Set secure email server with docker-mailserver

3 min readAug 8, 2023

I run my own email server for fun. Let’s get started the journey. This time it took me 3 days to complete.

This article is not a walkthrough, but a note to pitfall of the new user.

The use case will be I alone use sarit@elcolie.com and fetch/send email to my elcolie.com server.

In the DNS pay attention to mail.elcolie.com it has prefix, but it will not shown up in the email address. I confused this in the early setup.

Now go into my host server

create compose.yaml

services:
  mailserver:
    image: ghcr.io/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver:latest
    container_name: mailserver
    # Provide the FQDN of your mail server here (Your DNS MX record should point to this value)
    hostname: mail.elcolie.com
    env_file: mailserver.env
    # More information about the mail-server ports:
    # https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest/config/security/understanding-the-ports/
    # To avoid conflicts with yaml base-60 float, DO NOT remove the quotation marks.
    ports:
      - "25:25"    # SMTP  (explicit TLS => STARTTLS)
      - "143:143"  # IMAP4 (explicit TLS => STARTTLS)
      - "465:465"  # ESMTP (implicit TLS)
      - "587:587"  # ESMTP (explicit TLS => STARTTLS)
      - "993:993"  # IMAP4 (implicit TLS)
    volumes:
      - ./docker-data/certbot/certs/:/etc/letsencrypt
      - ./docker-data/dms/mail-data/:/var/mail/
      - ./docker-data/dms/mail-state/:/var/mail-state/
      - ./docker-data/dms/mail-logs/:/var/log/mail/
      - ./docker-data/dms/config/:/tmp/docker-mailserver/
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    restart: always
    stop_grace_period: 1m
    # Uncomment if using `ENABLE_FAIL2BAN=1`:
    # cap_add:
    #   - NET_ADMIN
    healthcheck:
      test: "ss --listening --tcp | grep -P 'LISTEN.+:smtp' || exit 1"
      timeout: 3s
      retries: 0