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Comment by vex | Hacker News Reader

A better question is, why isn't there an open source webmail service like gmail that can be run on a server you control? My lab uses Gmail for business, and the outage took us down too.

I just want to be able to run an email server that has conversation features, contacts, XMPP chat, etc, but isn't Microsoft Exchange

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So coincidentally I was just looking into this earlier this week. I just got a server to host the blog I've been working on and figured hey, why don't I try self-hosting my email while I'm at it.

Turns out there are plenty of good open source webmail frameworks: Roundcube, Mailpile, Zimbra and RainLoop are all freely available and ridiculously easy to set up.

The issue is that they're all just front-ends for the horribly complex and difficult to configure backend of a modern email server (SMTP/POP3/IMAP). You can configure them to hook into Google/Yahoo/Other smtp servers, but then why bother — you're back where you started.

I had no understanding of how broken email was until I tried to set up a simple SMTP + IMAP server using postfix + courier.

I didn't find postfix all that hard to set up. Courier, on the other hand, is a disaster area, which is why my mail server runs dovecot instead; the latter took little effort to configure, and works quite nicely across several devices. The really hard part was finding a halfway decent CalDAV/CardDAV server that didn't require undue suffering to configure; I settled on Baïkal, which works okay, but could be considerably improved upon.

Thanks for the tip on dovecot. I'll give that a shot.

Do; I spent half a day wrestling with courier and lost, and it took me less than an hour to get dovecot up and doing what I wanted.

I've been using, and contributing to, Sovereign. It's fantastic. Even if you are only looking for a mail server, you can point it to a VPS and let it do its magic. Zero trouble, self-hosted IMAP/POP3/SMTP/Webmail. https://github.com/al3x/sovereign

Thanks for mentioning RainLoop,I was looking at various open source webmails and wasn't happy with them (Mailpile looks promising though), but never before run into RainLoop, looks like a winner.

I think an even better question may be, why isn't there a decentralized approach to email to compete with centralized alternatives like Gmail.

Imagine that you could still use your email when Gmail goes down, but you would lose a lot of features like autocomplete, search, recommended recipients, etc.

IMAP

There's plenty - we chose Roundcube. http://roundcube.net

You could use Kolab:

http://kolab.org/

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