This is the community support forum for hMailServer — the free, open-source mail server for Windows and Linux — run by Progressive Robot Ltd, the company that maintains the software. It replaces the forum that ran at hmailserver.com for the best part of two decades.

Why there is a new forum at all

hMailServer ran self-hosted email for twenty years and then the original project went quiet, taking its forum with it. We took the software over, rebuilt it on a modern toolchain and shipped version 6.3.3; the forum is the other half of that. It is the same community, on infrastructure we can keep the lights on in, with the maintainers reading it.

How the categories are laid out

• Announcements & releases — release notes, security advisories and forum notices. Read-only for members.
• Running hMailServer — the day-to-day: general support, installation and upgrades, Linux, the webmail portal and Control Deck, TLS and deliverability, anti-spam, and guides.
• Automation & integration — scripting and the COM API, the REST API, rules and Sieve, and monitoring.
• Development & roadmap — bug reports, pre-release builds and feature requests. Reproducible defects are raised on GitLab.
• Community — off-topic, and feedback about the forum.
• Managed hMailServer — the paid option, kept out of the way of the free support above.

Who is here

Staff post under their own accounts — chris and Progressiverobot — and they are in the administrators group, which you can verify on the groups page. Everyone else is a member, and members answer more questions here than we do.

What you can expect from us

We answer as the maintainers, which means we will tell you when something is broken before we tell you the workaround, name the release a fix is held for, and say plainly where the software does not go: there is no Control Panel and no COM API on Linux, per-domain DKIM cannot be configured there yet, and moving a Windows install to Linux is a rebuild and a cutover rather than a migration. We would rather you heard all of that from us than discovered it on a Friday evening.

Where an answer already exists in the manual, you will get a sentence and a link rather than a paraphrase — the documentation runs to thirty-seven chapters and is kept current with the releases, and this forum is meant to be a front door to it.

If you would rather not operate it yourself

hMailServer is free and always will be: AGPL-3.0, no per-mailbox fees, no paid tiers, and no answer on this forum depends on buying anything. If you would rather someone else ran it, the team that maintains the software also does that commercially — architecture and deployment, migration from the original hMailServer or any 5.x install, SPF, DKIM and DMARC done properly, TLS and MTA-STS or DANE enforcement, monitoring, and backups that are tested with restores.

Details are on the managed hMailServer page, with support plans and pay monthly support alongside it. If it is easier to just talk: contact us, +44 (0)1244 911212, or [email protected].

Housekeeping

Before posting, read the forum rules and the template on posting a support request. The forum stores what you would expect a forum to store — your account, your posts and the usual server logs — and that is covered by the privacy policy and the cookie policy.

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