The self-hosting wave ran on virtual machines because VMs are what a credit card and a tutorial get you. They are also a tax on every disk seek, every IMAP search, every large attachment.
MAINMAIL runs on enterprise-class bare metal with all-SSD RAID 1 storage and high-availability clusters. Indexing for IMAP search is built for that hardware, not for a noisy neighbor on a hypervisor.
What “fast” means for mail
- Search that does not hitch on a decade of archive
- Attachments large enough for actual work, auto-converted to download links when a recipient’s path cannot take them
- A webmail portal that is uncluttered on purpose
- Filtering through unlimited Sieve rules, evaluated close to the metal
High availability is a moving target as we grow. The goal is an always-on service with more than one layer of redundancy. Our infrastructure provider has redundant internet connections; that layer has not had a disruption. Servers with real-time replication. You will not find that in a recipe.
If you already self-host a domain, this is the offload: same custom domain, enterprise-grade operations, no second job.