Postmark.pm
 

I'm testing an email server and I can offer 5 free email accounts for those forum users that are interested in getting one.

The emails are under postmark.pm domain, each account has 10 Gb disk space, Roundcube webmail, the outgoing email is delivered using Mailbaby / Mailchannels infrastructure, the server is in Netcup datacenter in Germany and backups are set up daily, at 4 am UTC.

The only thing I ask in return is to test it and provide feedback regarding speed, functions, everything you can think of.

I will setup a status page on another server to host announcements regarding planned and unplanned maintenance. The server is set to check and install it's updates every night at 2 am, and to restart itself if needed, after updates. This means a downtime of less than 5 minutes if the restart is needed after an update.

If the project will be successful and will be launched, these email accounts will remain free. If the project does not take off, these email addresses will be converted to email forwarders to your address of choice. The domain is paid until 2032.

I set up a status page for postmark mail service, available at http://postmarkstatus.uk

A nice looking page there :)

Thank you!

The Webmail status page was completed with realtime details regarding the server: graphs for memory and processor usage, network traffic and the server storage capacity.

In the following weeks I plan to move the email service to a more powerfull dedicated server in Germany or in France, at Hetzner datacenter or OVH.

Make sure you get enterprise quality drives. I saved money at Hetzner with NVMe disks, and a few years later I wished I hadn't. So many disk failures.

Good luck friend!

Just my thoughts you should have a paid plan otherwise it’s hard to continue the biz.

Thank you! and thank you for your advice! In fact I learned a lot from you and I continue to learn. I also use Directadmin as a helper tool for server administration (but a lot of work still has to be done in CLI). And from you I learned about Mailbaby, also thank you for that, at this moment Mailchannels is too pricey for my project.

At this moment the project is in a pre-alpha stage. I am offering some free accounts for kind of real life testing, and those who got email accounts also help me by telling me the problems that they encountered. This way I was able to tweak the server firewall, and some other settings, making the service better.

I started this project last summer, I tested all existing control panels, all email servers, all mail-in-a-box style sollutions, a lot of providers, VPS, dedicated, cloud, I learned a lot, I lost a lot of nights on this because it seems that this is my passion.

20 years ago I had an email account at postmark.net or postmark.co.uk, I can't remember. It was one of the first, I really liked it but for some reason the service went downhill and then the site was closed. Maybe now I can continue the story of Postmark as a mail service.

I plan to evolve with small steps, to be sure that every step is a solid one and will not create problems for me in the future.

If everything goes well, maybe in 5-6 months I will open the service for the public. Until then there is a lot of work (for example the automation of signups, the billing side and to be absolutely sure that the service is stable and the risk of downtime is minimum).

At that moment in the future yes, the email accounts will be paid, and the selling point will be the quality of the service and the domains that I will offer for email addresses, short and memorable. (for example: ana.im, m5.pm, pmx.pm, etc.pm, tnt.pm, nos.pm, noc.pm, v9.lv, x10.ro - I registered a lot of them :rolleyes:.)

Until then, I am glad that I quit smoking and those 300 euros I was spending every month on cigarettes will fund this project. I don't know what the future will bring, but the server is stable (and I plan to keep it that way) and is paid in advance, so in case something happens to me, at least for a few months the server will be up.

But if everything goes according to the plan, in the next 2 years the service will be funding itself.

I also use this server for my personal and my primary business email. I will keep my mxroute account (Jarland, your service is stellar and I just don't want to close my account from mxroute :D), but I will cut the spending and close my accounts that I have at fastmail, mailbox.org, tutanota, protonmail, titan mail (was a mistake), zoho, posteo, soverin, inbox.eu, and a few others I don't remember them right now. I had paid accounts at all these services. So I am interested and motivated to have a solid service because my personal and business mail depend on it.

Worse case scenario: something happens to me or to the server.

If the server will crash, I have daily backups stored on Microsoft Onedrive, I will use a backup server (I have another 2 dedicated servers at OVH and 1 dedicated at Hetzner that I use with other projects), and I will restore the backup on one of these servers. Or in case I will not have those servers at that moment, I will fire up a cloud server at Hetzner, Netcup or OVH and I will use that one.

For backup I am planing to mirror the backup from OneDrive to a local storage service from Romania, Digi Storage. Also, I think that in maximum one week I will move the domains to use Cloudflare, because it has instant propagation (minus the cache from each ISP that knows my domain) and I don't have to wait in case I will need to change the IP.

Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to let each of you know what this project it's all about and to be as transparent as possible.

It is, and according to your business plan will be, a one-man show. Having disk backups isn't enough to keep the service going if something goes wrong. You need a backup person as well :p

Yeap, I need to backup myself :rolleyes: You know, there's a linux program called rclone. I wonder if I can clone myself with it :D:D

Postmark.pm has moved to France. It's new home is a dedicated server hosted in OVH datacenter and the DNS is now managed by Cloudflare.

... and a new Roundcube skin, with dark red colors: https://postmark.pm/webmail.png

I clone myself by making the servers act out my will routinely on their own 🤣

If you haven't seen this, it's pretty much all of my scripts that I use to extend myself as admin: https://github.com/mxroute/da_server_updates

Might find some things in there that reduce your workload along the way ♥️

Thank you, Jarland! I really appreciate your work!

At this moment the backup is automated with the native DA backup and then the files are moved to the Onedrive Storage with rclone triggered by cron. Also I use unattended upgrades for os updates.

Good stuff, just a couple things worth noting about DA's built in backup system:

1. The "Append" feature at step 3 of configuration is key. If you set it to "Day of week" you'll keep a rolling copy of 7 days worth of backups. If you set it to "Full date" you'll never see a single backup get removed or overwritten, which will blow up and become a problem later. However, even using the "Day of week" option if you remove a DirectAdmin account later, the backups of that account will never be deleted, because they won't be overwritten. So any way you spin it with DA's backup system, there is cleanup to be done to avoid a crisis later.

2. It doesn't do incremental backups. This is fine for a while, but look into JetBackup because while I have plenty of my own complaints about it, it is the lesser evil for it's handling of backup retention and it's low overhead for daily backups by using an incremental option. Eventually, taking a whole backup of every account daily will mean that you can't even finish a round of backups in a day and it'll cause your CPU/disk overhead to spike.