Maddy: the five-minute mail server

Published on 2022-01-09 by flewkey

I am waiting at the airport this evening, cursing the weather for delaying my flight for so long. I’ve already bumped my packages, so I might as well gush about some software that I adore.

A few months ago, cricket published a blog post outlining how she configured her mail server on OpenBSD. Reading this post made me consider self-hosting my email as well, since Yandex is a pain in the neck to deal with. However, configuring a mail server seemed annoying as well, so I put it off.

A few weeks later, I learned about the Maddy Mail Server, a moment which forever changed my life. The server is a single daemon with a sane default configuration, requiring no significant dependencies by default. It is so simple and foolproof that even I could set it up. After packaging it for Debian, guided by the installation instructions, it was smooth sailing.

Installing maddy

Install package
Make certbot keys readable for maddy
Set the domain name in the config
Start the daemon
Add the DNS records
Make an account
Connect an email client

Conclusion

Setting up maddy is as easy as configuring NGINX. It only took me five minutes to get up and running. There are no more excuses: self-hosting email is easy now. If you are interested, please give it a go.

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