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Is POP email still a thing?
(lemmy.zip)
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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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Just recently, someone wrote about https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart here. It is literally an all-in-one server, so it's quite hard to mess up.
Email itself is an unreliable delivery method, so usually, if a server cannot send an email to the recipient's server, it puts it in a queue and tries again after some time. Therefore, a few hours of downtime won't affect you much. Especially if you don't need an archive of your correspondence.
So I still recommend trying to run your own full server with stalwart. At most, a couple of days of problems, and then it will work for years.
This is what Mozilla’s Thundermail service uses.
I run Stalwart for the server, Bulwark for the webmail frontend (using JMAP), and SMTP2GO for outgoing mail (free tier is more than enough).
I use the exact same stack. It's been working great!
Can confirm. Stalwart is really nice. They very recently released their 1.0 version. It was a couple days of issues, then later I broke it again for a few days. Other that that, the server hosting end of it has been very smooth. There is another project that goes well with it called Bulwark. The pair of those have been stable and reliable for me for months now.
How does it work with network security, do you need to have a SMTP port open to the net?
That would depend on your deployment set up. I do not do that, but many people do. I have a very bespoke ingress route that I coded myself. It consists of a serverless cloudflare edge worker to catch emails, break them into a JSON that is sent over a tunnel to cloudflared as a post. This post is directed at containerized python program that rebuilds the email and that container is the only thing with access to deliver mail to the container running stalwart.
The reason I do this is not security though. It was a personal project more or less to see if it could be done and if it was reliable. Particularly to see if i could make a secure delivery method to bypass my ISPs CGNAT without paying for and maintaining a VPS. So far so good. And it has no monthly fee.
Most people I know of (with CGNAT limitations) are just using a cheap VPS with open ports and then the VPS either has the email server there or a tunnel to the SMTP server. If you have a static IP or a DDNS set up where you can properly port forward, that works too.
What does Bulwark do? Link?
https://bulwarkmail.org/ it's a web mail client that can fully utilize jmap with Stalwart. Its very snappy and the maintainer is very active. They also put together a good android native client and they are working on one for iOS.