Mailu Server Hosting on Offshore Anubiz Host VPS

Mailcow and Mailu solve similar problems but with different philosophies. Mailcow is feature-dense, ships SOGo for groupware and ActiveSync, includes Solr indexing, and assumes you have at least 6GB RAM to spare. Mailu is deliberately leaner: Roundcube for webmail, no ActiveSync by default, no embedded Solr, and a baseline that runs comfortably on a 2GB RAM VPS for personal use. If you primarily need IMAP, SMTP, antispam, and a clean webmail front-end without ActiveSync or shared calendars, Mailu is the lighter and faster path. If you need full groupware features, calendar sharing, and contacts sync to mobile, Mailcow is the better fit. Anubiz Host supports both. Customers who specifically self-host for a small team or personal domain almost always pick Mailu and end up paying for a smaller VPS plan, with the same offshore protection and the same clean sending IP.

Mailu deployment starts with a docker-compose.yml generated by the official Mailu setup wizard at setup.mailu.io. You answer a few questions about hostname, admin password, and which optional features you want, and the wizard produces a ready to run compose file and accompanying mailu.env. After uploading those files to your Anubiz Host VPS, run docker-compose up -d. The stack pulls images for the Postfix front-end, Dovecot back-end, Rspamd antispam, Redis, and the admin UI. Within a couple of minutes, the admin panel is reachable at mail.yourdomain.com/admin and you can create your first domain and administrator mailbox. DKIM signing is automatic per domain. SPF and DMARC records are your job to publish in DNS. The admin panel surfaces the exact records to add, including the DKIM public key after you create each domain.

Mailu in production has a few specific operational quirks worth knowing. The front-end Postfix listens on ports 25, 465, and 587 by default and exposes 993 for IMAPS through Dovecot. When you add Let's Encrypt automatic renewal, make sure ports 80 and 443 are reachable from the public internet during renewal windows. Backups are simple: snapshot the data, dkim, mail, overrides, and redis volumes plus the mailu.env file. Anubiz Host hypervisor snapshots cover this cleanly. For offsite, rclone or restic against an offshore object storage provider works well. If you outgrow Mailu, the migration path to Mailcow or a hand-rolled Postfix and Dovecot is straightforward because the mailbox format is standard Maildir. That makes Mailu a great starting point for new self-hosters who want to learn without locking themselves into a single platform forever.