FAQ

Why?

For fun. Turned out to be a rather convenient approach to self-hosted email.

Is it caddy for email?

No. It was intended to be one but developers quickly acknowledged the fact email cannot be easily abstracted behind some magic.

What is the scope of project?

1. Implement a usable SMTP + Submission server that can both accept and send email as secure as possible with todays state of relevant protocols.
2. Implement a meaningful subset of IMAP for access to local storage.

Is there a webmail?

No. maddy handles email messages, not Web pages.

I suggest you to check out https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/alps if you are fine with alpha-quality but extremely easy to deploy webmail.

Is there a content filter (spam filter)?

No. maddy moves email messages around, it does not classify them as bad or good with the notable exception of sender policies.

It should not be hard to integrate rspamd by calling rspamc command on delivery. Check https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy/blob/master/dist/integration/rspamd.conf

Is it production-ready?

Each release change log mentions its "stability". One might say that maddy 0.2 is alpha quality, upcoming 0.3 would be considered beta quality then.

Several people use it for personal email.

Single process makes it unreliable. This is dumb!

This is a compromise between ease of management and reliability. Several measures are implemented in code base in attempt to reduce possible effect of bugs in one component.

Besides, you are not required to use a single process, it is easy to launch maddy with a non-default configuration path and connect multiple instances together using off-the-shelf protocols.

Can I do X with maddy?

Ask on #maddy.

maddy is less feature-packed than other SMTP/IMAP server implementations but it is not completely useless for anything other than its default configuration.

Can you implement X?

"Umbrella" projects like maddy are susceptible to scope creep unless maintainers apply a lot of skepticism to proposed features.

If X is essential for providing email security or extends the space of useful configurations significantly and does not require major design changes - we can talk, go to #maddy. Otherwise the likely answer is no.

Are you breaking things between releases?

maddy releases follow Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 specification. It is expected that 0.X releases may not be compatible with each other. I attempt to minimize such breakage unless there is a significant benefit.

1.0 when?

When no more backward-incompatible changes will be needed. maddy releases follow Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 specification.

maddy is bad name, it is almost impossible to Google!

Call it Maddy Mail Server.