As the title reads, I really want to begin hosting my own email server again. I’m sick of the poor quality of the service providers out there. Damnit all I want/need is a reliable IMAP/SMTP provider. I spent 3 hours getting off of Hostinger and on to Zoho. I just hope Zoho won’t suck. It’s great for now but we’ll see.
Is the prevailing advice still not to bother with self-hosting email?
There’s no shortage of people who will tell you it’s okay to self host email… in fact, you’re probably not hearing all of them, because some will inevitably get routed to spam.
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Is the prevailing advice still not to bother with self-hosting email?
From someone who never stopped: YES.
99.95% spam, and no amount of filters and training can do as good a job as Gmail (as much as I hate and would like to get away from Gmail)
I want to turn it off so bad, but fomo, that one email from that one person I knew 25 years ago who only has that email address … fml.
You can get a mailprovider that allows custom domain names for very little money. I use Mailbox.org and it works fine. Also used Protonmail previously which also works.
Mailcow includes rspamd which learns spam using bayes analysis. Just move messages to the junk folder and it learns, after a month or so of training I get very very little actual spam, and no false positives.
I also use mailcow with rspamd and I have seen like 2 spam mails in 3 years. And even those were marked as suspicious.
Combined with aliases I don’t really have to bother with spam or leaked addresses anymore.
What are you doing to get spam? Somehow simple RBL check + pipelining block most of it for me.
Yeah + spamassassin, I have probably two or three spam mails a YEAR that end up in my inbox.
Well, the address is over 20 years old… it’s on many, MANY lists, lol.
I want to turn it off so bad, but fomo, that one email from that one person I knew 25 years ago who only has that email address … fml.
If you want to turn it off, can’t you just use some free service to forward messages to your new address?
I actually had it running that way for a while but a couple/few/don’t remember years ago Google started rejecting all the mail :-(
99.95% spam
lol may I ask what you have to do to get that amount of spam? I at most get one spam mail per month to my server and I have some addresses listed as contact information on my public websites.
Well, the address is over 20 years old… it’s on many, MANY lists, lol.
Honestly, if you want it, go for it. It’s a good learning experience!
I’ve been running postfix+dovecot for 10 years now and I’ve had very very few issues, I wouldn’t know it’s not Gmail or some other big provider. Kinda pain to set it up, especially if your provider hands you an IP that’s been used for spam previously, but it’s been smooth sailing since for me. Mails always delivered, DKIM/DMARC and everything.
Here’s a helpful site to test deliverability: https://www.mail-tester.com/
Mine scores 10/10
E: Also, surprisingly zero spam despite my addresses being quite public.
Maybe I’ll try it with my throwaway domain, fugzied.com. I did host my own email 8 years ago. I can imagine the landscape has changed.
Hi, email self hoster here, though with a unique circumstance. Self hosting email is fine given you know what you’re doing or have a unique circumstance like I do, I run my own ASN (internet thing allowing you to directly connect with other internet networks like your ISPs) and you can obtain your own IP addresses that you control yourself, meaning you lose the issue of ISPs giving you crap IPs, or your hosting provider being blacklisted because of someone else. I never get sent to spam as a result. Self hosting email is a doable thing, you just need more control over whatever IPs you use than most people will have at home
So self hosting yes, but not for the average person with a residential ISP IP address.
Do you own IPv4 address space as individual? I do not think it will happen in his era. Just pick ISP which provides internet services to businesses only (probably as colo), so you IP will not get listed as “residential” and start building up reputation. Secondary MX on cheap VPS is fine.
I have self-hosted my own emails many times. Up to having three SMTP servers with failsafe option at DNS.
It’s super nice, but I would never self-host SMTP again. It’s a nightmare. I had to email or open a ticket at most ISPs despite my clean IPs. Most ISPs simply blacklist all IPs unless they are major email providers already.
My advice is go for it but let SMTP be handled by who will deal with these frustrations. MXroute is a great choice and it’s cheap.
