Cleida — first client domain migrated off InterServer onto self-hosted Mailcow

Commodity email is the textbook example of recurring spend that never builds equity. The client paid $14/mo per mailbox for 32 employees — $450/yr of pure pass-through to a US provider. Worse, the InterServer webmail was slow, the admin panel was anemic, and the spam filter was permissive enough that phishing emails reached users. The migration cost (~$200 in time + setup) paid for itself in 6 months and gave the client a mail system they actually own.

Mailcow is a self-hosted mail server that runs the same stack as every commercial provider (Postfix + Dovecot + Rspamd + ClamAV), behind the same admin panel you would pay for. We deployed it on the same Hetzner VPS that already hosts the user's portfolio and Barriotech, hardened it against open-relay (the 2026-08-25 incident — see the related memory entry), configured the DKIM/DMARC records in Namecheap to match InterServer's signing, and scripted the mailbox sync so the 32 employees never noticed anything except the URL changing from mail.cleida.com.co to mail.andresmorales.com.co. The annual saving is the entire $450/yr that previously went to a US provider.