DesertBox
Your email server in a box. Plug it in, own your email.
What it is
A palm-sized appliance. Plug it into power and your router; minutes later you have your own email address on your own domain — and every message, every key, every account lives on hardware in your house. Not synced to a cloud. Not “encrypted at rest” in someone else’s datacenter. In your house.
Inside is DesertEmail, a from-scratch pure-Rust mail server: SMTP, IMAP, webmail, DKIM signing, a full outbound queue and TLS in a single ~1.2 MB static binary. The box is the binary plus a case, a network jack, and opinions about who owns your mail.
The promises
- No account
- There is nothing to register and nobody to sign in with. The box does not know who you are, and neither do we.
- No subscription
- Buy it once. Nothing renews, nothing expires, nothing is held hostage behind a monthly payment.
- Works even if this website disappears
- The box contacts this site for exactly one thing: signed software updates. That is the whole relationship. If this website goes dark forever, your email keeps working — a dead website means “no updates”, never “no email”.
- Updates you can verify — and refuse
- Every release is signed with a key that lives offline. Your box checks the
signature against a public key baked into its own binary, so a hijacked website
or DNS cannot push code onto it. And you can switch updates off entirely:
auto_update = false. - One-click exit — that is the point
- Your domain, your DNS, your maildir in a standard on-disk format, an open-source server anyone can run. Move it all to another machine, another provider, or another product whenever you like. A product you cannot leave is a product that owns you.
Deliverability, honestly
Whether the big providers accept mail from your connection is decided by your connection, not by our software. Residential IP ranges sit on spam blocklists by default; carrier-grade NAT makes inbound connections impossible. No box — ours or anyone’s — can fix that with software, and any product that claims otherwise is quietly routing your mail through its own cloud.
So DesertBox tells you the truth instead. During setup, the built-in doctor probes your line and hands you a report card:
Static IP, port 25 open, reverse DNS you control (a business line, or the box living on your own colo/VPS). The box talks to the world with no intermediary at all. This is the full promise, unmediated.
Inbound mail usually works; outbound from your IP will land in spam folders no matter what the software does. Fix: relay outbound through a smarthost you choose and pay for — your ISP’s relay or any relay account. Two lines of config, swappable any day, and DesertBox is not in the loop. Your mail archive still never leaves your house. Smarthost setup →
Behind carrier-grade NAT nothing can reach your box from outside. Fix: rent the cheapest VPS you can find (a few euros a month, any provider), point MX at it, and run a tunnel from the box out to it. The VPS forwards raw connections down the tunnel; the mail — and the TLS that protects it — still terminates in your house. You own both ends and can swap the VPS in an afternoon.
We could have sold you a relay subscription and called it a cloud. That would put a company back inside your mail path — the exact thing this product exists to remove. The report card tells you which line you have; the escape hatches are documented and belong to you.
Get it
The box & the flashable image — coming soon
An SD-card image for Raspberry Pi–class boards: flash, plug in, open
http://desertbox.local, and a setup wizard walks you through domain,
DNS records and the doctor report card. No terminal required.
Today: run the same server yourself
The box runs the exact server this site distributes. Any Linux machine, Mac, or Raspberry Pi works — pick your platform on the home page and you are one command away. Full walk-through and config reference: the docs.
Own your email for the electricity cost of a doorbell.
— the whole idea