this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
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[AIP] Stalwart v1.0: The Fastest Mail Server on the Planet (stalw.art)
submitted 1 week ago by tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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[–] boosted@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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).

[–] Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 1 points 5 days ago

@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.

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 70 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Here's their AI policy: https://support.stalw.art/t/how-we-use-ai-at-stalwart/1496

[–] DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world 42 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Holy fucking shit. I read the whole thing and I even enjoyed reading it. This has to be the most sane shit I’ve read all month. This is THE definition of “how to use a tool”. I freaking love it.

[–] irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Definitely agree on that part, if only the tools themselves weren't so unethically created and a continual heavy drain on so many aspects of society I might consider using them for small, tedious tasks outside of work where I'm forced to.

Also, they don't do much to aid my work and actively slow me down quite often since I don't think in words, so I have to translate my logic into a conversational essay for the AI to understand and then debug code someone else wrote. It's so much faster for me to translate my logic into programming languages directly which follow logic, not conversational norms. I see how it's useful for people who can't think in logical steps, though.

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah it's quite disappointing how often that part is conveniently ignored in

[–] poolcritter@pawb.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The AI corporations are hiring Lemmy snipers now?

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 2 points 1 week ago

:D yeah, absolutely that and not me changing the sentence and forgetting to fix it

I'll leave it like that now to keep your joke

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It was kinda long so i just used ai to summarize it ~/j~

but seriously, wow, it is exactly what I've been thinking would be the perfect policy, they really nailed it.

[–] DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

It even makes sense on a technical level. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any group or company (at least that I know of) approach AI this way. It has always been either “absolutely no AI and it’s all slop” or “we are all in and we are not even writing a single line of code”.

[–] soyslurper2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 1 week ago

And there is a last reason, which is less rigorous but matters to us just as much. We write software because we enjoy writing software [...] We are not interested in optimizing away the reason we do this.

[–] Mordikan@kbin.earth 20 points 1 week ago

Those 4 points for AI code writing are extremely well thought out. I can really respect that.

[–] Ooops@feddit.org 12 points 1 week ago

That reads much too sane for today's ~~idiot mud fight~~ discussions about AI.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

What I appreciate about this is the acknowledgement of something called "nuance" that AI can now write viable code and be a tool that improves software, reduces bugs and security issues, and increases the speed with which it is written and fixed. Just because there's an AGENTS.md doesn't make code slop. And the more we refine this method, the cheaper it gets in terms of tokens/energy.

I'm not happy about what it means for juniors coming into the field, but we might have to change what we teach in order to build good software, as has been done dozens of times before.

We'll still have the kneejerk reactionaries that are locking in the KV pair of AI=Slop but i guess that's a constant of the human condition. Conservatives never change their minds.

[–] markstos@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

Mozilla’s Thundermail email service uses Stalwart.

https://thundermail.com/

[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

I would like to see someone compare it against On-Prem Exchange, for no reason other then it's stupid to compare.

[–] devaly@ani.social 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm self hosting it and it's fast as fuck, me and my infrastructure are the only mailboxes though.

[–] Zelaf@sopuli.xyz 1 points 6 days ago

Same, doing the last upgrade was a PITA but turned out fine in the end. Been extremely low on resource usage and been reliable and fast. My only negative feedback is the locked features like the delivery and receiving log and statistics dashboard. It makes me either need to look at raw logs or send and receive an email from another service every now and then when I want to troubleshoot and check stuff.

[–] kalpol@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago

Qmail was fast. Exim is plenty fast. Like how fast does it need to be? I admire the ambition but make Linux faster, o something.

[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 2 points 1 week ago

If we could marry it to openarchiver it would be so sweet.

[–] Gonzako@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

That's true I use L̴̩̱̼̼̹͙̜͚̗̬̅̓́̊̚͜͜͝ì̷̛̫͖̮̩̃͐͋͘a̶̛̦͍̣̺̱͉̖͈̣̞̯̲͊̐̑̄̅̈̓̒̓͊͜͝͝ͅm̶̠͉̈̽̚͜e̵̩̯͒͘ and it is faster

[–] nitrolife@hikki.team 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

In principle, it's a pretty good "all-in-one" server, and I even wanted to switch to them until I checked the documentation and saw that the Community version doesn't filter From with valid authentication. This means that anyone who is properly authorized can send an email from any address on the server out of the box. In short, if I understood the documentation correctly, it's a decent option for hosting your own mailbox, but for even small-scale mass use, postfix + dovecot still wins.

[–] ShortN0te@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I do not think that this is correct. Otherwise multiple permission features that are part of the community branch would not make sense. Like "impersonate".

Do you have a link to the part in the documentation?

[–] nitrolife@hikki.team 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, I lost the section. But I've already been told that everything works correctly according to the tests, so I was just mistaken.

[–] ShortN0te@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ah ok. Was confused. Cause that would have made the community edition mostly useless.

Maybe you mixed that up with the Tenant System in the enterprise Edition?

[–] nitrolife@hikki.team 1 points 1 week ago

Yes, possibly. In general, I was wrong.

P.S. very cool server, but it's a pity there is no analog of dovecot dsync in it. I had already prepared the deployment when I realized that I wouldn't be able to run 2 isolated servers with synchronization.

[–] JadedBlueEyes@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah this is straight up wrong from my practical testing

[–] nitrolife@hikki.team 2 points 1 week ago

Thank you. Apparently, I misunderstood the documentation. I will try to deploy it anyway.