System Requirements¶

What you need before deploying Mailyte — hardware, software, and network.

Hardware Requirements¶

Minimum (Development / Testing)¶

Recommended (Production, up to 50k emails/day)¶

Large Scale (100k+ emails/day)¶

Note: Disk requirements grow with user count and retention policy. Budget roughly 1 GB per 100 active mailboxes as a starting point, then monitor actual usage.

Memory Breakdown by Service¶

The stack is ~30 containers. docker-compose.prod.yml caps each one; the big consumers:

The limits sum to well over the recommended 8 GB, but services do not all hit their caps simultaneously -- 8 GB runs the full stack comfortably at moderate volume. 4 GB works for development if you start only the essential services (./start.sh option 2).

Software Requirements¶

Operating System¶

Docker¶

# Check your versions
docker --version
docker compose version

Install Docker if needed:

# Ubuntu / Debian
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
# Log out and back in

# Verify
docker run hello-world

Additional Tools¶

These aren't required but make life easier:

Network Requirements¶

Ports¶

These ports need to be open (inbound):

Warning: In production, every internal service port -- the API's 8083, Prometheus's 9090, Grafana's 3000, the worker ports 8081-8104, and the rest -- is bound to 127.0.0.1 by docker-compose.prod.yml (hardening applied 2026-08-22). Everything HTTP reaches the internet only through Traefik on 443. Docker publishes ports past ufw by writing its own iptables rules, so the bind address -- not a host firewall -- is what actually protects these.

DNS Records¶

Before deployment, set up these DNS records:

Outbound Connectivity¶

Your server needs to reach:

• Port 25 outbound (SMTP delivery to other mail servers)
• Port 53 outbound (DNS lookups)
• Port 443 outbound (Let's Encrypt, package updates, Docker pulls)

Note: Some cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) block outbound port 25 by default. You'll need to request an exception or use a relay service like SES or SendGrid.

Disk Layout Recommendations¶

Almost everything lives in two places:

/var/lib/docker           50 GB+  (images, build cache, and the named volumes:
                                   mysql_data, redis_data, rspamd_data,
                                   postfix_spool, prometheus_data, ...)
<project root>/storage/   100 GB+ (bind-mounted data: mail_data/ -- the Maildirs,
                                   dkim_keys/, ssl_certs/, backups/, archive-spool/)
<project root>/logs/      10 GB   (Postfix/Dovecot/Rspamd and worker logs)

Keeping mail data, backups, and secrets under the project root is deliberate -- moving the server is "move one folder", and on deploy-pipeline hosts storage/, secrets/, and logs/ are anchored outside the timestamped release directories so they survive every deploy.

Use SSDs for everything. Mail storage can use slower storage if cost is a concern, but MySQL and Redis should always be on fast disks.