That said, I personally value privacy highly, which is actually one of the main reasons I started Stalwart Mail Server. I don't maintain a personal presence on LinkedIn or other social media platforms, not because I'm trying to be anonymous, but because I prefer to focus on the work rather than promoting myself. I’ve found that platforms like LinkedIn are more noise than signal for me, especially with constant recruiter spam.
That being said, Stalwart Labs as a company is far from hidden. You can find our company page on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/stalwartlabs/. We're also active on:
* Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@stalwartlabs * Twitter/X: https://x.com/stalwartlabs * Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/stalwartlabs/
While I may not be putting my personal life on display, I’m committed to transparency where it matters most: through the project’s code, documentation, and community engagement. I hope that helps clarify things!
It's this and the project being maintained by a solo developer (unless it's a pseudonym for multiple people :D) that makes me not want to personally rely on it.
I'm not only here to complain though, it's an awesome project and I find it really impressive for someone to build a mailserver (and other features) from scratch. Thank you for investing time in open source implementations of protocols that run the world.
Follow up questions: What are the thoughts about enterprise and business support? I see that it exists but I believe there is a lot of trust involved ^^. Will there be more developers, open source, knowing the people behind the project and or support people? Do you have any customers today?
To give you more context about the project: Stalwart Labs was indeed started and is currently led by a single developer: myself. I have over 30 years of experience working with email technologies and have previously founded three email-related companies.
That said, I’m not working entirely alone. While I’m the core developer and founder, there are others involved in Stalwart Labs today handling support, sales, and maintaining smaller parts of the codebase (mostly changes required by clients). My plan is to continue leading development myself until the project reaches version 1.0, which I hope will happen later this year. After that milestone, the goal is to gradually expand the development team, particularly to support work on a Rust-based webmail and calendar interface that will complement the mail server.
Stalwart’s development has been largely self-funded, aside from two NLNet grants. I’ve been growing the team organically and intentionally. While I have been approached by two VC firms, I’ve chosen to decline their offers. Not just to avoid external pressure (and stress), but also because some proposed directions conflicted with promises I’ve made to the community. For example, there have been suggestions to move some open-source features behind a paywall, which I’m against and promised the community never to do.
As for enterprise support, yes, Stalwart Labs offers an enterprise license that includes premium support services. And regarding adoption, I'm happy to say that there are currently a few hundred enterprise clients using Stalwart in production. While I would need the clients' permissions to share their names, I can say that Mozilla Thunderbird is one of them. They’ve publicly announced their upcoming launch of thundermail.com, which is powered by Stalwart.
I hope that gives you more clarity and confidence in the project. Thanks.
Unsolicited advice from an anonymous entity online ;): Put this information on the website! It hopefully removes any trust issues that people might have (I believe I'm not the only one), it did for me!
I wish you all the best on your endeavors, I'm excited to see what you bring in the future <3
These issues, which would be showstoppers for a real free software project, and pretty easy to fix if you were the rightsholder of the code, were promised to be fixed "in a few weeks" in September last year, and "in a few months" in January this year, however they're still not fixed, which means I can't upgrade - not that I probably want to anymore. I truly believe in free software, so I find the idea of using "open source" as an empty marketing bullet-point for at least eight months to be fairly distasteful. Might be time to switch to Maddy.
[1]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/st... [2]: https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart/issues/783 [3]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/st...
It’s also worth noting that only about 5% of the codebase is Enterprise, and that small slice helps fund ongoing development and expansion of the team [1]. As much as I'd love to be completely sponsor-funded, the reality is that open source projects still need to cover real-world costs. For what it's worth, Stalwart has received two NLNet grants [2] [3] to support open protocol work, which hopefully reinforces our commitment to open source.
So while the optics of this situation may look rough from the outside, I promise it’s not some “open source in name only” kind of thing. It’s just one of those painful balance acts between building features, maintaining packages, and paying the bills.
And hey, if you're heading back to Maddy, no hard feelings. But the door’s always open if you want to give Stalwart another shot down the road.
[0]: https://stalw.art/docs/development/compile [1]: https://stalw.art/compare/#faq [2]: https://nlnet.nl/project/Stalwart/ [3]: https://nlnet.nl/project/Stalwart-Collaboration/
FlamingMoe•17h ago