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Self Hosted Email

01/20/26

This is not an easy thing to do, for a technical person, but! it is doable.

I have 3 users and don't really want any more, as it's kinda important to always work.

What I used?

There are a lot of concepts I had to learn and apply to the server and DNS records. OK so I came at this from running Zimbra on Ubuntu 14.04, until now. I know slacker. Zimbra was too much for our needs and required a lot more up keep, so I was going to do a hacked together postfix/dovecot/amavis/etc... which I think would have been easier than Zimbra, but thankfully, I discovered mailcow and it runs all that and more in a docker container.

https://mailcow.email

I knew nothing of Docker, and still essentially don't, but got this up and running.

The process has been greatly improved by mailcow.

The documentation says 8GB of ram needed but I think that is determined by users and usage, for now mine is running on a Linode 8 GB Shared CPU plan. I may think of lowering the resources and expense to 4 GB, but will have to watch it.

I came to this with having run Linux for 20+ years but email is always a pain. If searching for a self hosted free open source email solution, check out mailcow.

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