The panel that puts you back in control of your mail.
Postfix · Dovecot · Rspamd, on Debian 12 & 13, in one panel. DNS advice with live verification, per-domain DKIM keygen, granular backup with per-mailbox restore, mail queue management, certificate lifecycle, vacation auto-reply. Boring stack done right — built for small VPS, Raspberry Pi, and Proxmox homelabs.
Free for personal and non-commercial use — home labs, learning, self-hosting your own mail. Commercial deployments (paying clients, for-profit production) require a NetForge license — see the terms.
Why missus
DNS advice that verifies itself
For each managed domain, missus shows the exact MX, SPF, DKIM,
and DMARC records to publish — and a one-click Verify all
that runs live dig lookups and tells you which
records are actually live. Stop guessing why Gmail spam-folders
your mail.
Boring stack, modern UX
Postfix and Dovecot have 25 years of sysadmin knowledge in the
world. Rspamd is the modern anti-spam standard. missus assembles
them with sane defaults + a panel that doesn't hide what's
happening. Every config file is generated under
/srv/missus/ for you to read.
Pi & homelab first-class
No Docker, no Java, no kitchen-sink. ~300 MB resident across the
three daemons — fits comfortably on Pi 4/5 with 4 GB RAM and an
SSD. Ships as a self-contained .deb for Debian 12 &
13, amd64 + arm64. Proxmox LXC template on the way.
How mail flows through missus
Two lanes — inbound (the world reaching your mailboxes) and outbound (your mailboxes reaching the world). Same three daemons, same SQLite store, no extra moving parts. Each blue-bordered box is something the panel renders config for and you can read on disk.
The chosen stack
Three daemons. One panel. No alternatives — less choice means less drift between two missus boxes and less for you to debug at 2am.
No CalDAV/CardDAV. No web admin baked into a Rust monolith. No HA cluster. Three things, done well — and a panel that respects your time.
What you get out of the box
DNS advice + live verification
For every managed domain: the canonical MX/SPF/DKIM/DMARC
records ready to copy-paste, hostname & IP pulled from
your server settings. Verify all runs
dig against your authoritative DNS and tells
you exactly which records resolve correctly, which are
mismatched, and which are missing. No more "why does Gmail
quarantine my mail?".
Granular backup & restore
Tarball snapshot with hot-copy of state.db and
every Maildir. Restore full for disaster recovery,
per-domain when a single domain's data corrupts,
or per-mailbox when one user nuked their inbox by
mistake. Sibling mailboxes keep the last hour of mail
they received in the meantime.
Per-mailbox vacation, per-domain greylisting
Vacation auto-reply with start/end dates renders a Sieve
script under each mailbox; Dovecot pigeonhole compiles it
on first delivery. Greylisting toggle per-domain via
rspamd's whitelisted_rcpts mechanism — domains
with chatty automated senders bypass the deferral, the
rest get the standard 5-minute spam-bot defense.
Queue, spam, and statistics
Mail queue with hold/release/requeue/delete and Flush all to retry deferred. Rspamd visibility: the last 100 messages with action breakdown, search filter, symbol drilldown. Stats dashboard with top senders/recipients, per-domain disk usage, top mailboxes by size with quota bars.
Install
On a fresh Debian 12 (bookworm) or 13 (trixie) VPS, Pi, or LXC,
as root:
-
Add the NetForge public APT repo (codename auto-detected):
curl -fsSL https://apt.netforge.it/netforge.asc | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/netforge.asc > /dev/nullecho "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/netforge.asc] https://apt.netforge.it/public $(. /etc/os-release; echo $VERSION_CODENAME) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/netforge.list -
Install — apt resolves Postfix, Dovecot, Rspamd, certbot:
sudo apt updatesudo apt install missus -
(rare) If apt complains about unmet dependencies, fix in one shot:
sudo apt -f install -
First admin + start. The panel is bound to 127.0.0.1:8443 — front it with arx's reverse_proxy or SSH-tunnel from your laptop:
sudo missus admin createsudo systemctl enable --now missusssh -L 8443:127.0.0.1:8443 root@your-vps
From a fresh Debian VPS to a green Verify-all takes roughly
10 minutes once DNS propagates. State and configs all live
under /srv/missus/ — backup is just rsync.
Step 3 (apt -f install) is only needed if a third-party
repo or a half-removed previous install left the dependency tree
broken — it recomputes what's missing and resolves it.
How it compares
| missus | Mailcow | iRedMail | Stalwart | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free for personal / non-commercial use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| No Docker required | ✓ | required | ✓ | ✓ |
| Boring stack (Postfix/Dovecot) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Rust monolith |
| Single panel UX | ✓ | ✓ | paid Pro for nice UI | ✓ |
| DNS advice + live verify | ✓ | partial | ✗ | partial |
| Granular backup (per-mailbox) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | export |
| Pi 4 / 4 GB target | ✓ | heavy | tight | ✓ |
| Family integration (hosting + DNS) | arx + nomina | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Files visible & editable | ✓ | in containers | ✓ | single TOML |
Part of the NetForge family
missus doesn't try to be everything. Two sister panels handle what's not mail — together the three cover hosting, mail, and naming on a single self-hosted box.
arx
Hosting panel. nginx + PHP-FPM, per-site outbound firewall, WireGuard admin plane, Squid SNI filter. Hosts websites — including the webmail UI you'd expose to your missus mailbox users. arx.netforge.it →
missus (you are here)
Mail server. Postfix + Dovecot + Rspamd. SMTP, IMAP, DKIM, DNS advice, granular backup. The mail half of the triad. arx + missus + nomina = self-hosted home base.
nomina
Authoritative DNS panel. BIND9 + KASP DNSSEC + RPZ threat-intel + live propagation check. Publishes the MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records missus tells you to set — same family, same look. nomina.netforge.it →