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Postfix
Raised as a usability problem by 14 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2012–2025), in 13 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Configuring the mail server stack is very difficult for the person setting it upUnreviewed
20122026- Setup takes 20+ hours and requires deep knowledge of many mail protocols2025-03-05
- Flexibility makes learning and configuring the mail servers harder for novices2025-03-05
- Configuring the mail server stack is abysmally difficult for the person setting it up2021-01-07
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 15 complaints
- Setup takes 20+ hours and requires deep knowledge of many mail protocols2025-03-05
- Flexibility makes learning and configuring the mail servers harder for novices2025-03-05
- Defaults and docs are hard to orient around; dozens of pages needed to set up virtual mailboxes2025-03-05
- Local test emails between users never arrive despite setup guides claiming it works out of the box2024-04-22
- Postfix docs are terse and overwhelming, cluttered with outdated compatibility material2023-11-30
- Scripted auto-reply solutions don't work reliably, so the owner can't just turn it on2022-09-05
- Hard to learn configuration; errors don't show which pipeline step failed2022-06-12
- Configuring the mail server stack is abysmally difficult for the person setting it up2021-01-07
- Setting up the full mail stack is too much work and too complex for normal users2018-01-26
- Setting up email server needs many acronyms and options, hard to configure correctly2017-02-12
- Yahoo's sender verification web form gave no result, leaving the user unable to get mail delivered2014-11-23
- Config needs careful doc reading to avoid hidden gotchas and memorizing variables2014-10-19
- Requires understanding many interacting abstractions at once for trivial tasks2014-04-24
- Mail server setup is complicated, with fragile software needing constant fixing2013-02-27
- Configuring Postfix, Dovecot and PostgreSQL together was a hassle to set up2012-01-31