Server for the sendmail command, which is used by PHP mail(). You could integrate it as a service, where you can edit the config file (/etc/msmtprc) with your smtp details. Here is some info about msmtp. :v:

3 Likes
#5

Thatā€™s interesting, I did a similar setup on the mail server level used Milgun to send those email using Postfix: Configure Postfix + Mailgun on a Cloud VPS | Tutorial Depot

@amiedema, msmtp could be a solution to use email on servers where the smtp port is blocked by hosting provider. For example for sending WordPress setup emails. The SMTP config could be configured via Cleavr and used for all new servers. Always better than php mail() plus sendmail

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#6

The best thing is that the msmtp config is very self explaining. The users just have to enter the smtp credentials. They could use gmail, gsuite, exchange, zoho, or any other smtp server with almost zero struggles. Itā€™s almost as convenient as setting up mail on outlook :smiley:

# Set default values for all following accounts.
defaults
auth           on
tls            on
tls_starttls   on

# accounts

# gsuite
account        gsuite
host           smtp-relay.gmail.com
port           587
from           webadmin@example.com
user           webadmin@example.com
password       SuperStrongPW123

# set a default account
account default : gsuite
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#7

A big ā€œthank youā€,
thatā€™s a nice little package i may have use for in some of my personal projects.

1 Like
#8

Just my 2c in ā€“ used to be a Domino Mail Admin for large corporations in the old days when mail was not really a cloud solution (as common as it is now) but a corporate server to corporate server ā€œthingā€.

It was a constant , daily administration ā€“ thousands of emails, spams, spoofing, multitude of hack attempts at the SMTP and MTA, banning by the ā€œEmail routing Godsā€ (cant remember the org name bans SMTP servers if found guilty of spamming or spoofing mail sends ), malaware, virus payloadsā€¦ etcā€¦ and this was on our public SMTP gateway / proxy on IBM AIX ā€¦

In short your really do not want to manage your own public mail server, specially if the intention is just to mail out low volume emails or notifications. Even with high volume outgoing mails, iā€™d really rather pay for MailGun or other third party mail routers from apps running on the server.

I agree with the other users here using MSMTP as a mini MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) - safer and easier to maintain :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#9

Hello, did you maybe setup successfully mailcow within working cleavr server installation?

I tried:

cd /home/cleavr/mail.mydomain.com
git clone https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized
cd mailcow-dockerized
./generate_config.sh
docker-compose pull
docker-compose up -d

Now this throws error:

Error response from daemon: driver failed programming external connectivity on endpoint mailcowdockerized-nginx-mailcow-1 (hash): Error starting userland proxy: listen tcp4 0.0.0.0:443: bind: address already in use

Because of cleavr nginx for sites.

Now I tried editing mailcow conf:

nano mailcow.conf
HTTP_PORT=55555
HTTPS_PORT=55555

And docker-compose up -d works, but cannot access siteā€¦ Not sure should I change these to port app number or something elseā€¦