[HN Gopher] Calendars, Contacts and Files in Stalwart
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Calendars, Contacts and Files in Stalwart
Author : gpi
Score : 122 points
Date : 2025-05-27 01:11 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stalw.art)
(TXT) w3m dump (stalw.art)
| FlamingMoe wrote:
| Cool! I love anything in the direction of email decentralization.
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| glad the focus returns to this instead of ML stuff.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| NLnet out here funding another banger
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| What is the reason to pick Stalwart over Nextcloud? Nextcloud
| also has calendars, contacts, files, and integrated mail client.
| And a reasonably sized ecosystem of apps.
| dwedge wrote:
| Stalwart is also a mailserver
| mxuribe wrote:
| While I am happy for areas of competition - since they lead to
| choice - I also like it when there are
| partnerships....Nextcloud either acquired or partners with
| RoundCube, and separately also partners with collabora for the
| Office suite offering....so might be great if Nextcloud and
| Stalwart had some sort of partnership for mutual benefit.
| hex-m wrote:
| The partnership between Nextcloud and Stalwart was announced
| 4 months ago:
| https://nextcloud.com/blog/press_releases/nextcloud-
| stalwart...
| mxuribe wrote:
| That's awesome, thanks for sharing!
| hatzz wrote:
| I've always found stalwart interesting but have been a bit
| sceptical due to the main developer being quite anonymous. It
| seems that there is a company behind it as well "Stalwart Labs"
| but I cannot find information about it either, no linkedin and no
| people. I might just be used to openess as in devs not being
| anonymous though.
| StalwartLabs wrote:
| I understand your perspective, many open source communities are
| built on transparency, and it's natural to want to know the
| people behind a project.
|
| That said, I personally value privacy highly, which is actually
| one of the main reasons I started Stalwart Mail Server. I don't
| maintain a personal presence on LinkedIn or other social media
| platforms, not because I'm trying to be anonymous, but because
| I prefer to focus on the work rather than promoting myself.
| I've found that platforms like LinkedIn are more noise than
| signal for me, especially with constant recruiter spam.
|
| That being said, Stalwart Labs as a company is far from hidden.
| You can find our company page on LinkedIn here:
| https://www.linkedin.com/company/stalwartlabs/. We're also
| active on:
|
| * Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@stalwartlabs * Twitter/X:
| https://x.com/stalwartlabs * Reddit:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/stalwartlabs/
|
| While I may not be putting my personal life on display, I'm
| committed to transparency where it matters most: through the
| project's code, documentation, and community engagement. I hope
| that helps clarify things!
| hatzz wrote:
| I feel you as I also value my privacy however i believe there
| is a difference between anonymity and privacy: a completely
| unknown entity and a person which personal life is not on the
| internet. There is a lot of trust involved especially with
| something as important as an email server which is extremely
| important for businesses.
|
| It's this and the project being maintained by a solo
| developer (unless it's a pseudonym for multiple people :D)
| that makes me not want to personally rely on it.
|
| I'm not only here to complain though, it's an awesome project
| and I find it really impressive for someone to build a
| mailserver (and other features) from scratch. Thank you for
| investing time in open source implementations of protocols
| that run the world.
|
| Follow up questions: What are the thoughts about enterprise
| and business support? I see that it exists but I believe
| there is a lot of trust involved ^^. Will there be more
| developers, open source, knowing the people behind the
| project and or support people? Do you have any customers
| today?
| StalwartLabs wrote:
| Thanks for follow-up. You're absolutely right that there's
| a distinction between privacy and anonymity. However I just
| want to clarify that my decision to keep a low personal
| profile online stems from a deep belief in privacy, not
| secrecy.
|
| To give you more context about the project: Stalwart Labs
| was indeed started and is currently led by a single
| developer: myself. I have over 30 years of experience
| working with email technologies and have previously founded
| three email-related companies.
|
| That said, I'm not working entirely alone. While I'm the
| core developer and founder, there are others involved in
| Stalwart Labs today handling support, sales, and
| maintaining smaller parts of the codebase (mostly changes
| required by clients). My plan is to continue leading
| development myself until the project reaches version 1.0,
| which I hope will happen later this year. After that
| milestone, the goal is to gradually expand the development
| team, particularly to support work on a Rust-based webmail
| and calendar interface that will complement the mail
| server.
|
| Stalwart's development has been largely self-funded, aside
| from two NLNet grants. I've been growing the team
| organically and intentionally. While I have been approached
| by two VC firms, I've chosen to decline their offers. Not
| just to avoid external pressure (and stress), but also
| because some proposed directions conflicted with promises
| I've made to the community. For example, there have been
| suggestions to move some open-source features behind a
| paywall, which I'm against and promised the community never
| to do.
|
| As for enterprise support, yes, Stalwart Labs offers an
| enterprise license that includes premium support services.
