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 is separate from the forum at hmailserver.com, which belongs to the original hMailServer project.
Why there is a new forum at all
hMailServer, created by Martin Knafve, ran self-hosted email for twenty years before the original project went quiet. In 2026 we forked it, rebuilt it on a modern toolchain and now maintain the hMailServer 6 line; the original project has since resumed development separately. This forum is the other half of that work: a place for people running hMailServer 6 to help each other, 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 (administrators) and Progressiverobot (hMailServer Team), and you can check both 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, event scripts there run in JavaScript only, and moving a Windows install to Linux is not a supported migration: treat it as a new installation plus a mailbox-level 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.