Postal vs wildduck
| Tagline | Self-hosted mail delivery platform, a SendGrid/Mailgun alternative | Scalable, horizontally distributed IMAP/POP3 mail server with no single point of failure |
| Category | Email & Newsletters | Email & Newsletters |
| Replaces | SendGrid | Gmail / Google Workspace, SendGrid, Mailchimp |
| GitHub stars | 17k | 2.1k |
| Language | Ruby | Nodejs |
| License | MIT | EUPL-1.2 |
| Self-host difficulty | 4/5 Involved | 5/5 Advanced |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose Manual | Docker Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 9 days ago | today |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Postal
- You are responsible for IP reputation, warmup, and deliverability
- Requires MariaDB, RabbitMQ, and DNS/DKIM configuration to run
- No marketing-campaign UI — it is a delivery engine, not a newsletter builder
- Less hand-holding than managed providers for spam/blocklist issues
wildduck
- No built-in web admin UI; management is done through a JSON HTTP API only
- SMTP is a separate component (Haraka/ZoneMTA) requiring additional setup
- MongoDB dependency adds operational overhead compared to simpler SQL-backed servers
- Documentation assumes strong Node.js and MongoDB expertise
Bottom line
Choose Postal if you want the lower-effort setup; choose Postal for the larger community and ecosystem. wildduck has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
wildduck
Scalable, horizontally distributed IMAP/POP3 mail server with no single point of failure