My experience with hosting mail was very good. I host my mail using Mailu, which is just a docker compose file and premade scripts for the usual mail stack software (Postfix, Dovecot, Nginx etc.). I hosy it on my home network using a raspberry pi. I score 9.8 on mail tester and my mail rarely ever lands in spam.
In total I spent maybe 3 hours setting everything up including my domain and 2 hours debugging issues. I honestly recommend self hosting mail.
From a different Lemmy post I wrote a month ago:
I also host my own mail and there’s been little issues.
Microsoft is a pain in the ass if you’re in an IP space they don’t like like DigitalOcean. Which is ironic because they have the worst spam filter by far in the industry.
If you want to get through to everyone you will have to:
- Use a “good” TLD ( not .to, not .xyz, …)
- Don’t use cloud platforms that are regularily used for spam (mostly DigitalOcean)
- Use SPF
- Use DMARC
- Use DKIM
- Use a PTR record
- Don’t make an open relay by accident
- Use proper ports and certificates
- Register an abuse account at the big players (Google, Microsoft, …)
- Don’t use an dynamic IP
- Keep it up to date
- Minimize downtime
I can’t recommend mailcow enough, it makes setting up a mail server a breeze.
https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized
Use the MXToolbox to verify your server(s).
I have used mailcow as well for the past few years and it’s been fantastic.
Self host with mail-in-a-box
I’ve been running this on a Linode box for a number of years now and it’s been an amazingly easy experience.
Is the prevailing advice still not to bother with self-hosting email?
Unfortunately, yes. Here’s a fantastic blog post from someone who gave up on self-hosting last year due to the vast number of problems with self-hosting. The post also does a great job at pointing out why the death of self-hosting email is so bad in general, but still regrettably concludes that it isn’t worth it in any scenario right now.
I’m hosting my own email for several years now with https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest/ which supports all the useful things like SPF, fail2ban, postgrey, sieve, spamassassin. I’m not hosting at home, I rented a server with a hoster which I also use for other services.
It’s pretty unremarkable, mostly it just works. I do have more spam than with gmail because I have to feed all spam to spamassassin myself. I also had one issue with larger attachments where I had to modify the maximum size, but that was also pretty easy using https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest/config/environment/#postfix_message_size_limit
I recently modified my setup to support DMARC and I occassionally check if I can improve something via https://mxtoolbox.com/. But other than that I never had any issues, never looked back.
I’m sure that’s the prevailing advice… I’ve been self-hosting mine for a while now. It’s been lovely. 0 issues outside of some “special” users… Who also are family… So they’re just “special” anyway.
Been very hands off for me. And when shit goes “wrong” (I can think of 2 major incidents in the past couple years?)… I get the opportunity to actually fix it… rather than sitting on my thumbs crying that my emails don’t work.
I can’t think of any major incidents with Gmail since I opened my account in 2005.
And yet I get emails regularly about outages from Google. I used to be hosted on a grandfathered google workspaces. For some reason they refuse to unsubscribe me from the admin emails. This month has had 6 emails on 2 different issues(290173792 and 290269440). This year… 63 emails.
There’s definitely outages galore… and I’ve had several affect me/my users in different ways. They usually clear up pretty quick… but to say none… I can’t agree.
It’s quite likely that you think it hasn’t affected you, but an outage occurred for you overnight or during a time you didn’t really notice.
If you want a reliable provider try Fastmail. Used them for years, very rare outages. I have my local postfix set to relay to them for locally sent mail. Great web UI.
Fastmail is king.
I tried and really had problems with mail servers sending my mails straight to spam even with DKIM, DMARC, etc. I ended up using the free mail service that comes with my domain.
I host my own email on uberspace. It’s a vps where you pay what you think is appropriate per month. You can install whatever you want on the vps, but they have a very good tutorial page on how to set up services. Email among them. I set it up a couple of years ago and it just works. Email is kind of pre set up as well, so should be easy enough to get working. You can enable the spam filter as well. You can also set up alias emails for every account you open up with some other provider. I name them after that provider, for example: ebay@my-domain.com
That way I always know where the spam is coming from and just delete the alias address if necessary.
