comparison with maddy

[nustiueudinastea]

Hi, thank you for creating this lovely project!

I was wondering if you are aware of https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy and if you know how your compares to it? I am in the process of choosing a new solution for my self-hosted email and not sure if your project or Maddy would be more appropriate for a standalone email setup.

Thanks!

[mjl-]

Hi, great you found mox and are evaluating it!

Just after publishing mox I found maddy while checking if mox made it into the pkg.go.dev search results. Not sure why I didn't find it earlier. My theory: my work on mox started more than 1.5 years ago, and I probably looked then, didn't find it and never searched again.

It sure looks like maddy has overlapping goals. I haven't tried it yet though, so I cannot really say how it compares in practice. It certainly has a few things going for it, like existing for longer (may be more stable), and it implements DANE (which is still on my todo list). On the other hand, the installation documentation says it doesn't do automatic TLS (though there does appear to be an ACME module?), and I don't know how "beta" its IMAP is. Not sure if it has its own junk filters. It may have less of a focus of doing everything itself, with the mentioning of dovecot, rspamd and being a "composible all-in-one mail server". Anyway, this is based on my skimming of the documentation, not actual experience using maddy.

An interesting test would be to install both mail servers, and see how they compare. You could install both under a subdomain, e.g. moxtest.example.org and maddytest.example.org. If you're going to do that, I'm very interested in hearing the results. I'll also add "try installing maddy" to my to do list, but it is long already... Another candidate may be "mail-in-a-box", though it is more a gathering of existing components in a docker image, not a single server doing all of email.

I'll leave this issue open for more thougths/experiences. (:

[nustiueudinastea]

I think mox and maddy are in a league of their own when it comes to "mail-in-a-box" solutions. The other relevant projects have a decent user experience but can be fragile at times, in my experience. So I am very happy that now we have not one, but two single binary solutions for self-hosted email. And it's great that you are implementing spam filtering in the same solution. That should really make things simple to manage... so hopefully more people will be empowered to host their own email.

When I get the time I will try both solutions. Thanks and good luck!

[xpufx]

One positive for maddy I am seeing is a variety of authentication options including LDAP. It also includes authentication against Dovecot SASL which would cause auth/user info to be kept separately but allow using all auth mechanisms Dovecot supports. (I assume that's what it means). I was specifically looking for xoauth2 support in each product as that's something I do use now with Postfix/Dovecot even though client support is very limited. (Roundcube does support it, notably. It's nice for SSO.)

[foxcpp]

(though there does appear to be an ACME module?)

Automatic ACME in maddy is dona via dns-01 challege which is tricky to configure, that's why I don't encourage it.

and I don't know how "beta" its IMAP is

It works and passes Dovecot's imaptest test suite, but lacks support for some important protocol extensions and is not really scalable now (lacks proper search indexing, etc).

Not sure if it has its own junk filter

I believe spam filtering is a large problem on its own and is better left to battle-tested industry solutions like rspamd.
I implemented support for rspamd's http protocol in maddy and made it as simple as possible to setup integration. Literally adding this in smtp config block to use rspamd on localhost:

check { rspamd }

[rooty123]

I've been using maddy for a while (since spring 2023) and it sits behind Proxmox mail gateway for spam filtering purposes. There was an error when I was trying to send non-latin email through it(as relay to AWS SES), but the as receiving side it works ok and I use AWS SES as outgoing MTA. Will likely replace it with mox some day, at least I will try.

[chlarsen]

An important observation with regards to comparing mox and maddy may be developer number and activity, plus time to bug resolution.