RMS Mail

I've been a sysadmin for 15+ years. I currently run my own hosting business — about a dozen servers, mine and clients'. A few months ago I ran into an annoying problem: my Mac has a 512GB SSD, and I have around twenty email accounts with years of archived mail. Buying more storage felt like the wrong fix — VPS storage is dramatically cheaper, so I started looking for a self-hosted mail client instead.

I tried everything I could find: Roundcube, SnappyMail, Stalwart, the usual list. Most felt like software from another era, or required infrastructure way heavier than it needed to be. And almost all of them had the same architectural habit — IMAP sits at the center of the app. Every search, every folder switch, every bulk action waits on a round-trip to the mail server.

That's the actual bottleneck. Not storage, not JavaScript. Latency baked into the architecture.

So I built RMS Mail around a different idea: IMAP is a sync layer, not the app's backbone. Mail gets synced into a local database. Search, threading, bulk operations, and AI features all run against that local index. IMAP's only job is keeping things in sync in the background.

On the business side, this is where I'd love input from people here — I split it into three editions, because "self-hosted" means very different things depending on who's running it:

• Mono (free) — a modern Roundcube replacement. Multi-user webmail for one domain, SQLite, no dependencies, up in under a minute.

• Mono Pro (paid) — same model, scaled up with Postgres/Redis/Asynq for heavy long-term workloads.

• Unified (freemium) — a genuinely different product: not multi-user, but multi-account for one person. This is what I built for myself, to manage ~20 accounts in one workspace.

On methodology, since I know it comes up: I work as architect/specifier/reviewer and use AI as implementation tooling rather than hand-writing all the code myself. I've been open about this from day one — it's how a 20+ year sysadmin ships production systems solo in a few months, not a shortcut I want to hide.

One more thing worth being upfront about: the source is closed. Mono, Mono Pro, and Unified all ship as Docker images, not as open-source repos. I know that's a harder sell in self-hosted circles, and I'd genuinely like to hear whether that's a dealbreaker for people here, or whether "self-hostable, source-closed" is a model that can work.

Repo (deployment files, docs, docker-compose configs): github.com/max-ramas/rms-mail-public

Would love feedback — especially on the pricing split across three editions, and on how big a blocker closed-source actually is for people who'd otherwise want this.