| And regarding adoption, I'm happy to say that there are
| currently a few hundred enterprise clients using Stalwart
| in production. While I would need the clients' permissions
| to share their names, I can say that Mozilla Thunderbird is
| one of them. They've publicly announced their upcoming
| launch of thundermail.com, which is powered by Stalwart.
|
| I hope that gives you more clarity and confidence in the
| project. Thanks.
| hatzz wrote:
| It most definitely gives me clarity and confidence in the
| project! I'm very happy to hear rejections from VC
| funding. A few hundred enterprise clients is not a small
| amount at all for a bootstrapped project.
|
| Unsolicited advice from an anonymous entity online ;):
| Put this information on the website! It hopefully removes
| any trust issues that people might have (I believe I'm
| not the only one), it did for me!
|
| I wish you all the best on your endeavors, I'm excited to
| see what you bring in the future <3
| gertop wrote:
| For better or worse there's an immense amount of anonymous
| developers behind major projects that you likely rely on a
| daily basis. I wish more core projects had a policy of no
| anonymous people in the core team at least, but it is what it
| is...
| matja wrote:
| This is interesting because Stalwart has a built-in clustering
| feature and can use distributed databases as its storage layer,
| so you get high-availability options out of the box. I've
| struggled with doing similar HA on Dovecot, never quite being
| true HA (for the open source version of Dovecot) for a while and
| never found a good other open source option.
| mjl- wrote:
| Congrats on the release! Having calendaring (and address book)
| along with your email makes it easy to run your own self-hosted
| PIM infrastructure.
| StalwartLabs wrote:
| Thanks! :-)
| lb_ wrote:
| I really like where Stalwart is going, but I am quite hesitant to
| use it when basically all commits are authored by a single
| person. What would happen if he abandons the project or
| disappears?
| miroljub wrote:
| Why not? If it goes away, it would take years until it rots and
| becomes unusable. And given that it uses open standard, it
| would be pretty simple to take a backup (which you should be
| doing regularly anyways) and move somewhere else.
| rossy wrote:
| I checked my repo to see which Stalwart version I was running and
| if I could update, and I was surprised to find that the Arch
| package has been deleted due to FOSS licensing concerns[1], the
| most severe of which seems to be that Stalwart can no longer
| build without proprietary code[2]. Other smaller issues include
| the fact that the web admin interface isn't included in the
| source distribution, but is downloaded from GitHub on first run,
| and _also_ seems to contain proprietary code[3].
|
| These issues, which would be showstoppers for a real free
| software project, and pretty easy to fix if you were the
| rightsholder of the code, were promised to be fixed "in a few
| weeks" in September last year, and "in a few months" in January
| this year, however they're still not fixed, which means I can't
| upgrade - not that I probably want to anymore. I truly believe in
| free software, so I find the idea of using "open source" as an
| empty marketing bullet-point for at least eight months to be
| fairly distasteful. Might be time to switch to Maddy.
|
| [1]:
| https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/st...
| [2]: https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart/issues/783 [3]:
| https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/st...
| StalwartLabs wrote:
| I want to clarify that Stalwart can absolutely be compiled
| without any proprietary code. All you need to do is omit the
| Enterprise feature flag during compilation [0], and what you
| get is a 100% AGPL-3.0 build. The Arch package removal wasn't
| because the software suddenly became non-free, but rather due
| to a packaging requirement: Arch needs a clean separation of
| the Enterprise code from the source tree, and that's something
| we haven't done yet (it will be implemented as a script). The
| delay isn't due to any unwillingness to comply, it's simply
| been a matter of prioritization. Over the past few months, the
| focus was on delivering major features like WebDAV support.
| That said, I'm still fully committed to resolving the packaging
| issue because we want Stalwart back in Arch as much as you do.
|
| It's also worth noting that only about 5% of the codebase is
| Enterprise, and that small slice helps fund ongoing development
| and expansion of the team [1]. As much as I'd love to be
| completely sponsor-funded, the reality is that open source
| projects still need to cover real-world costs. For what it's
| worth, Stalwart has received two NLNet grants [2] [3] to
| support open protocol work, which hopefully reinforces our
| commitment to open source.
|
| So while the optics of this situation may look rough from the
| outside, I promise it's not some "open source in name only"
| kind of thing. It's just one of those painful balance acts
| between building features, maintaining packages, and paying the
| bills.
|
| And hey, if you're heading back to Maddy, no hard feelings. But
| the door's always open if you want to give Stalwart another
| shot down the road.
|
| [0]: https://stalw.art/docs/development/compile [1]:
| https://stalw.art/compare/#faq [2]:
| https://nlnet.nl/project/Stalwart/ [3]:
| https://nlnet.nl/project/Stalwart-Collaboration/
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(page generated 2025-05-27 23:02 UTC)