E-Mail Server Update

Quite a while ago I wrote about my use of the OSX Server application as I was one of the few remaining people on the internet dumb enough to run my own E-Mail server. Operating this service mostly for myself has taught me a lot which allows me to confidently approach certain problems while helping to develop & run Guardian’s many backend services today for our customers. The broken Mac mini resides on my desk to this day as a reminder of where this journey started.
After shopping around many E-Mail server options, I ultimately landed on Mailcow and I could not be happier about it! Using Docker to solve the problem of making the various components talk to each other was quite intimidating to me at first, as I was afraid about the networking aspect of it all. It turns out though that the maintainers of the project have done a phenomenal job of getting all the various pieces to talk to each other and effortlessly upgrade to newer versions. I suspect the project’s use of Docker is how it was imagined to be used by it’s creators and Mailcow’s setup has become my personal measuring stick whenever I see others trying to leverage Docker as a growth-hacking-problem-abstraction-layer.

Out with the old

As part of my yearly tradition of tinkering with my own hardware over the holiday season I decided that this year was going to be the year to upgrade the servers hardware. I settled on jumping from an Intel i5 6600 to an AMD Ryzen 5 5600G, alongside a new motherboard, new faster RAM etc…
As part of the upgrade I had also decided to jump from running everything bare metal with the desktop variant of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to Proxmox VE 8 as the primary operating system in order to leverage ZFS and mirrored boot drives as an operational safety net. I have been a ZFS advocate for a few years now and have been fortunate enough to have gained a lot of real world experience with this exact setup. ZFS is the real deal and I will go out of my way to recommend it whenever applicable!

The Mailcow server itself is running the server variant of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS inside a VM managed by Proxmox. All in all things are bit more folded into itself as I added yet another level of abstraction but the Linux Kernel virtualisation layer (KVM) is simply amazing, so none of that ended up giving me any trouble at all!
As part of the takedown preparation of the old server I ran a backup of the E-Mail inboxes itself with imapsync (link) followed by a complete backup with Mailcow’s backup-and-restore (link) script. The output of that script are a bunch of .tar.gz files as well as the Mailcow configuration file which I rsync’d to the new Mailcow VM. The same backup-and-restore script was run in the VM to restore a one-to-one copy of the old on the new server and I was back up and running within a bit over an hour end-to-end.

No E-Mail client that interacts with my server appears to have noticed anything about the move, which has done nothing but push my confidence in the Mailcow toolchain even further. If you think about running your own E-Mail server for whatever reason, Mailcow would be my recommendation 10/10 times!
One key thing that I am still missing in Mailcow is the XAPPLEPUSHSERVICE which was a Apple created custom Dovecot extension in OSX Server, to enable you to send push notifications about new E-Mail to iOS’s Mail.app. So far the only other provider being able to do this has been Fastmail to my knowledge, but I am not entirely sure whether they support it anymore as I have not been able to get it to work recently with my Fastmail account.

31.12.2023