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Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#181

Post by havetocharge »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #168
semanticist wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is at a level before 'mark as junk', where a mail provider will refuse to deliver your message at all - or potentially even refuse to accept it. The earlier the mail providers can detect/block spam the less resources they have to dedicate to storing and transmitting the spam.

Ah, so cost is the reason why the won't let the email through at all… All those people who mistakenly think email is free… (even gmail is not free: you pay for it by letting them spy on you and sending you targeted ads).

Heh. You might be overestimating your own importance.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#182

Post by mrbill »

I've been doing so for years. Having spent almost a decade in the ISP industry, I don't trust other providers for anything but transit.

I have a 50/10 connection from Comcast Business with five static IPs. One of those hosts what used to be a colo box with an ISP in Austin (I'd worked for them years ago, and had a services-for-colo agreement that lasted until an ownership change).

For about five years now I've had no problems sending or receiving mail; just keep a common-sense best practices configuration and do regular checks to make sure that you're not relaying/sending spam and aren't on any RBLs. "Nux"'s comment is a good list.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#183

Post by systemfreund »

quickben wrote: post #178
a3n wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What replaces email?

For most of the people I interact with, and most of the usecases: Viber

i consider viber legacy technology because of its reliance on a centralized system and which will stop working as soon as vc money runs out

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#184

Post by mrbill »

dsr_ wrote: post #113
TheMog wrote: post #29

I've been running my own MTA for about 15 years now, so it's definitely possible without spending the majority of one's waking hours to do so. Even when I switched mail server IPs twice over the last few years I didn't run into the issues you ran into. A large part of it depends on where you run it - if you, say, run it on your home Internet connection that's usually an immediate strike against you because of the ins…

I've been running my own mail server off of a residential connection since 1998, so... 18 years. I do pay for a static IP, and I switched ISPs away from Comcast (who had inherited me as a customer) when they abruptly started to filter inbound port 25 and claimed I had a malware infestation. For years it was qmail, but when I wanted to use SMTP/SSL as much as possible, switching to Postfix was easier than maintaining…

FYI they don't filter inbound OR outbound port 25 if you're a Comcast Business customer; in fact I think the only ports they filter for business customers are a couple of ports only used for remote attacks on MS Windows boxes.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#185

Post by quonn »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #168
semanticist wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is at a level before 'mark as junk', where a mail provider will refuse to deliver your message at all - or potentially even refuse to accept it. The earlier the mail providers can detect/block spam the less resources they have to dedicate to storing and transmitting the spam.

Ah, so cost is the reason why the won't let the email through at all… All those people who mistakenly think email is free… (even gmail is not free: you pay for it by letting them spy on you and sending you targeted ads).

Most people in fact know this and assume they are being tracked everywhere and they also assume that the service providers (Google, Facebook) can read everything.

The problem is not that alternatives are too expensive, but that there are no good alternatives. I would be glad to pay $5/month to Google to get an ad-free version.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#186

Post by joosters »

Nux wrote: post #59

It's absolutely possible to run an email server in 2016 and I encourage anyone capable to do so! Email is one of the bastions of the decentralised Internet and we should hang on to it. Every day more and more people are moving to Gmail/Hotmail/Outlook and while I do understand the reasons, it also puts more and more power into the hands of these providers and the little guy (us) gets more screwed (like marked as junk…

Thank you for mentioning https://www.mail-tester.com/ - I wish I knew this site existed back when I was setting up my mail server. I struggled setting up SPF and DKIM, having a site that validates your config is very helpful.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#187

Post by mgbmtl »

thomasjames wrote: post #115
Nux wrote: post #59

It's absolutely possible to run an email server in 2016 and I encourage anyone capable to do so! Email is one of the bastions of the decentralised Internet and we should hang on to it. Every day more and more people are moving to Gmail/Hotmail/Outlook and while I do understand the reasons, it also puts more and more power into the hands of these providers and the little guy (us) gets more screwed (like marked as junk…

I recently ran into issues with the PTR on a mail server and did the lazy/unsustainable move of just disabling IPv6. Wish I had found this post before!

If you can't control your PTR on IPv6, in postfix I recommend using: "smtp_address_preference = ipv4", instead of fully disabling IPv6.

This way you can still receive email from IPv6 servers.

I run an smtp server from home with a static IPv4 address (for which the ISP lets me configure the PTR), but their IPv6 is "beta" and they don't yet support delegation, which is rather frustrating, but different topic.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#188

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #161
soneil wrote: post #81

It's worth checking whether you're running IPv6. It does become very relevant. e.g., SPF records need to include it, it must also have a good rDNS, etc. In particular, I know gmail hold IPv6 to higher standards. Some things (e.g. rDNS) that we traditionally treat as 'should', gmail will treat as 'must' over IPv6 - it's being treated as a chance to drop a lot of legacy leeway. I do run my own MTA. It's not high-mainte…

> My best advice is to choose a reputable host. This sucks big time. We should be able to send email from fucking home , not beg an external, bigger guy to either do it for us (one's ISP, google…), or lend us a machine so we can do it from there (Amazon, OVH…). Email providing is so concentrated right now it is starting so show signs of network effects —just like more recent (anti)social networks. This is not right.

We should be able to send spam from home.

But if we can send email from random dynamic IP addresses, so can spammers.

And spammers do. I run an MTA (postfix) on a couple of Linodes and I get more hacky spam-wannabe traffic than I get actual mail.

Postfix is configured to kill it all, so I never see any of it. But the logs are spam carnage.

My domains are hardly famous, so if you're running a high profile site I can imagine the problem would be a lot worse.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#189

Post by jloughry »

vancan1ty wrote: post #135

Those of you who run your own email servers -- do any of you run it from a residential connection with dynamic ip address? Or do you pay extra for a static ip address/host using a VPS?

I've done it; personally, I pay the extra $5/month for static IP addresses.

Depending on your upstream provider, though, it ranges from difficult to impossible to get the reverse DNS for "your" static IP addresses set to something reasonable. Maybe for a business account they would do it...but for a home connection, forget it. Trouble tickets asking for reverse DNS updates will be ignored.

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