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Comparison · Comms
Maddy vs mailcow
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Maddy and mailcow — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Shared themes:mail-serverself-hosted
Maddy vs mailcow: at a glance
What is Maddy?
A one-binary mail server learning to behave like production infrastructure.
maddy is an all-in-one SMTP and IMAP server written in Go, aimed at people who want a working mail host without assembling Postfix, Dovecot and a policy daemon themselves. The 0.9 line moved quickly — 0.9.0 through 0.9.5 between late March and late May — with the sequence following a recognisable shape: a feature release, an immediate patch for a broken integration, a security release, then cleanup. Configuration is directive-based, and much of the changelog concerns the behaviour of individual modules like auth.ldap, check.rspamd and check.dnsbl.
What is mailcow?
mailcow's release notes are almost entirely upstream security currency.
mailcow ships named seasonal releases with lettered revisions, and nearly every revision exists to pull in an upstream security fix - Redis, ClamAV, SOGo, Rspamd, nginx, unbound, Postfix. Revision B of the Mooly 2026 release updates Redis 7.4.10, ClamAV 1.4.6, and SOGo 5.12.10, adds minor web UI and nginx hardening, and removes a legacy DeltaChat sieve rule. The last release with genuinely new features was the March cut, which added forced 2FA, ACME DNS-01 challenges, and a passwordless autodiscover endpoint.
Maddy vs mailcow: editorial side-by-side
Maddy
0.0COMMS
A one-binary mail server learning to behave like production infrastructure.
◆ Current state
maddy is an all-in-one SMTP and IMAP server written in Go, aimed at people who want a working mail host without assembling Postfix, Dovecot and a policy daemon themselves. The 0.9 line moved quickly — 0.9.0 through 0.9.5 between late March and late May — with the sequence following a recognisable shape: a feature release, an immediate patch for a broken integration, a security release, then cleanup. Configuration is directive-based, and much of the changelog concerns the behaviour of individual modules like auth.ldap, check.rspamd and check.dnsbl.
◆ Where it's heading
The project is systematically removing the compromises that made early versions convenient. Obsolete SASL LOGIN was disabled by default, the STARTTLS plaintext fallback was dropped, the maddyctl symlink behaviour and the implicit run command were deleted after four years of deprecation warnings, and libdns providers that have not kept up with 1.x are being cut. Running the other way is operational maturity: no-downtime config reload, queue-length metrics, OpenMetrics fixes, systemd readiness reporting, and SLSA build attestations on release artifacts. This is a project moving from hobbyist-friendly to operator-friendly, and accepting breakage to get there.
◆ Prediction
0.10.0 is already scoped by the deprecations announced in 0.9.1 — expect the flagged libdns providers to be removed and gandi to require Bearer tokens. Given the 0.9.x pattern, a feature release followed quickly by an integration fix is the likely shape.
mailcow
5.0COMMS
mailcow's release notes are almost entirely upstream security currency.
◆ Current state
mailcow ships named seasonal releases with lettered revisions, and nearly every revision exists to pull in an upstream security fix - Redis, ClamAV, SOGo, Rspamd, nginx, unbound, Postfix. Revision B of the Mooly 2026 release updates Redis 7.4.10, ClamAV 1.4.6, and SOGo 5.12.10, adds minor web UI and nginx hardening, and removes a legacy DeltaChat sieve rule. The last release with genuinely new features was the March cut, which added forced 2FA, ACME DNS-01 challenges, and a passwordless autodiscover endpoint.
◆ Where it's heading
For a self-hosted mail stack that bundles a dozen upstream components, keeping current with their CVEs is the product, and mailcow has organized its release cadence around exactly that. The pattern is consistent: a named release with some feature content every few months, then lettered revisions that are pure security currency plus small web UI escaping and validation fixes. The web interface is where mailcow's own code gets hardened - HTML escaping in quarantine views and sieve editors recurs across several revisions.
◆ Prediction
Expect the next entry to be another lettered revision carrying upstream updates, with the next named release likely bundling whatever feature work has accumulated since March.
Alternatives to Maddy and mailcow
Other Comms products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Maddy or mailcow.
Proton Bridge
Proton Bridge spends its first release in ten weeks on crashes, memory bounds and dead code
Stalwart
Stalwart is chasing mail RFCs and its own storage layer at the same time
Mux
Every manual control Mux ships now arrives with a Robots workflow that does it for you
Netcore Cloud
Netcore's feed remains a demand-generation channel; ten entries, zero product releases.
Openfire
Openfire keeps its XMPP server current without changing what it is.
See all Maddy alternatives → · See all mailcow alternatives →
Recent activity from Maddy and mailcow
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1d agomailcow🏖️🐮 Mooly 2026 | Postfix 3.10.12, Rspamd 4.1.0 & Nginx 1.30.3 - Revision B
- 20d agomailcow🏖️🐮 Mooly 2026 | Postfix 3.10.12, Rspamd 4.1.0 & Nginx 1.30.3 - Revision A
- 1mo agomailcow🏖️🐮 Mooly 2026 | Postfix 3.10.12, Rspamd 4.1.0 & Nginx 1.30.3
- 2mo agomailcowThird May revision: unbound CVE and nginx 1.30.2
- 2mo agoMaddymaddy 0.9.5 fixes nested pipeline logging and systemd reload reporting
- 3mo agomailcowSecond May revision: quarantine table HTML escaping
- 3mo agomailcowSOGo 5.12.8 covering four upstream security issues
- 3mo agoMaddymaddy 0.9.4 removes the maddyctl symlink and implicit run command
- 4mo agoMaddymaddy 0.9.3 patches an LDAP injection flaw in auth.ldap
- 4mo agoMaddymaddy 0.9.2 fixes an rspamd panic on unspecified tls_client
- 4mo agoMaddymaddy 0.9.1 flags libdns providers for removal in 0.10.0
- 4mo agoMaddymaddy 0.9.0 adds no-downtime configuration reloading ⚡
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Maddy and mailcow?
Both compete on the same themes — mail-server, self-hosted — within Comms. mailcow is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Maddy better than mailcow?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. mailcow is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Comms products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Maddy?
Top Maddy alternatives in Comms are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Maddy alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/maddy for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to mailcow?
Top mailcow alternatives in Comms are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "mailcow alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/mailcow for the full list with editorial commentary on each.