Hey,
I am using Nixos quiet a while now and I think it is time to do an further step.
As far as I found there are two “preconfigured” ways.
snm simple-nixos-mailserver / nixos-mailserver · GitLab
nixcloud mail https://github.com/nixcloud/nixcloud-webservices/blob/d8b966f8d25c08e9445fa9a28ba850afc2ffcc2d/documentation/nixcloud.email.md
So my basic question is, which one to take?
Are there good or bad experience with either one?
Thanks in Advance for sharing your experience
I’ve used simple nixos-mailserver for a while and used that as a starting point to migrate my mailserver to nixos.
It works pretty well, but it suffers from one major issue, which is the declarative configuration for the users and passwords. It’s fine if you’re the only one using the mailserver. It works for my father: “Call me when you want to change your password and I’ll come over with my laptop, so I can change the configuration on the mailserver.”
But it’s not useful for anything beyond one or two closely related people or if you’ve only got users that can answer to a question like “give me your new password hash, please”.
About a year ago my git repo of smn diverged from the original and I didn’t bother to merge it anymore, so I’m not sure of the current state of snm.
I never had a closer look at nixcloud mail, so I cannot really comment on that, though from the description you linked it suffers from the same issue of the declarative users.
If you consider declarative users and passwords a feature or aren’t bothered by it, then both projects seem to be a good quick and easy way to setup a mailserver.
Personally I’ve started building a new mailserver using postfixadmin for myself and a small group, but it’s both unfinished and not really intended to be used as a module. It’s more a “copy this to /etc/nixos, update variables.nix, setup the domains and users in postfixadmin and you got yourself a small mailserver”.
If you want to have an idea how that could look, you can have a look here: https://github.com/tokudan/ffmailserver
But keep in mind: It’s not finished, it’s not documented and it’s pretty much single purpose.
I can vouch for snm, it is really extremely simple. When I’ve migrated my personal server to SNM it took a mere couple of hours (mostly to transfer my mailbox) and zero issues, leaving me to wonder how to kill the rest of the allocated evening.