Stalwart Beats Mailcow and Mailu at 10,000 Mailboxes, University Deployment Shows
A production comparison of three self-hosted email platforms — Mailcow, Mailu, and Stalwart — reveals significant differences in scalability and architecture. The author's team runs Stalwart at a university managing 10,000 mailboxes, while assessments of Mailcow and Mailu are based on their official documentation rather than direct experience. Mailcow, built as a Docker Compose stack requiring at least 6 GiB of RAM, lacks a supported multi-node or active-active mode, making large-scale failover a scheduled outage risk. Mailu is the lightest option, needing as little as 1 GB of RAM, but its scalability at enterprise levels remains untested by the authors. Stalwart stands out as a single Rust binary supporting multiple protocols and pluggable storage backends including S3, with clustering available in its community edition.
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