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Comparison · Comms
mailcow vs Proton Bridge
A side-by-side editorial comparison of mailcow and Proton Bridge — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
mailcow vs Proton Bridge: at a glance
What is mailcow?
mailcow's release notes are almost entirely upstream security currency.
mailcow ships named seasonal releases with lettered revisions, and nearly every revision exists to pull in an upstream security fix - Redis, ClamAV, SOGo, Rspamd, nginx, unbound, Postfix. Revision B of the Mooly 2026 release updates Redis 7.4.10, ClamAV 1.4.6, and SOGo 5.12.10, adds minor web UI and nginx hardening, and removes a legacy DeltaChat sieve rule. The last release with genuinely new features was the March cut, which added forced 2FA, ACME DNS-01 challenges, and a passwordless autodiscover endpoint.
What is Proton Bridge?
Proton Bridge spends its first release in ten weeks on crashes, memory bounds and dead code
v3.26.0 is a maintenance cut. The user-visible items are a macOS 27 crash fix, bounded CPU and memory in the Gluon RFC parser, deletion of orphaned unencrypted vaults once keychain access returns, and a meta+W shortcut. The rest is internal: two unused subsystems removed from go-proton-api, two Go toolchain bumps, gomock swapped for uber-go/mock, and June and July vulnerability patches folded in.
mailcow vs Proton Bridge: editorial side-by-side
mailcow
5.0COMMS
mailcow's release notes are almost entirely upstream security currency.
◆ Current state
mailcow ships named seasonal releases with lettered revisions, and nearly every revision exists to pull in an upstream security fix - Redis, ClamAV, SOGo, Rspamd, nginx, unbound, Postfix. Revision B of the Mooly 2026 release updates Redis 7.4.10, ClamAV 1.4.6, and SOGo 5.12.10, adds minor web UI and nginx hardening, and removes a legacy DeltaChat sieve rule. The last release with genuinely new features was the March cut, which added forced 2FA, ACME DNS-01 challenges, and a passwordless autodiscover endpoint.
◆ Where it's heading
For a self-hosted mail stack that bundles a dozen upstream components, keeping current with their CVEs is the product, and mailcow has organized its release cadence around exactly that. The pattern is consistent: a named release with some feature content every few months, then lettered revisions that are pure security currency plus small web UI escaping and validation fixes. The web interface is where mailcow's own code gets hardened - HTML escaping in quarantine views and sieve editors recurs across several revisions.
◆ Prediction
Expect the next entry to be another lettered revision carrying upstream updates, with the next named release likely bundling whatever feature work has accumulated since March.
Proton Bridge
2.5COMMS
Proton Bridge spends its first release in ten weeks on crashes, memory bounds and dead code
◆ Current state
v3.26.0 is a maintenance cut. The user-visible items are a macOS 27 crash fix, bounded CPU and memory in the Gluon RFC parser, deletion of orphaned unencrypted vaults once keychain access returns, and a meta+W shortcut. The rest is internal: two unused subsystems removed from go-proton-api, two Go toolchain bumps, gomock swapped for uber-go/mock, and June and July vulnerability patches folded in.
◆ Where it's heading
Releases arrive in long gaps — ten weeks since v3.25.0 — and each one bundles a quarter of dependency hygiene with a handful of IMAP correctness fixes. The recurring theme is RFC 3501 conformance and resource bounds in the mail parser rather than new capability, which is what a local IMAP shim for an encrypted mailbox is supposed to look like.
◆ Prediction
Given the pattern of shipping OS-compatibility fixes shortly after a macOS release, the next cut is likely another maintenance bundle timed to whatever the current macOS version breaks.
Alternatives to mailcow and Proton Bridge
Other Comms products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either mailcow or Proton Bridge.
Stalwart
Stalwart is chasing mail RFCs and its own storage layer at the same time
Mux
Every manual control Mux ships now arrives with a Robots workflow that does it for you
Netcore Cloud
Netcore's feed remains a demand-generation channel; ten entries, zero product releases.
Openfire
Openfire keeps its XMPP server current without changing what it is.
Rspamd
Rspamd closed a file-read hole any TCP client could reach, and taught the PDF parser to read fonts.
See all mailcow alternatives → · See all Proton Bridge alternatives →
Recent activity from mailcow and Proton Bridge
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1d agomailcow🏖️🐮 Mooly 2026 | Postfix 3.10.12, Rspamd 4.1.0 & Nginx 1.30.3 - Revision B
- 1d agoProton BridgeBridge 3.26.0: macOS 27 crash fix and bounded RFC parser resources
- 20d agomailcow🏖️🐮 Mooly 2026 | Postfix 3.10.12, Rspamd 4.1.0 & Nginx 1.30.3 - Revision A
- 1mo agomailcow🏖️🐮 Mooly 2026 | Postfix 3.10.12, Rspamd 4.1.0 & Nginx 1.30.3
- 2mo agoProton BridgeBridge 3.25.0: IMAP and sync fixes bundled with dependency updates
- 2mo agomailcowThird May revision: unbound CVE and nginx 1.30.2
- 3mo agomailcowSecond May revision: quarantine table HTML escaping
- 3mo agomailcowSOGo 5.12.8 covering four upstream security issues
- 3mo agoProton BridgeBridge 3.24.2 patch with a single-line note
- 4mo agoProton BridgeBridge 3.24.1 patch with a single-line note
- 4mo agoProton BridgeBridge 3.24.0 Nescio feature cut
- 4mo agoProton BridgeBridge 3.23.1 patch on the Margit line
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between mailcow and Proton Bridge?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. mailcow is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 vs 2.5), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is mailcow better than Proton Bridge?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. mailcow is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 vs 2.5), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Comms products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to mailcow?
Top mailcow alternatives in Comms are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "mailcow alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/mailcow for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Proton Bridge?
Top Proton Bridge alternatives in Comms are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Proton Bridge alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/proton-bridge for the full list with editorial commentary on each.