Five years after the first line of code, Stalwart v1.0 is here: the first stable release, with a finalised database schema, months of profiling and stress testing, a rewritten search engine, and benchmark results that put it ahead of Postfix and Dovecot in 35 of 38 tests.
I deployed Stalwart a few weeks ago just to give it a go.
The good: Honestly nothing. It’s email. Nothing differentiates it beyond marketing hype.
The bad: Having self-hosted email for many years the UX really sucks. It’s like they tried to hand-hold self-hosting noobs but even I had difficulty figuring out their approach in several areas.
The ugly: Several features are paywalled via inaccessible buttons of alarming colors (red outline iirc) throughout the UI. No thanks.
If you’ve never hosted email, you don’t need ThE FaStEsT mAiL sErVeR oN ThE pLaNeT, nor do you need sexy. You need security, reliability, and ideally, years of battle-testing that Stalwart just doesn’t have. Look for stacks including Postfix and Dovecot (docker-mailserver, mailu, mailcow come to mind).
@boosted@tofu Thank you. I tried it out a while back and didn’t like it for similar reasons, but had forgotten why. With the 1.0 release I was tempted to try it again, but I also found the UX annoying and the paywall buttons (which I believe users can see, not just administrators!) really pissed me off.
I deployed Stalwart a few weeks ago just to give it a go. The good: Honestly nothing. It’s email. Nothing differentiates it beyond marketing hype. The bad: Having self-hosted email for many years the UX really sucks. It’s like they tried to hand-hold self-hosting noobs but even I had difficulty figuring out their approach in several areas. The ugly: Several features are paywalled via inaccessible buttons of alarming colors (red outline iirc) throughout the UI. No thanks.
If you’ve never hosted email, you don’t need ThE FaStEsT mAiL sErVeR oN ThE pLaNeT, nor do you need sexy. You need security, reliability, and ideally, years of battle-testing that Stalwart just doesn’t have. Look for stacks including Postfix and Dovecot (docker-mailserver, mailu, mailcow come to mind).
@boosted @tofu Thank you. I tried it out a while back and didn’t like it for similar reasons, but had forgotten why. With the 1.0 release I was tempted to try it again, but I also found the UX annoying and the paywall buttons (which I believe users can see, not just administrators!) really pissed me off.