# Stalwart Mail Server

27 Hacker News commenters recommended Stalwart Mail Server and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.25 years (3 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Praised as an easy, single-binary self-hosted mail server that replaces several separate tools; critics mention a large binary and occasional crashes during self updates.

## Why people recommend it

- Easy single-binary setup (4 comments): "You have projects like https://stalw.art which make it quite easy. Single binary setup which covers all functionality you need." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48503558)) "I have deployed stalwart as my replacement for mailu and iv never had such an easy time setting up mail, i love it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329521)) "makes it so much easier to build an e-mailsystem on your server" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329478))
- Strong engineering quality (4 comments): "Continue to be impressed with the quality and quantity of work Mauro is putting out for this project" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47843160)) "Amazing engineering work! Bought a license just to support it as well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50249464)) "Stalwart is a relatively new, well written email server." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47121888))
- Good for self-hosting email (4 comments): "I would recommend a local IMAP server like Dovecot or Stalwart installed as Docker" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45986292)) "Its been excellent for self hosting email on a small hetzner instance." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50247297)) "systems like Mox mailserver or stalwart guide you through it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073885))
- Fast, scalable mail server (2 comments): "Maddy and Stalwart have cheap enough concurrency and good enough scalability" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49076579)) "a high performant jmap server implementation in rust" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45986091))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Postfix](https://hackerapproved.com/p/postfix.md): 21 recommend
- [Dovecot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dovecot.md): 18 recommend
- [qmail](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qmail.md): 15 recommend
- [mailcow](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mailcow.md): 15 recommend
- [Mox email server](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mox.md): 14 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Stalwart Mail Server", https://hackerapproved.com/p/stalwart-mail-server/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).