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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?

#251

Post by merb »

voltagex_ wrote: post #238
matthewking wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately SES servers seem to be regularly blacklisted. A quick google confirms. I've been using SES for 3-4 months now and had a few hard bounces with specific mention to the IP being banned.

The last spam that got through GMail's filter was from amazonses.com. It wasn't clear how to report it back to Amazon.

actually I never had blacklisting problems on aws ses. My guess would be that the big providers ignoring the blaklists for themself. I mean even Google sometimes gets on a blacklist or Microsoft on still no email happened to be in Spam filter.

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

#252

Post by pmontra »

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 uninstalled Viber when the last friend still using it started using WhatsApp.

Btw, everybody still has email and SMS like in the 90s. For me SMS are a fallback when IM won't work for a given person; email is my primary mean of communication for business. Furthermore I can archive and search email much more than IMs.

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

#253

Post by galori »

If you look at the aggregate of the comments here, I think you get the idea. Its possible, but you have to constantly work at keeping it going with reputation, whitelisting, etc. and you'll never get to 100% deliverability ingoing or outgoing. Probably more like 70%-80%.

The big guys whitelist each other.

There are (very expensive) services for the medium guys, such as [Return Path](https://returnpath.com/) , that help you keep good relationship with the various ISPs. With many ISP's they even have a very specific whitelisting deal where you literally pay to be whitelisted...I think thats mostly the second tier ones like AOL, Comcast, Yahoo. Gmail for example doesn't play ball with that - but they will whitelist you if you follow all the rules and have a good reputation, which someone like Return Path can help with.

Is the situation shady? Yes. But it rose out of a need for dealing with a real problem (spam), which you have to admit has gotten under control over the last 10 years.

Bottom lime, I would use a 3rd party service.

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

#254

Post by pmlnr »

Of course it is. I've been running my for ages; the current setup is postfix, dovecot, dspam, opendkim, opendmarc. The last IP change was ~1 years ago, the last domain change is ~1 month, no issues.

A long while ago, when I wasn't running the mail server in lxc, and it was a server which also hosted web frontends, I got it "hacked" once; a rouge perl script sent 10s of thousands of emails within an hours. Thankfully, this was in ~2007, so removing the node from blacklists wasn't impossible.

Anyway: add dmarc, and make sure you have TLS to send/receive. This latter is probably the most important bit.

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

#255

Post by lazyjones »

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…

It's also recommended to not have any "vacation" autoreply mails - you will get spam with blacklist's honeypot email addresses as apparent sender and end up on blacklists.

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

#256

Post by e12e »

jeffmould wrote: post #7

See this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12107688

In particular this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12109727

about some hard-to-find tools that help with Microsoft mail (Live.com / outlook.com / hotmail.com etc). There may have been some similar strange link for Gmail - i only have access to my phone right now, so I can't check my notes.

I believe that was the thing I was missing from my setup (and it was frustrating to debug as mail simply disappeared).

Between a (for now) cacert-certificate (which I think is treated as "self-signed" for most purposes) and SPF - both Google and MS appear to accept my mail. I've turned off ipv6 - if you want it, it might take some extra work.

I'm planning to move to opensmtp "when I have time" and maybe dbmail for the store - now I'm on exim and dovecot.

I get little spam - I do have greylisting set up. What I get is generally to emails leaked in the linked-in and Adobe attacks. I should change those addresses, and reject/black hole the old ones. But for now it's manageable - and is filtered out in my "misc" folder by simple address-basrd filtering (exim .forward file)

(I generally give each site a different mail, se eg my hn profile).

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

#257

Post by philtar »

robertely wrote: post #234
teddyh wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bounce? No. The servers trying to send mail to your server will retry for up to, typically, four or five days, before they bounce the mail back to the sender. Mail was written to be resilient against network downtime.

That's why you soft bounce. It tells the sender that you can't receive the email _at this time_.

Pretty sure you can't do anything when you're not connected to the internet.

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

#258

Post by Fnordje »

ashitlerferad wrote: post #248
huskyr wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because your mail will end up at Google anyway? Even if you don't use Gmail, all your friends do.

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...

PGP solves that problem, and yours. Running your own MTA comes at a price. You need a domain, certificates, your ISP needs to not block port 25, possibility of abuse (so separate IP, server, domain, certificates), server which costs money needs to be maintained and draws power and requires space, and another responsibility to maintain. Disclaimer: It is possible containers mitigate some of the above problems. It is also a legacy protocol. Just run PGP on top of it and use any free provider out there. If you don't use that you can assume Google's oversight (the NSA) sees your mail.

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

#259

Post by benev »

Kequc wrote: post #195
simon_acca wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you know Docker, this is pretty much what you are asking: https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver . I use it in combination with the rainloop webmail client: https://github.com/jprjr/docker-rainloop . Everything is configured with a single docker-compose, read about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11748036

What is it if anything that happens if my internet cuts out at my home, should I instead use some sort of hosting provider for my mail server?

It's usually a bad idea to run email from a home internet connection because it massively increases the chances of your mail being marked as spam. The hardest part of running a mail server is making sure your mail gets through spam filters, and the IP is critical to this.
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