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Self-hosted

maddy

Composable all-in-one mail server.

overview

maddy is a self-hosted mail server that implements SMTP for outbound and MX receipt, IMAP storage, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, DANE, and MTA-STS. It replaces the classic Postfix plus Dovecot plus OpenDKIM style stack with one daemon and one configuration model.

for early-stage startups

At an early stage the deciding factors are what the free tier actually covers, what the first paid invoice looks like, and how much of a founding engineer's week the setup costs. Feature depth that only matters at a million sends a month is noise until it is not.

Against a waitlist, a launch announcement, onboarding email, and the first transactional sends, maddy covers developer experience, and does not cover scheduling, SDK breadth, and webhook coverage. Whether that gap matters depends on how central those are to the build.

  • Free tier: Free self-hosted, GPL-3.0
  • Best published rate per 1,000: Tiers not published in comparable form
  • Starts at: Free self-hosted
  • DX score: 6/10
  • Deliverability: Self-hosted deliverability depends on DNS, IP reputation, queue management, bounce handling, and ongoing abuse controls. maddy includes DKIM, SPF, DMARC, DANE, and MTA-STS building blocks.
  • Operating since: Not published
  • Scheduling: No
  • SDKs: None
  • Webhooks: No
deliverability

Self-hosted deliverability depends on DNS, IP reputation, queue management, bounce handling, and ongoing abuse controls. maddy includes DKIM, SPF, DMARC, DANE, and MTA-STS building blocks.

best for

Infrastructure teams that want a compact self-hosted mail server with modern authentication primitives.

not great for

Product teams that need managed deliverability and support.

pros
  • Single daemon replaces several traditional mail-server components
  • Implements SMTP, MX receipt, IMAP, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, DANE, and MTA-STS
  • GPL-3.0 licensed and actively documented
cons
  • Self-hosted email remains operationally demanding
  • IMAP storage is documented as beta on the project site
  • No hosted SaaS plan or support pricing was found on the official site

Features at a glance

API No
SMTP Yes
SDKs None
Webhooks No
Templates none
React Email No
Batch send No
Scheduled send No
Suppressions No
Multi-tenant Yes
Inbound parsing Yes
Event stream No
Idempotency keys No
Dedicated IP No

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