I’m looking into running my own relay, and to be honest, the whole mailing tool orchestration brings back some bad memories from the last time I tried it. So I started looking for alternatives, and it seems that Madmail could be a solid one. But to my surprise, it’s not mentioned in this forum at all; not even once. So does it just work flawlessly and nobody needs to talk about it, or does nobody use it?
Never heard of it. Can’t even find it, search these day is so twentieth-century. Can you link to the repo, please?
If you don’t want to run chatmail relay for some reason, but want to have your own server just for yourself and friends I’d recommend trying upstream Maddy instead of madmail fork. One disadvantage compared to chatmail is that you will not have push notifications over FCM or APNS, but if you either run an Android phone which does not kill the app all the time or generally don’t care about push notifications, e.g. because you keep Delta Chat running on your laptop, it may be fine.
Maddy is known to work for small setups. There were problems with messages “seen” status synchronization because Maddy does not support IMAP extension CONDSTORE, but it will not be needed with the next Delta Chat version: Feature request: Quotas and CONDSTORE for Delta Chat · Issue #727 · foxcpp/maddy · GitHub
As for quota extension, it is not supported in Maddy, but for personal server you don’t need it.
If you want to run the relay for others to use, it’s better to setup a proper chatmail relay. It’s much easier than setting up a normal email server and if you run into problems we can solve them.
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I guess that explains why nobody talks about it… 
I found it mentioned here Community developments - chatmail relay documentation and the link to the repo is GitHub - themadorg/madmail: A mad fork of maddy, bringing the madness to mail delivery. ( #deltachat )
I opened a PR to fix the documentation syntax and update the link: docs: fix link to Maddy and update madmail URL by link2xt · Pull Request #847 · chatmail/relay · GitHub
The documentation lists it in the “work in progress” list and even then says “experimental” for a good reason I guess, madmail looks like Maddy with some features such filtering mails to only allow OpenPGP-encrypted messages, TURN server for WebRTC calls and Iroh relay added with AI assistance.
Depending on what you want to setup, “official” chatmail relay, Maddy or even mailcow are all good options that are tested and known to work well for a long time and I suggest trying them first before deciding they are too difficult.
And it got merged; nice. Also, you are right, starting with the official setup might be the best. It might not be difficult per se, but I feel intimidated by all the small cogs in the system. Anyway, let’s do it, what is there to lose…
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