What is mail-box?

Mailbox is a self-hosted email client and management platform built on Next.js and Prisma. It sits between your Cloudflare-managed domain and your own users, automatically setting up mailboxes and routing rules so incoming email on your domain shows up inside a real-time dashboard rather than a traditional inbox. When someone sends an email to an address on your domain, Cloudflare's Email Routing service catches it, matches it against a Worker script, and forwards the raw message to a webhook inside the Mailbox application. The app parses that message, verifies the recipient, saves the email thread to a database, and the dashboard updates automatically for anyone viewing it, using React Query to refetch data. Sending outgoing email is handled separately, through your own SMTP settings configured in the environment file, since the Cloudflare integration only covers receiving. The codebase follows a strict four-layer structure: a repositories layer that only talks to the database through Prisma, a services layer that holds the actual business logic and authorization rules, a query layer that bridges the backend to React Query hooks, and a components and pages layer that is presentation only, with no direct database access allowed. Shared TypeScript types live in one central file, and every icon used in the app is registered in a central icon registry rather than imported ad hoc. Mailbox supports SQLite for quick local development, or PostgreSQL and MySQL through Docker for more production-like testing, and it can also connect to serverless Postgres providers like Neon or Supabase. It ships with a Docker setup for self-hosting and documented steps for deploying to Vercel. The project is licensed under the Business Source License.