DragonFly
A small MTA for home and office use. Works on Linux and FreeBSD.
Little to no recent activity. Treat as unmaintained until proven otherwise.
Commit activity more than 7% of tracked projects; popularity more than 14%. How this is calculated.
Commits, last 11 months
| Stars | 265 |
|---|---|
| Latest release | — |
| Repo updated | 30 Aug 2026 |
| Licence | BSD-3-Clause |
| Built with | C |
Is DragonFly actively maintained?
Development is ongoing. The repository recorded 14 commits over the same window, and the last three months alone account for 1 of them.
Activity is cooling: commits are down 90% against the previous quarter. One slow quarter is normal; two in a row is a signal.
No tagged releases are published, so there is no stable version to pin to — you would deploy from the default branch or a container image built from it.
Of the 9 projects we track in Communication - Email - Mail Transfer Agents, DragonFly ranks #3 by health score — in the top quarter of its category.
What DragonFly actually does
DragonFly is a lightweight mail transfer agent designed for routing electronic mail on home and small office setups. It runs on Linux and FreeBSD operating systems, handling the core tasks of sending and receiving messages. As a compact MTA, it provides a functional routing layer without the heavy configuration footprint of enterprise-grade mail servers.
Best fit: It is a suitable choice if you want to run a simple, self-contained mail routing daemon on a lightweight Linux or FreeBSD server without excessive resource overhead.
Worth knowing: The codebase has a low maintenance activity score and lacks tagged releases, meaning you may need to patch bugs yourself or rely on unreleased development commits.
Deployment notes
Being written in C, it typically compiles down to a standalone binary with minimal runtime dependencies, though you will need to configure persistent storage for mail queues and handle TLS certificates separately.
Links
DragonFly as a replacement for
Alternatives to DragonFly
Projects in the same categories, ordered by health score.
Fast, highly extensible, and event driven SMTP server.
Secure SMTP server implementation from the OpenBSD project.
SMTP (email) server with a focus on simplicity, security, and ease of operation.
Fast, scalable, enterprise mail/groupware server providing ESMTP, IMAP, POP3, webmail, mailing list, basic web-based calendaring and scheduling services.
A small and easy to configure SMTP and POP3 server for Windows and Linux.
Message transfer agent (MTA) developed at the University of Cambridge.