A few years ago a noticeable number of engineers and technologists decided to run their own email. Recipes, Docker, a script that claimed to automate the whole stack. Almost all of it landed on virtual machines, not on bare metal.
The reasons were honest: privacy, control, addresses that did not look like they were issued by an advertising company. The costs arrived later. Security patches. Configuration drift. Hosting problems. Constant attacks. Long outages with nobody on call. Self-hosting is a second job.
MAINMAIL was imagined as the offload. Same privacy and flexibility. None of the 2 a.m. pager. We have been running this for a small group of early adopters for more than four years. The subscription portal is now open.
Not another wrapper around open source
We use open source. We also write a great deal of our own software in C and C++ because the performance and security goals we care about are not what a default stack gives you. PHP and Laravel cover the web applications. Nobody does email this way, and that is the point.
Self-hosting typically runs on virtual machines and performs poorly. MAINMAIL runs on enterprise-class bare metal with mirrored SSD storage, in clusters, behind an infrastructure provider with redundant internet connections. To date there has not been a service disruption from that layer.
Most people do not have the time or the skills to self-host. They still want the privacy and flexibility that self-hosting was supposed to provide.
Main Street, not Wall Street
The name is not a flourish. Founders who spent time in large tech companies and in Silicon Valley startups wanted a different business model: a service aligned with Main Street. You pay a subscription. You are the customer. You are not the inventory.
MAINMAIL is a Delaware LLC (DUNS 119411794). A trademark application for the name is pending. We eat our own cooking — the company runs on the mail it sells.