Mail, calendar and drive are the reason to install Joinery. Everything else comes along for the ride.
Your address, your archive, your server.
Joinery is built around mail at a domain you control. Instead of using [email protected], you'll register yourname.com (or whatever), and you can make as many mailboxes as you want....free from censorship and control. Changing your address is painful exactly once, and then never again, because the address stops belonging to whoever runs the mail. Move providers, move servers, move continents and the address comes with you.
Ask Google for a Takeout archive and import the resulting backup straight into Joinery. Contacts come across as vCards, calendars as .ics. Nothing is left behind and nothing needs re-typing. You can keep your old account alive as long as you like while it happens with IMAP integration.
Outbound goes through an established mail provider — Mailgun, Amazon SES, or any SMTP smarthost you already trust — with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up during install. Your server holds the mail; the provider lends the sending reputation. Other providers are supported too, and the docs list them, but those three are the tested path we recommend (Mailgun provides 100 emails free per day).
What if you don't want the world to know where your email server lives? You can optionally run a small second server as your mail relay. It is a security and privacy feature:
There is a fast webmail client and native apps in development for phone and desktop. Threading, search, folders, filters, contacts, signatures, aliases — the ordinary things, working ordinarily. Spam filtering is in place and improving.
The things people actually use a calendar for, without a company reading the entries.
Stop sending your files to Google's servers.
Uploads are stored as ordinary files on disk. No content-addressed blob store, no database rows holding your documents hostage.
Desktop and mobile sync clients keep a folder in step with the server. The number one complaint about the alternative is sync that lies... a client reporting "up to date" over a partial transfer... so the desktop client is being developed very carefully.
Files placed at the Private protection level are encrypted with keys held by you, not the server, and stay encrypted through sync. The server stores encrypted files it cannot read, and nobody with access to the machine or its backups can read those files, even hackers. It also means that if you lose your keys and your recovery key, nobody — including us — can get them back. That is the tradeoff.
Files not at the Private level are stored unencrypted on your disk, readable by anyone with server access. That is you, on your own server, which for most people is the point.
Included in the same install.
One address book behind mail and calendar. vCard in, vCard out.
Registration, capacity, waiting lists, recurring schedules and surveys.
Publish availability and let people book time, on your own domain.
A model running on your hardware, not somebody's cloud. Encrypted content is architecturally blocked from leaving the server.
Products, subscriptions and memberships with 0% platform transaction fees.
Scheduled backups to your own bucket, one-click upgrades, multi-server management.
A full featured CMS for a public site or blog.
Encrypted secrets with the same key hierarchy as private files.
Here are our competitors.
| Google Workspace | Proton | Fastmail | Nextcloud | mailcow | Joinery | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it costs | $7–8.40 per person, every month | $9.99–12.99 a month; mail alone from $3.99 | $6 a month, per person | Free to self-host | Free to self-host | Free to self-host; business licence paid once |
| Who can read your data | Google, under its terms | Nobody at Proton | Fastmail staff, and a warrant | Only you, and hackers | Only you, and hackers | Only you, not even hackers |
| Encryption at rest | "Trust us" | Full; Proton cannot open it | "Trust us" | Optional module; the keys sit on the server | Encrypted on disk; the keys sit on the server | Full, optional, protected by passkeys |
| If it is hacked, can it send as you? | Yes, once an account is taken | Yes, once an account is taken | Yes, once an account is taken | No mail to send | Yes, the signing key sits on the box | No, at the most secure setting the signing key is encrypted, too |
| Who can lock you out | An automated system | Proton can suspend an account; there is an appeal form | Fastmail can suspend an account | Nobody | Nobody | Nobody |
| Mail included | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes, that is the whole product | Yes, the flagship feature |
| Plugins and themes anyone can create | Add-ons, reviewed and hosted by Google | No | No, but a documented API | Yes, over 400 apps in its store | No | Yes, documented plugin and theme APIs |
| How files are stored | Opaque | Encrypted blobs only you can open | files beside the mail | Real files | No file storage, just mail, calendar and contacts | Real files with an online drive app (client coming soon) |
| Getting out | Takeout archive, but they keep your address | Export tool, or IMAP through Bridge on a paid plan | IMAP, JMAP and standard exports, genuinely easy | Copy the data directory | Its own backup script | Click a button and download a standard zip file |
| Upgrades | Not your problem | Not your problem | Not your problem | Frequently somebody's evening | One script, and you watch it | One command, or one click with Server Manager |
| Hardware it needs | None | None | None | Varies | 6 GB of RAM before you start | A 1 GB virtual server |
No, not yet. You use the web apps and the native Joinery apps, and you move calendars and contacts in and out as .ics and vCard files. If pointing your phone’s built-in calendar at your own server is a hard requirement, Joinery is not there yet — and we would rather you know that now than after the migration.
Not today. Joinery does not serve IMAP to mail clients. You read your mail in the webmail client or the Joinery apps. If your workflow is built around a particular desktop client, wait for that support before switching.
Yes, because Joinery does not try to earn its own sending reputation from scratch. Outbound goes through Mailgun, Amazon SES or an SMTP smarthost of your choosing, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured during setup. Your server holds the mail; the provider handles the last hop.
Decent and improving, and not as good as Gmail’s. Gmail has a corpus nobody else can match. If flawless spam filtering matters more to you than ownership, that is a legitimate reason to stay where you are.
Your install keeps running. It does not check in with us, it does not need a license server, and it works air-gapped. The code is published and your data is in standard formats on your own disk. That is the whole reason to prefer software you run yourself.
Yes — PHP and PostgreSQL. It is a boring, well-understood stack that runs fast on cheap hardware and will still be maintainable in a decade. The database is where the credibility is: your data is in Postgres, queryable with tools you already have.
Free to self-host, on a server that belongs to you.