Mail, calendar and drive are the reason to install Joinery. Everything else comes along for the ride.
Your address, your archive, your server — with the delivery problem solved properly rather than wished away.
Joinery is built around mail at a domain you control. That is the reframe worth internalising: 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 — the address comes with you.
Ask Google for a Takeout archive and import the resulting mbox straight into Joinery. Contacts come across as vCards, calendars as .ics. Nothing is left behind and nothing needs re-typing. Import runs in the background with progress you can watch, and you can keep your old account alive as long as you like while it happens.
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 battle-tested path we recommend.
You can optionally run a small second instance as your mail relay. It is a security and privacy feature, not a deliverability trick, so here is precisely what it does:
There is a fast webmail client and native apps for phone and desktop. Threading, search, folders, filters, contacts, signatures, aliases — the ordinary things, working ordinarily. Spam filtering is in place and improving; it is not yet as good as Gmail’s, and we would rather say that than let you discover it.
Joinery does not currently serve IMAP, so third-party mail clients cannot connect to it yet. If your workflow depends on a specific desktop client, this is the honest blocker to know about before you switch.
The things people actually use a calendar for, without a company reading the entries.
What it does not do yet: CalDAV. You cannot point a phone’s built-in calendar app at Joinery today. You use the web calendar or the Joinery apps, and you move calendars in and out as .ics files. It is on the list; it is not shipped, so we do not claim it.
Files that are files, in a directory you can look at with ls.
Uploads are stored as ordinary files on disk. No content-addressed blob store, no database rows holding your documents hostage. Whatever else goes wrong, you can always walk the directory and take your files.
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 developed against a continuous kill-and-chaos soak rig: the process is killed mid-write, repeatedly, at random, and a no-loss oracle checks afterwards that nothing was lost or silently corrupted.
It is still pre-release. Use it, tell us what breaks, and keep a backup like you would with anything at this stage.
Files placed at the Private protection level are encrypted with keys held by you, not the server, and stay encrypted through sync. Precisely what that means: the server stores ciphertext it cannot read, and nobody with access to the machine or its backups can read those files. It also means that if you lose your keys and your recovery key, nobody — including us — can get them back. That is the actual trade, stated in full.
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.
Phone photo backup, thumbnails, and a browsing view. Your family’s pictures land on your hardware and stay there.
Included in the same install, off unless you want it.
One address book behind mail and calendar. vCard in, vCard out.
Registration, capacity, waiting lists, recurring schedules and custom questions.
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 through it — a rule in the code, not a promise in a policy.
Products, subscriptions and memberships with 0% platform transaction fees.
Scheduled backups to your own bucket, one-click upgrades, multi-server management.
A CMS for a public site on the same install, if you want one.
Encrypted secrets with the same key hierarchy as private files.
On the axes that actually decide this, including the ones where we come off worse.
| Google Workspace | Nextcloud | Joinery | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who can read your data | Google, under its terms | You | You — and private files not even the server |
| Who can lock you out | An automated system | Nobody | Nobody |
| How files are stored | Opaque | Real files | Real files plus a Postgres database |
| Sync honesty | Reliable | Long-standing complaints | Chaos-soaked with a no-loss oracle — pre-release |
| Upgrades | Not your problem | Frequently somebody's evening | One command, or one click with Server Manager |
| Hardware it needs | None | Varies | A 2 GB VPS is the stated minimum |
| Getting out | Takeout archive | Copy the data directory | Copy a folder, take a pg_dump |
| Mail included | Yes | No | Yes — the flagship |
| CalDAV / IMAP for other clients | Yes | Yes (CalDAV) | Not yet |
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.
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