In the community of self-hosters, email infrastructure has a reputation of being a nightmare due to the maintenance of the infrastructure and the complexity involved. We will see in this talk how one can combine modern tooling like bootc and Fedora Image Mode with the mail server Stalwart and others simpler server to get a very low maintenance email stack running on the cheapest possible VM, while following current best practices.

The presentation will explain the pitfalls of building a custom image, how to automate the upgrades with dependabot and how to get the smallest possible image to run on a normal openstack cloud provider without specific support for bootc image.