Mail-in-a-Box
This is a software solution to make running your own mail server as straightforward as possible. Started by Joshua Tauberer in 2013, its philosophy is to democratize email hosting by turning a freshly installed cloud server into a fully functional mail server, complete with all the necessary features, in just a few hours. The central goal is to give individuals and small organizations the ability to control their own email, rather than relying on large, third-party providers. In that sense, Mail-in-a-Box is like creating your own Gmail, except you own and operate every aspect of it yourself, from top to bottom.
Open-Source and Licensing
Mail-in-a-Box is fundamentally an open-source project. Its code is hosted on GitHub, and the development community is open to contributions from anyone interested. The software is written primarily in Python and revolves around a set of well-documented shell scripts alongside a management daemon. What sets Mail-in-a-Box apart when it comes to licensing is its use of the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) 1.0 Universal license. This license is effectively a public domain dedication: the creator relinquishes all copyright claim, explicitly allowing anyone to use, modify, distribute, or commercialize the software without restriction. This makes Mail-in-a-Box “free-for-all,” with none of the limitations sometimes found in more restrictive open-source licenses.