Mailcow

Mailcow is a Dockerized, self-hosted email stack for hosting inboxes at your custom domain with better privacy than G Suite or Office 365. For growing organizations, especially those with 50 to 100 inboxes or more, hosting your own email server can be far more economical than $72/address/year (formerly $60/year) for a hosted email service.

A 4GB RAM / 2 core virtual server can easily host 150 users using Mailcow, with attachable SSD block storage that can be expanded on-demand.

• Cost with G Suite – $6/user/month * 150 users * 12 months = $10,800/year
• Infrastructure Cost with Mailcow – $12.00/month = $144/year
• Budget for Support/Maintenance – Starting from $200/month = $2400/year
• Net Savings – $8256/year

Most employees use a few hundred megabytes or at most, a few gigabytes for years worth of email. Although the enormous storage capacities advertised by G Suite or Office 365 might seem tempting, most inboxes will use nowhere near that amount. Besides, you give up a considerable amount of privacy & control when you delegate your email hosting to a US multinational corporation such as Google or Microsoft.

The GDPR currently does not require most data controllers to store customer data (including customer data exchanged through emails) in the European Union, so long as it’s properly disclosed to the data subjects (i.e. the customers) that their data might be transferred outside the EU, EEA, or Switzerland under the EU-US Privacy Shield or a Data Processing Agreement (DPA). However, some national laws require that certain personal data is stored in-country. Hosting a private email server ensures that you always know where your data is stored, and how it’s protected – such as through the use of encryption and off-site backups.

Many organizations are hesitant to host their own email server for technical reasons, but these concerns can easily be alleviated with correctly architected solution by a managed Mailcow hosting provider.

Difficulty of Configuration – Using Docker and Docker-Compose, Mailcow incorporates a complete stack of software services necessary to run a well-functioning email server. This includes Postfix (MTA), Dovecot (POP3/IMAP), SOGo (groupware), rspamd (spam filter), in addition to system services such as Nginx, MySQL, PHP-FPM and Memcached.

Uptime / Service Availability – Email is an essential service for the modern enterprise, and unplanned downtime can severely impact day-to-date business operations. Downtime is rare with a correctly configured instance of Mailcow, and high availability setups such as Backup MX and inbox sync are available. According to the RFC 5321 standard, failed messages should be retried (typically for at least 3 days) by outgoing mail servers – so it’s very unlikely to lose an email completely.

Email Deliverability – Using a Postfix Smarthost to relay outgoing email through a SMTP email service eliminates problems with IP blacklisting and reputation. The SMTP relay can be based in the EU to avoid privacy concerns with the US PATRIOT and CLOUD Acts. Your emails will arrive in users’ inboxes with major webmail providers such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo.