I’d like to take a moment to say thank you to @JoshData for the time and effort put in to Mail In a Box. For me it was certainly a good start in learning to manage my own mail server with minimal effort. It’s certainly a great tool for those who want to run their own mail server but may not have a clue when it comes to managing things like DNS and webservers as well.
For me, I decided I wanted to try something different. Not because I don’t like MIAB, but more because I wanted to have a look at some of the alternatives out there. With that in mind did fire up another VPS and moved to iRedMail. Not lease as it gives a choice of backends, including OpanLDAP and a choice if WebMail clients. So I’ve given SoGo a try not least as with the OpenLDAP backend, it sports a Global Address Book, something that Roundcube is lacking.
iRedMail does not come with DNS server included, so compared to MIAB it’s a little harder to setup. But for me it wasn’t too hard. Although you do have to install certbot and provision the certificates yourself.
For ease of use, you can’t beat MIAB - it’s certainly a good start point and Josh should be well pleased with his work to date.
I think MiaB is a unique solution that doesn’t address the problems being solved by current similar projects such as iRedMail, mailcow, and Modoboa, and vice.
I would be interested to hear why you selected iRedMail over those other options?
For me it was the first one I looked at, when I looked at the setup instructions I noticed that it supported LDAP and had it’s own Global Address Book setup.
I like looking at different encryption methods, and AFAICT S/MIME in Outlook needs the Global Address Book to work properly. Add to that, you have the functionality to set up different DKIM keys for different domains without the config being overwritten.
I used iRedMail back in 2014. It was pretty good — I imagine it’s much better today. I ended up moving onto G Suite (or whichever of the four names Google used for that service), but recently moved over to Mail-in-a-Box. Also solid even if you need more than it offers out of the box. There’s no perfect solution, so picking what suits you most is absolutely the way to go.
I do think MiaB could hit the tipping point for being the perfect solution if it there were ways of including more custom configs without everything getting overwritten. But it is what it is and has always been clear about it. I decided to just monitor my modified files, keep backups, and reapply the changes when I know I’ll have time to upgrade the system.