I recall asking about wildcard aliases years ago, but I didn't end up needing them at the time so I moved on. I regularly use wildcard aliases with domains and I'm at the point now where it's getting frustrating to *not* be hosting your own email...
So I've spent the last week trying Dovecot and Cyrus see which works best in 2025. I want it to be simple; I don't need a giant email appliance / VM like Mailcow. I can run an MTA, rspamd, and IMAP in a FreeBSD jail and use minimal resources and I won't give that up. [0] I have multiple domains and user accounts that I care about. I prefer to be using LDAP for auth, though some additional services (carddav/caldav, etc) could be coerced into using SQL auth if I told them how to use the Aox database's users table. When it comes to Dovecot and Cyrus, they are just not as flexible as I want and often suffer with issues like the full email address used to login with not being preserved to the auth backend, so you can't build a dynamic base DN or search LDAP based on the mail attribute.[1] This means I couldn't have multiple accounts with the same cn/uid (mark@) but belonging to different domains. They have more features and IMAP extensions, but Aox's seems more than sufficient. I do not notice any issues with all the different clients I use. The core problem is that once you've started using Aox you really don't want to use anything else because it solves the problem so elegantly. Sure, there are some small quality of life changes that could be made to improve the software but it's not a huge undertaking. I may have to just start maintaining my own private patch set. Aox just works, and I really don't want it to die. This is a long winded way of saying I can't give up on Aox because it works so perfect for my use case, and after I've fixed LDAP [2] my next goal is to implement wildcard aliases. I don't expect it to be that big of an issue, just look up the aliases table for the address and to a second check for a *@domain entry. I'll send a patch and PR when I have something functional. There has to be at least a handful of us out there still using this software, right? :) Mark [0] Mox and Stalwart are very interesting developments, but both seem overkill for what I need. If I was running mail services for customers I'd consider Stalwart as they seem to have a good focus on scaling and redundancy, and if I didn't care so much about having the normalized and deduplicated email (with undelete capability!!) that Aox provides I'd give Mox a fair shot. [1] Mox apparently can do this according to the docs -- they show how to use LDAP and search by a mail or mailAlias attribute [2] Patch to fix LDAP could probably use more polish, but it does work https://github.com/aox/aox/pull/13
