No, I use https://purelymail.com/ with my "own" domain. Happy with it so far (~2years?)
Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
191–200 of 209 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#192I run my own email. I have my own physical servers, that I built and tested myself, that I'm colocating. They handle both incoming and outgoing, and I've been doing it for so long that there is no previous reputation for the IP addresses I use. In spite of how vehemently some people, Reddit's /r/sysadmin, as an example, want you to NOT host your own and use issues like deliverability as reasons, it's really not hard…
So self-hosting is so easy and problem free, everyone is making up fiction about the problems, and yet in your very first "solution" you tell people to not self-host outbound email at all and to pay money to a third party to solve a lot of the hard parts for you? > 1) The primary issue brought up is deliverability. If you don't have a static IP, or you don't have control over your reverse DNS PTR, or the reputation o…
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Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#193After messing with POP3 and local mail clients (before Gmail was a thing) I decided that I wanted my emails in a Maildir, so I started to host them on Dovecot on the LAN, which made it easy to backup all my mail and move around. The local server would POP them from any (of multiple) services and serve them to clients that needed access. I would take my mailserver with me on travels and during moves (multiple countries) and use DDNS where necessary to access mails outside the home (currently using an old BananaPi as hardware has gotten smaller). I've had domains for decades as well, and started out receiving mail using services that came with the domain name registration. For sending I would use the ISP, later Gmail, but settled on MXroute which is very affordable and has good deliverability. I als started using it for MX, but after a few years decided that I really want to receive any and all mails sent to me, so for the past few years I have run Postfix (with a few failovers) with trimmings like SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc. This all works OK, and doesn't cost a lot.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
DO is probably the worst choice as they have one of the worst reputations for emitting trash... I drop do entirely and have done for a few years, nothing appears to come from there apart from trash though so I haven't noticed any problems there. Literally anyone else (even ovh these days) would be a better choice for delivery success.
I raise the asn of do a bit using the asn module for rspamd. Same goes for ips in rbls - score higher and take a complete picture score using multiple data points. There are legitimate systems on do and you never know the email you don’t get unless someone goes out of your way to send email another way. Personally I get more spam from gmail and outlook than digital ocean but obviously due to both of their sizes it pr…
Fair points, if I'm expecting an email though and don't get one I just check logs, which I do regularly anyway as often mail isn't delivered due to sender's provider incompetence (dkim is hard apparently) - but I guess it also depends if you're expecting mail from random people in which case you'd probably want to be a bit more lenient yeah.
Also re Gmail etc that is also true, but the difference there is it's limited to a couple whereas do also emits general abuse under the guise of "researchers" without identity or contact details etc - until they stop doing that they'll forever remain dropped entirely
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#195If anyone has any experience with Docker-Mailserver, please share. I'm exploring exiting Gmail. https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/edge/e...
been running it, works well. would recommend.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self-hosting email for over 20 years, I will say most of what you stated is either greatly exaggerated or grossly factually incorrect.
If you've self-hosted for that long you've avoided some problems I've mentioned by having long-running IPs and high trust scores. Go launch one today and you'll see. Since other people planning on starting today don't have a time machine, my advice applies. Plus I have as much experience between commercially and personally, and that is my take. The fact you couldn't give one single example should give people pause.
I have every confidence today, tomorrow 5 or 10 years from now I can do the same thing I've done every time I changed ISP's the past over 20 years and would have zero issues.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self-hosting email for over 20 years, I will say most of what you stated is either greatly exaggerated or grossly factually incorrect.
I'd say if enough people share this sentiment, then there are legitimate problems in self-hosting email. I don't think deliverability is a made up problem. Differing complexities can contribute to one person thinking it's easy, and another knowing it's not. Both perspectives may be entirely correct, but the devil is in the details. It seems more right to say that in general, self-hosting email is hard, rather than ac…
It takes some research and effort, the title of the post wasn't [do you host your own email and is it so easy a stock broker could do it].
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#198I just use FastMail with a custom domain. What's especially nice is that it lets you generate aliases that use the fastmail.com domain. Great for signing up for sites where I don't want them to be able to identify me. This wouldn't work if I was hosting my own email since you'd be able to link all my identities by matching the domain.
This is what I have switched too. I hosted for years, but due to deliverability issues and the work required to solved it - in addition to the great features like masked emails - I have switched.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#199I've been running my own email server for 20+ years. As of now, it costs well under 10€/month at Hetzner Cloud and it uses Debian jessie and whatever exim and dovecot that came with it. It also hosts my private git repositories in /var/git and a few other services and websites. One day, I will migrate it to Arch Linux.
Why Arch for this?? Debian is super reliable, Arch is fickle.
Because Arch is close to upstream.
OTOH, Debian exim config is the incarnation of evil.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#200Is it hard to run the basic software to have a self-hosted e-mail server? No.
Is it an utter PITA to have to chase a dragon's tail of stupid things that you don't control to have RELIABLE e-mail? Yes.
While running your own server is great for a hobby or as a learning exercise, 99%+ of people just want e-mail to WORK. And many of the big providers have an endless amount of hoops to jump through, and have little to no transparency or feedback when things aren't working.