I recommend to consider mailcow again rather than trying to glue together and test everything yourself. Or what are your real concerns w.r.t. mailcow? Regards, Joachim
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: Tim Harman via Postfix-users <[email protected]> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 29. Januar 2026 03:02 An: [email protected] Betreff: [pfx] Small Postfix Mailserver Best Practices in 2026 Hi, Firstly I hope this question is appropriate for this list, if not please let me know and accept my apologies in advance. I'm just after some "2026 Best Practices" advice. I run my own small mailserver, currently a Debian 10 box with Postfix, Dovecot, postsrsd and rspamd. I am soon to be upgrading it to Debian 13 (I've tested all the Debian 10->11->12->13 steps multiple times, I've got it sussed) but I'm still a little unsure as to what people consider best practice these days. I've asked the AIs and they've given me ideas, but I'd rather have people on the ground running servers give me their advice please. I am aware of Mailcow, but I consider that overkill for my small setup. My mailserver is really small (~10 users, 3 domains), mail is delivered to /home/<user>/Maildir or just forwarded (with SRS) to other email addresses. Currently that's done by Postfix with "mailbox_command = /usr/bin/procmail" and a global procmailrc with DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/ I'm fully aware of how old, out of date and unsupported procmail is, so I wish to move away from it. I am currently considering (and have pretty much decided) using Dovecot's LMTP to do delivery to user's Maildirs. This means I can then also use sieve - this seems like an easy-win best practice to me. I am also considering having Dovecot doing Submission/SMTPS as well, as I know I can then enable BURL support (or Dovecot supports it natively I'm unsure) to stop the double submission hassle. So in summary, I'm planning to upgrade my mailserver to use the following: Postfix listening on Port 25 (Internet Facing) Postfix listening on 10025 on the loopback only Dovecot listening on 587/465 (Internet Facing) and then passing messages accepted via it to 10025 on Postfix - For users sending mail. Postfix handing to Dovecot LMTP for local Maildir delivery, with sieve in there for filtering to various folders. rspamd as a postfix milter to filter spam (and to dkim sign outbound) postsrsd to ensure forwarded messages get delivered / passes SPF checks. Does this seem like a sane 2026 configuration? Is there a better way to be doing local mail delivery / accepting mail from clients to send? My only real hesitation is that in my current setup, I can shut Dovecot down and mail is still delivered just fine. With my proposed setup, mail would be queued in Postfix but not actually delivered until Dovecot was running again. The flipside of course is, why would I be shutting down Dovecot? If you can't read mail what's the point of a mailserver... Thank you very much for any advice/comments/feedback. Tim _______________________________________________ Postfix-users mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] _______________________________________________ Postfix-users mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
