Can we create a mail server used from Frappe Framework?
Like Zoho Mail, Zimbra, and other open Sorcus mail servers.
You really shouldn’t (unless you have a decently big budget to invest in this).
Email is not technically hard to achieve. HA is simple, redundant storage is simple. Technically email is one of the most simple things you can do. What comes after that is hard, and I’m not talking about technical maintenance.
I’m talking about blacklists, blocks, abusers, incoming and outgoing Spam, filter training, viruses, Google, Microsoft, malice from competitors etc. It’s a huge mess!
I highly recommend you to start a thread on /r/sysadmin, you will see what’s the general consensus on this.
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Adding to what @Razva said.
You definitely -can- use whatever mail server you want with Frappe Framework. The framework will not stop you. You can enter credentials for whatever mail server you want.
Razva is correct. Hosting a mail server is easy. But humans have made maintaining email difficult.
Still, if you have time & energy? It can -definitely- be done. I’ve seen at least 1 ERPNext client successfully run self-hosted Zimbra for many years.
At my organization, we self-host virtually everything, but email is the big exception. Outside of a few very specific scenarios, I can’t think of any good reason for organizations to host email themselves. The stakes of getting blacklisted are too high, and the costs for high quality whitelabeled email hosting are so low.
We have ~100 users with active email accounts, and we pay $65/year for unlimited addresses and domains. We’ve integrated the email account management system api with the Frappe User doctype, so new email addresses get created/archived automatically when new users are added to the Frappe system. As an administrator, the thought of having to do all that myself just to save a tiny amount of money gives me nightmares.
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Hey @peterg,
Thanks for sharing that. 100% agree with your takes on the cost-benefit of email self-hosting. Which provider are you using for your email?
I am bit short of knowledge in terms of domain name and other servider services (I have bought a domain name, I have created servers on DO (and some others VPS). Now I am at lost on how to combine my domain name with an email service provider (how to keep the same domain name for everything). For instance erp hosted on myerp.com and email be like peter@myerp.com. Thanks for any pointer.
I’ve always used MXRoute, and they’re fabulous. I have no affiliation other than being a happy customer. There are many other well reputed email providers out there too.
To point your domain name to an email host, you need to create an MX record at your name server (in parallel to the A record you use for web traffic). There’s a bit more to it than this, mostly related to spam protections, but any good provider should walk you through the process.
Once it’s set up, I’d strongly recommend testing deliverability with (at minimum) something like mail-tester.com.
I’ve used yunohost.org
post for LDAP integration with yunohost and ERPNext How to configure yunohost.org LDAP server for Frappe / ERPNext
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I am using Mailcow project since past 3 years with few of my clients.
Everything is running smoothly.
There exists LDAP connector for mailcow also.
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Interesting thread.
I had no idea so many people still use providers for email services other than Microsoft and Google.
I had use only these 2 and completely agree that self-hosting email it’s a really bad idea.