Why this exists

The problem

Running your own mail server used to be normal. It stopped being normal because the work moved: the SMTP part is easy and settled, and everything that decides whether your mail arrives — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, ARC, reputation, reverse DNS, TLS reporting — is a second job that has to be done correctly and then kept correct.

The free self-hosted stacks assemble the daemons and leave that second job to you. The commercial ones either charge per mailbox, which punishes exactly the small multi-domain estate that self-hosting suits, or are priced for an enterprise procurement process.

What MailDock is

Postfix, Dovecot and Rspamd — the mail engines that have run the internet for twenty years, because there is nothing to be gained by rewriting them — behind a control plane, an admin console and a webmail client that are built this decade. It installs with one command on a VPS you rent, and the deliverability work is the product rather than an appendix to it.

It is sold as an annual licence per server, not per mailbox, because a per-mailbox price on software you host yourself is a tax on your own hardware.

What it is not

• It is not a mail service. There is no MailDock server your mail passes through, no MailDock inference endpoint, and no MailDock copy of anything. The software runs on your machine.
• It is not free software. The source is not public and the licence is commercial. What the licence is deliberately not allowed to do is stop the mail you receive.
• It is not finished. Version 1.0 is not out. Calendar and contacts, webhooks, a reseller tier and a native package are named on the roadmap as planned rather than shipped.

How it is built

Every architectural decision is written down as a numbered record before it is built, and every claim on this website names the document that backs it — which is why the feature pages end with a list of file paths instead of a testimonial.