Show HN: Mainly – Self-hosted mail client built for multiple domains (mainly.crnst8.com)

Hey all,

I built this mail client to manage my self-hosted mail across multiple domains, and it's ended up being my daily driver (i.e. it gets patched quick) and thought I'd share it again here.

I wanted something that was fast to parse visually, easy to manage & customize, self-host and easily deploy, so it does all of the above.

I'm an inpatient fella, so it also allows you to do things like bulk onboard domains, sort addresses into folders for visual sorting, adjust custom sender images & tags, has MCP integration and has a settings page for adjusting your search queries.

Additionally if you're a postfix/dovecot user, there's a CLI script to integrate mailbox setup via the application with your server.

Completely free & open-source, zero telemetry currently self-hostable only. Would love feedback and feature requests :~)

2 comments

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kaybi-gh 18d ago ↗

I'm so interested into this, most selfhosted mail clients are super slow and well got outdated UIs.. How is the data persisted, does it need a db?

flowerpil 17d ago ↗

Yeah, I agree, I’ve struggled for years to find a mail client that feels (and looks) ‘modern’. The app uses Postgres as the database so that the mail lives server-side but stores an array of metadata attributes from each mailbox in the db, then pulls from the server when you open it.

Everything happens on Postgres first then relays to IMAP instead of relying on IMAP to query across all your domains, which I find is usually where most mail clients start to fail when you’re the type to setup multiple emails on multiple domains.