[kwlug-disc] Stalwart email server software: anyone know anything?

[Ron]

Chris Irwin via kwlug-disc wrote on 2026-01-12 18:48:

>> It's appealing to shed the 1,000+ options for Postfix, even more for Dovecot, plus all the ancillary tools required to run email.
> 
> I find most postfix settings were not needed, until they were.

The relayhost and mynetworks settings sure saved my butt recently, and I 
appreciate it.

Got a new IP from VPS provider, it was blocked by Yahoo, so I had to 
relay via another server (that didn't even have proper rDNS set up, but 
Yahoo didn't care about that).

Life saver until Yahoo unblocked me.

I'm not sure that's possible with Stalwart, but it's too soon to say for 
sure.



> Not sure if the AIO does more, but Nextcloud itself only provides
> DAV services, it doesn't provide mail hosting.

The AIO does not have email hosting. But it does have a lot of nice 
features like Nextcloud Office, and a working Whiteboard container out 
of the box.

I've come around on AIO vs maintaining everything; I'll choose AIO from 
now on.



> But I'm not using it's CardDav/CalDav features at all.

They're kind of a killer feature (one of many) of NextCloud - phone,
desktop, laptop, etc. sharing contacts and calendars is essential and
it's nice to be self-hosted.


> I may look at setting up stalwart to act as a backup for my mail/
> card/contacts, though. It's pretty interesting.

Indeed.

I've been struggling to get Thunderbird to access the calendar I set up 
via `curl`, and the failed attempts gets my IP blocked so I can't even 
get back into the admin interface.

Really, *really* been wasting time and pissing me off. There are 
settings for the config.toml file that are supposed to help with it, but 
I may be doing it wrong.



Still, while I've given up temporarily, it still looks like Stalwart is 
a decent tool for WebDAV etc. services and lighter weight than full 
NextCloud.