Postal
Complete and fully featured mail server for use by websites & web servers.
Maintained, but at a slower pace than the leaders in its category.
Commit activity more than 13% of tracked projects; popularity more than 86%. How this is calculated.
Commits, last 11 months
| Stars | 17k |
|---|---|
| Latest release | 3.3.7 · 3 Jun 2026 |
| Repo updated | 13 Sept 2026 |
| Licence | MIT |
| Built with | Docker, Ruby |
Is Postal actively maintained?
Development is ongoing. The repository recorded 25 commits over the same window, and the last three months alone account for 7 of them.
The most recent tagged release, 3.3.7, is about 4 months old.
Postal ranks #11 of 18 in Communication - Email - Complete Solutions, placing it mid-table for maintenance activity.
What Postal actually does
Postal is a fully featured email server designed specifically to handle outbound and inbound mail for websites and web servers. Built using Ruby and distributed under the MIT licence, it provides a comprehensive mail delivery platform that you can self-host. It functions as a complete solution for managing mail routing, delivery tracking, and server infrastructure.
Best fit: It is a suitable choice if you need to run your own mail infrastructure to send and receive transactional emails from multiple web applications rather than relying on third-party SaaS providers.
Worth knowing: Running a self-hosted email server involves a high operational burden, particularly around maintaining domain reputation, handling DNS records like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and avoiding spam blacklists.
Deployment notes
Because it runs via Docker, you will typically need to configure persistent volumes for data storage and place it behind a reverse proxy to handle TLS termination securely.
Links
Postal as a replacement for
Alternatives to Postal
Projects in the same categories, ordered by health score.
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Simple yet full-featured mail server as a set of Docker images.