Postal: fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming and outgoing e-mail
Postal is a self-hosted email tool. A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming and outgoing e-mail.
Why self-host Postal
Running Postal yourself means you control the data, the uptime policy, and the upgrade schedule. That is a different relationship with software than subscribing to a hosted service.
What it does
Postal falls into the Email category of self-hosted software. It is designed to be deployed on your own infrastructure, whether that is a home server, a VPS, or a local machine running Docker.
Community traction
The project has 15k stars on GitHub, which is a reasonable proxy for how widely it is used. Active repositories tend to ship bug fixes faster and have better documentation than projects that stall after the initial release.
Deployment
Getting Postal running usually takes under an hour if you have a working Docker setup. The official documentation covers the basic deployment steps.
Alternatives
If Postal does not fit your needs, common alternatives include Gmail, Microsoft Outlook. The self-hosted versions of these tools often differ in resource requirements and feature focus, so it is worth testing the one that matches your workload.
Maturity
The current release is 3.3.4. The project has moved past early development and tends to ship stable, documented releases.
License
It is licensed under MIT, making it freely available for personal and commercial use.
Links
Whether you are just starting with self-hosting or adding to an existing setup, Postal is a reasonable pick in the email space.