Managed hosting from
£45/month equivalent +VAT
Small resource profile: 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD storage. Typically suits small organisations starting with business email on their own domain. Billed hourly against our rate card with no commitments; deployment, upgrades, daily backups, monitoring, SSL and UK hosting included, with no per-user fees. How our pricing works
Business email on infrastructure you control.
Most organisations rent mailboxes by the seat from a US hyperscaler and accept that their most important conversations live in someone else's cloud. Hosting for Mail is the other model: a complete open source mail stack (Mailu) with mailboxes, webmail and admin, deployed and run by Node on UK infrastructure, with no per-mailbox licence meter.
What you get
Hosting for Mail is a production mail platform built on the open source Mailu project. It covers the day-to-day job of business email without assembling a dozen services by hand.
Sending and receiving - SMTP and IMAP for desktop and mobile clients, with webmail for browser access. Admin - domains, mailboxes, aliases and basic policy in one place. Filtering - spam and antivirus scanning so the inbox stays usable. Identity - single sign-on through your Node workspace, so access follows the same joiners-and-leavers process as your other apps.
The public product name is Mail. Mailu is the upstream project we host, configure and support.
Why Hosting for Mail with Node
No per-mailbox subscription - Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 charge for every mailbox, every month. A managed deployment is a predictable platform cost that does not climb with every hire.
UK data residency - mail lives on infrastructure we operate in the UK (or in your environment when that is the deal), with a clear answer for security questionnaires and client contracts.
Standard protocols - IMAP, SMTP and open formats. You are not locked into a proprietary client or a migration the vendor makes painful.
SSO and ops included - Keycloak login, TLS, monitoring, backups and upgrades are part of the service, not a separate project you have to staff.
Deliverability, taken seriously
Self-hosted email fails when authentication and reputation are neglected. We configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC, keep certificates current, and watch queues and health so problems show up as alerts rather than silent junk-folder placement. For denser anti-spam needs we can put Proxmox Email Gateway in the path as a separate managed layer.
How it fits with the rest of your platform
Mail sits alongside the other apps in your workspace. Pair it with Nextcloud for files and calendars when you want a fuller alternative to a commercial suite, keep identity in Keycloak, and watch the estate through our Zabbix and Grafana stack. One workspace, one login story, mail included.
Open source alternative to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 mail
Hosting for Mail is the open source path for organisations that want business email without per-seat SaaS pricing and without handing the mailbox store to a hyperscaler.
| Consideration | Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 | Hosting for Mail |
|---|---|---|
| Cost model | Per-mailbox monthly subscription | No per-mailbox licence; managed platform fee |
| Data location | Vendor cloud | UK infrastructure you control (or your cloud) |
| Protocols | Vendor clients plus standards | Standard IMAP/SMTP and webmail |
| Identity | Vendor directory | Your Node Keycloak workspace SSO |
| Ops burden on you | Low for SaaS, high if you DIY mail | Deployment, deliverability and ops handled by Node |
Email is too important to rent forever by the seat. Hosting for Mail replaces the recurring per-mailbox bill with a managed open source stack on UK infrastructure, so your organisation owns the mailbox store and we own the operational risk.
Open source provenance
Mail
is
MIT
software maintained upstream
(source, ref 2024.06.51).
Node provides managed hosting, configuration and support. We are not the publisher.
- Hosting for paying customers: permitted under this licence.
- Trademark: Public product name is "Mail" / "Hosting for Mail" — never "Mailu Hosting" or a Mailu-branded product name. Nominative reference to the upstream project in docs is fine.
Adoption and community
7.4k+ GitHub stars Mailu is a mature open source mail distribution on GitHub (Mailu/Mailu), packaged as Docker images with production deployments documented across self-hosted communities and Hacker News threads for years.
“I've been using it for my personal email and for automated no-reply messages in a few projects with no delivery issues.”
Hacker News
“Seconded, I've used it for a couple of years and it's a great package that I find quite understandable (a docker-compose stack).”
Hacker News
“I consider Mailu to be one of the best alternatives if you want to use Docker or have an infrastructure with Kubernetes. I've been using it for some years.”
Hacker News
Quotes are from public community discussions, linked to their original sources.
Frequently asked questions
What is Node's Hosting for Mail?
It is managed business email on the open source Mailu stack: mailboxes, webmail, aliases and an admin UI, running on UK infrastructure we operate. Your team gets IMAP, SMTP and a browser client; we handle deployment, upgrades, backups, monitoring, TLS and deliverability basics such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
Is this a good alternative to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mail?
For organisations that want email on UK infrastructure they control, without per-mailbox SaaS pricing, yes. You get standard business mail and webmail rather than a full productivity suite. Calendars and files can sit alongside it on Nextcloud and other Node-hosted apps when you need them.
Will mail from our domain reach the inbox?
Deliverability is the hard part of running your own mail, and it is part of what we manage. We configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your domains, keep TLS current, and watch queues and reputation so outbound mail is authenticated and monitored rather than left to chance.
Does it support single sign-on?
Yes. Mail joins your workspace Keycloak realm via the standard Node SSO path, so people sign in with the same identity they use for the rest of their apps, with access revoked centrally when someone leaves.
Who hosts and supports it in the UK?
Node Digital. Chris Evans and Matt Collier deploy and run the stack on UK infrastructure (or your own cloud when that is the engagement), including upgrades, security patching, backups, monitoring and UK-based support.
Can we migrate from Google Workspace or Microsoft 365?
Yes. Mailboxes and history can be migrated with planning for DNS cutover, dual-delivery windows where needed, and client reconfiguration. We treat migration as part of bringing the service live, not as an afterthought.
Talk to us about business email.
Drop us a line and our team will discuss mailbox counts, domains and how Hosting for Mail can replace a per-seat email subscription.