Cloudron Forum

@YurkshireLad I would like to share my thoughts as I have been asking myself the very same question.
My initial motivation has been to de-google and to become more privacy-conscious. Following the well-known line "When something is "for free" you become the product" I've looked at many commercial solutions, that advertise to be privacy focussed: Mailfence, mailbox.org, Tutanota, ProtonMail, to just name a view. Those are all fine choices.
Then I wanted to learn more about what's out there in the FOSS space and came across:

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#email

The below referenced site taught me the "ins and outs" in detail and I really got my teeth into things:

https://workaround.org/ispmail/buster/

I came to realize that self-administering a mail server is too much for me.

In looking at many of the before mentioned "out of the box" solutions like MailCow, iRedMail, Mail-in-a-box, etc. I finally settled with Cloudron for my e-mail needs.

For me, this is an excellent choice. And while Cloudron does not position itself as a Mail Server solution, it is surprisingly well done. Really well done.
The interface to set up users, aliases, mail-domains, etc is slick, simple, yet powerful. The backup solution is well established. And the whole thing is integrated into so much more than just e-mail.
I am not only very happy, but also convinced that I have the best solution that meets my needs.
I can - from personal experience - highly recommend giving this solution a very hard look.

I understand from other posts that this had been looked at before,

https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/sogo-app/-/issues/4

but it did not work/install at the time. But now there are Ubuntu 18.04 LTS packages available.

https://repo.z-hub.io/z-push:/final/Ubuntu_18.04/

It would surely be nice if we could add push notifications to the Cloudron Mail Server instance.

I am reaching out to the community with this question (if it is covered somewhere already, my apologies).

I am interested in creating a "Cloudron Mail Server redundancy". Let's say my primary Cloudron instance goes down for an extended period of time (including the mail server), what's the best way of having a secondary server "jumping" in, so that e-mails don't get lost.
I am interested in full redundancy, which means the secondary mail server should hold all e-mails from the primary server.

Does anyone have knowledge about such a setup?

@girish Like it. Thanks! Faster incremental improvements for the user base rather than waiting longer for bigger changes. Good call!

@ultraviolet I had similiar issues and here is what helped me. As a summary:

• Ensure that the local mount point is owned by yellowtent:yellowtent

• Before creating the fstab entry, please try to mount on the command line.

sudo sshfs -o port=23 -o allow_other,default_permissions,uid=1001,gid=1001,IdentityFile=/home/yellowtent/.ssh/id_rsa user@host /backup_sshfs/

I have used sudo because I am assuming that you are not logged in as user yellowtent.

@nebulon That did the trick, thanks a lot again.

@imc67 @doodlemania2 Right now I am using this setup on a separate, cloud hosted VM. Wireguard and Pihole, configured so that the system can only be accessed over VPN, not by external parties. Works beautifully and would be so cool, if this was working on Cloudron.

https://www.sethenoka.com/build-your-own-wireguard-vpn-server-with-pi-hole-for-dns-level-ad-blocking/

Excellent idea and request. Thanks for bringing this up.

What about full text search for Cloudron e-mail boxes? That is probably the only "one real feature" I am missing.
Thanks to Cloudron I have successfully "de-googled". It is just that I came to appreciate FTS while I was still on google mail.
Is this in the cards?

@girish Again, appreciate the call to move forward faster with small incremental changes.

@girish @imc67 Same here, I think the combination is awesome and makes a lot of sense. PLEASE, PLEASE...Yes...:-)

@savity couldn’t agree more. For me it would be a killer feature. And would make for a nice campaign on Twitter, Reddit et. all. Just look how many people google this and try to establish it manually....this is a mainstream feature, that would be appreciated by the entire user base, much more than specific applications that appeal only to certain users.... my opinion

@imc67 @girish Yep, couldn't agree more and am repeating myself. Pihole plus Wireguard would be a killer combination and I bet, so many more users, who don't even know what they are missing would start using it.

@nebulon Ha...it was not enabled. Let me check the time for the next backup. Thanks a lot meanwhile.

@mehdi Is this something that could be used for Mail Full Text Search, too? I love Cloudron and feel, that the Mail Server functionality is entirely under-rated. Such a simple and slick interface. Just the one thing missing is "Full Text Search" to really come off Gmail entirely....my two cents.
Hope some gifted hands and minds can look at https://www.meilisearch.com/ more closely.
Kind of excited to see this....

@Miggi I am a big fan, too and are upvoting.

Please also see this thread:

https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/1355/pi-hole-network-wide-ad-blocking/17?_=1594947401156

Together it makes even more sense.

@NCKNE Thank you, this is exactly my point, too. Sorry for not having been clearer. It is mostly a performance issue. IMAP Server-side search works sequential, without an Index.
For smaller mailboxes not so much an issue, but for larger ones very clearly noticeable.

Here some more background:
https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/fts/

Also, before I switched to Cloudron for my e-mail needs I got my feet wet and installed an e-mail server from scratch by following

https://workaround.org/ispmail/buster/

This was mostly for educating myself. I then migrated my ~ 7 GB Gmail over to this server, and this is when I realized that there is a huge perforamnce difference in search speed. The set up at "workaround" is just a "vanilla" Dovecot IMAP server.

I then managed to install Apache/Solr on this setup and it is then when I realized how much IMAP search improves.
From minutes to seconds...

Hope this helps to shed more light on my desire...:-)

Cloudron rocks and I am super happy with what I have now....even without FTS (yet)...

Mail FTS would be really cool and extremely useful. Is this still being looked at/worked on?

@ultraviolet Glad I could help...

@d19dotca That's quite interesting. 6 GB is certainly a big mailbox. And that you find everything fast on Apple Mail is not surprising, as Spotlight Index works on your mailbox. I am just surprised that the same seems to work for you on Cloudron (Roundcube or Rainloop, I suppose).
At any rate, I can only refer to the Dovecot reference again, where the developers themselves explain how indexing solutions improve the search speed.

@jdaviescoates Thank you, server-side e-mail full text search is high on my wish list, too. I have already ditched gmail in anticipation of the more great things to come. Cloudron rocks.