Yeah, all you need is a business-class Internet connection (residential Internet services block mail services), and a server.
I run my own servers both onsite and in the cloud. I have my only little personal "corporate" network.
Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
211–220 of 314 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#212It'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…
>use Postfix or Exim
Better yet, opensmtpd.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#213"gmail and hotmail both mark my mails as spam."
And they will continue to do so for as long as it takes for your mail server to earn a positive reputation. I recently had this problem with gmail after moving mail servers. there's really nobody that you can contact, gmail doesn't whitelist mail servers.
You're going to run into this problem with proofpoint, barracuda, postini, etc...
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would suggest running OpenSMTPD over any of the alternatives, it's much easier to configure and should be/remain secure as it comes from the OpenBSD people (the audit from Qualys attests to that).
Yeah I'll have to disagree here. I beat my head against this horribly documented MTA just trying to get virtual users to work with a relay host. I gave up after three days of slitting my wrists trying to get it to work. It's horribly documented, getting help out of the obsd folks is like getting blood from a turnip, but if it works for you great! But I would never agree it's easier to configure or has better document…
I'm genuinely curious here since opensmtpd has been by far the easiest to configure MTA I've ever seen. What problem(s) did you have? Virtual users through a relay host is literally one simple line:
accept for domain "example.com" virtual relay via relay.example.com
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Email is one of the bastions of the decentralised Internet and we should hang on to it. This. I hope someone will eventually create an "E-mail server in a box" package for Ubuntu LTS, so that more people can run their own E-mail. I'm not saying it has to be super-easy for everyone, just that it should avoid unnecessary chore work (like configuring postfix to always use TLS, or plugging postgrey into postfix).
There is something you can do to install that : https://mailinabox.email/
a recommendation for mailinabox, I've been using it for about 6 months, very nice
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I tried to think of network effects in email and could not think of any. To what do you refer?
I am referring to how the big players (Google with Gmail, Microsoft with Hotmail, and I suspect many others) tend to flag as spam, or even outright reject your email, as soon as the IP comes from a "little player", such as residential IP, or even virtual private hosting IPs.
Sending an email to a user of such networks has become difficult —at least, more difficult than it should be. Unless of course you come from one of those huge networks. And of course, the users themselves don't see any problem with this: they assume that if you can't send an email to them, the problem must be on your end —not, say, Gmail's spam filter.
On the other hand, if everyone had a little box that send email directly from home, nobody would ever dare to block them.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#217I followed Ars Technica's article years ago, and modulo a few minor alterations, their instructions seemed to have worked pretty well. I will note that I mostly receive, rather than send email, but I've had no problems I'm aware of.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when they abruptly started to filter inbound port 25 Didn't you mean "outbound"?
No, I didn't.
I don't understand. Many providers block the outbound 25 port because of their distrust of the infected computers of their end losers. What could possibly be their rationale for blocking the inbound 25 port?
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Moreover, Viber's adoption is highly concentrated in some specific countries so, depending on where your friends are based, it might not be a viable solution.
Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?
#220I have been running my own email server on a VPS running slackware and sendmail for over 3.5 years now and have not had any trouble sending mail.