mailinabox
by mail-in-a-box
Mail-in-a-Box turns a fresh Ubuntu server into a complete email system, including sending and receiving mail, webmail, contacts and calendars, spam filtering and DNS settings. It is for people who want to run their own email instead of relying on a hosted provider.
- Stars
- 15.5k
- Licence
- CC0-1.0
- Runs on
- A small server
- Setup
- Moderate
- Language
- Python
- Age
- 4821 days
What you can do with it
- Run your own email for your domains, with mailboxes, aliases and webmail
- Sync contacts and calendars across devices using the built-in Nextcloud and ActiveSync support
- Manage users, DNS records and backups from a web control panel
Make money with it
A freelancer could set up and maintain private mail servers for small clients as a paid managed service.
An idea, not financial advice. Check the licence before charging for anything built on it.
Ways a business could use it
- Host company email on your own domain and avoid per-user monthly fees from hosted providers
- Keep customer email and contacts on a server you control for privacy reasons
Can you use it commercially?
Free to use, change and sell, including in paid products. Keep the copyright notice.
Not legal advice. Read the project's licence file before building a product on it.
Getting it running
Clone the repository onto a fresh Ubuntu 22.04 64-bit machine, check out the latest release tag and run sudo setup/start.sh.
Follow the official instructions in the project README.
Things to check
- Requires a dedicated, fresh Ubuntu 22.04 server and cannot be customised much
- Other mail providers may block or spam-filter mail from self-hosted servers
- You are responsible for security, updates and deliverability
- Maintainers do not offer direct support, only a community forum
Checked 03 Nov 2026. Summary drafted by AI from the project's README.
