Question
What mailserver can I run alongside my website on a $5 droplet?
iRedMail says it needs 2GB of RAM. I have 512MB for the entire site… What can I do for mail?
Submit an answer
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.
Hollie's Hub for Good
Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We’d like to help.
Get started for free
Enter your email to get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.
New accounts only. By submitting your email you agree to our Privacy Policy.
Hi there.
To be honest, mail servers are not that hard to setup, they’re pretty hard for maintance and security. DigitalOcean has a article Why You May Not Want To Run Your Own Mail Server, which can explain what’s the problem with mail servers.
DigitalOcean has a lot of mail server tutorial which you can look for under Email tag.
My personal recommendation would be Postfix one. How To Install and Configure Postfix on Ubuntu 16.04 is a great tutorial.
You can also go with something like Zoho mail. How To Set Up Zoho Mail with a Custom Domain Managed by DigitalOcean DNS will cover you. Zoho mail is service something like Google offer, but it also has Free tier that’s great if you’re under 25 mail accounts (at time of writing tutorial, it was 10).
If you got any more question, feel free to ask.
Instead of maintaining your own mail server sign up with MXroute, it is a mail hosting service run by Jarland, the platform support specialist of DO. They have a 40GB storage promo that only costs $40 Biennially - https://billing.mxroute.com/announcements.php?id=81. But note that MXroute is not affiliated to DO.
Plenty of mail servers are happy with 512 MB (Sendmail, Postfix, Exim). Or just use Google Apps.