I also like Stalwart. It's easy to setup and does its job very well. I'm just a bit nervous that the development team consists of one (!) person. Btw, can anyone recommend an e-mail client that speaks JMAP?
this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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How do I use those features? I just upgraded to the latest version.
I had to give up on stalwart because on 4gb ram dual core with mechanical HDD the performance for a single account domain was abysmal and after some support back and forth there was no solution.
On the same hardware the good old postfix+dovecot just handles perfectly with 90% spare capacity
Sorry guys, maybe it was time to optimize it a bit before adding more features?
It's a 0.x release. It makes sense building the intended features first before optimizing heavily. There's no point having an optimized data structure that then falls flat once you need to add new features that brings new requirements to the data structure.
Once they label it 1.x (i.e. feature complete and production ready) I would expect it to be optimized. If it isn't, criticism is warranted.
Stalwart probably aims a bigger infra than mine, i think that is the point.
It aims at both, otherwise it wouldn't ship with sqlite and rocksdb. Stalwarts default is clearly for single node setups and expanding it to clustering takes further steps. So while it supports large scale deployments, it should not be limited to it.
Are we sure they are using semantic versioning?
We can ask, but the indicators are there:
- it has roadmap with bigger features that slowly shrinks as they get implemented
- new versions still bring big reworks (I think this is the third time now that the data structure is being migrated)
- optimizations happen between the versions
- benchmarks are still on the horizon
Mm, interesting.
That's probably because you were using RocksDB as a backend, which does not work well on mechanical HDDs. Try using PostgreSQL instead.
I did, we discussed this on an issue and a github discussion. It was still too slow and saturating my low spec machine, no matter which backends I tried to use.
Probably my hardware is just too underpowered.
They have improved performance in this release, although judging from their release notes it is targeting larger infra, so I don't believe these improvements would benefit your setup. Still, good news for software this new.
@warmaster @Shimitar Their licencing suggests they are targetting larger infra.
Yeah, that's what I said in the post you're replying to. Is this a case of weird cross-platform federation?
@warmaster I was just agreeding and suggesting that their monetisation strategy is licencing hence the reason for improvements for Enterprise clusters rather than focusing on Self Hosting is the money.
Ahora entiendo tu comentario, gracias por clarificar.
Did they split the contacts and calendars into their own rust crates? It'd be awesome to have it as a standalone.
Only the iCal/vCard parser and serializer, it is available at https://github.com/stalwartlabs/calcard
Being one of the few JMAP servers, adding these features is great although there's still some things yet to consider. The iCalendar standard also includes tasks and notes and Stalwart hasn't implemented those yet. Calendar scheduling is coming in the next few months, so that's good news.
I can't wait until service providers in privacy respecting countries start using complete solutions that enable users to really replace Google with a standards compliant alternative.
The iCalendar standard also includes tasks and notes and Stalwart hasn’t implemented those yet.
That's incorrect. Stalwart supports every single iCalendar IANA registered component and that certainly includes VTODO and VJOURNAL.
That's great news! I didn't know that. Is there a Stalwart service provider in the EU ?
Can I use IMAP only for archiving my old emails?
Yes. You can simply not expose SMTP at all and just use the IMAP/JMAP part. Unless you need also JMAP, I am not sure it brings you a lot to the table you wouldn't also get from a good old dovecot. IMO the big advantage of Stalwart is the all-in-one package it delivers plus the good defaults. It also shines when you want a multi node deployment. For a single node IMAP only it might not be the best choice, in my opinion. But it would work, if you want to.
All my need is imap for old email. Jmap +others are not xtras that i dont need. I’ll look at dovecot. Thanks