Steve Litt wrote on 2026-01-20 13:26:
When acting as an
IMAP server, is Stalwart capable of storing its emails in a maildir
format?
No. It can import mbox, maildir, and maildir-nested (my favourite) but
it stores in RocksDB or some other database.
This seems to have positives and negatives:
A DB makes most sense for email messages - index-able, ACID compliance
(depending on DB), fast, etc.
As much as I like maildir-nested (normal maildir is just dumb - see how
folders are represented), it's also kinda dumb: the file name contains
status flags:
when a message is marked "Read", the *file name* is changed to reflect
the change in status!
RocksDB gave me pause, but it seems okay - BigTable was forked by a
couple Google Fellows to LevelDB, which was then forked by Facebook to
RocksDB and is fully OSS and maintained by Facebook Database Engineering
Team.
Designed to be *fast* at up-to a couple hundred terabytes.
Is it relatively ease for me to shut off its other facilities
so I don't have an SMTP server on my computer?
Yes, it's highly configurable.
In your opinion is its
documentation good enough to work with, including examples?
Excellent documentation and there's even an "AI agent" trained on the
source code to help answer how-to questions.
I'm quite interested in the ability to point an email account holder to
the Stalwart web instance and have them:
* change their own password
* enable at-rest encryption
* generate per-app passwords
* use OAuth / Open Connect / Open ID (haven't untangled all these yet)
The built-in mailing list feature isn't really appropriate for LUGs,
etc. Not any subscribe / unsubscribe that isn't manually performed by
admin (that I've found).
I also quite like the Web/Cal/CardDAV support. Had some issues with
uploading large video files in testing but am unsure if that's a
Stalwart problem, a Dolphin problem, or what?
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