[Discuss] SSH options (was Future of X11 (was Trying to connect to internet in Debian))

[ron at bclug.ca (Ron)]

Steve Litt wrote on 2026-01-20 13:26:

> When acting as an
> IMAP server, is Stalwart capable of storing its emails in a maildir
> format?

No. It can import mbox, maildir, and maildir-nested (my favourite) but 
it stores in RocksDB or some other database.


This seems to have positives and negatives:

A DB makes most sense for email messages - index-able, ACID compliance 
(depending on DB), fast, etc.


As much as I like maildir-nested (normal maildir is just dumb - see how 
folders are represented), it's also kinda dumb: the file name contains 
status flags:

when a message is marked "Read", the *file name* is changed to reflect 
the change in status!



RocksDB gave me pause, but it seems okay - BigTable was forked by a 
couple Google Fellows to LevelDB, which was then forked by Facebook to 
RocksDB and is fully OSS and maintained by Facebook Database Engineering 
Team.

Designed to be *fast* at up-to a couple hundred terabytes.



> Is it relatively ease for me to shut off its other facilities
> so I don't have an SMTP server on my computer?

Yes, it's highly configurable.


> In your opinion is its
> documentation good enough to work with, including examples?

Excellent documentation and there's even an "AI agent" trained on the 
source code to help answer how-to questions.



I'm quite interested in the ability to point an email account holder to 
the Stalwart web instance and have them:

* change their own password

* enable at-rest encryption

* generate per-app passwords

* use OAuth / Open Connect / Open ID (haven't untangled all these yet)


The built-in mailing list feature isn't really appropriate for LUGs, 
etc. Not any subscribe / unsubscribe that isn't manually performed by 
admin (that I've found).


I also quite like the Web/Cal/CardDAV support. Had some issues with 
uploading large video files in testing but am unsure if that's a 
Stalwart problem, a Dolphin problem, or what?