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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?

#261

Post by gambiting »

dasil003 wrote: post #247
ommunist wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How on Earth MacMini with 8GB of RAM and i7 CPU is underpowered for the use? It is underpowered in only one way - energy consumption is so low that there are even server farms built on MacMinis, and colocation services targeting this brave little server.

Not for the use, for the price.

You get a custom operating system that literally no one else offers. It is a bit hard to put a price on that, but to me, it's absolutely worth the money they ask for the mini. I would even risk saying it's very cheap for what it offers.

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

#262

Post by huskyr »

Fnordje wrote: post #258
ashitlerferad wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I would like to agree with you (it sure is much easier than running a mail server), but isn't the problem that your friends also need to use PGP?

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

#263

Post by zaxomi »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #218
dsr_ wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Incompetence. At least that was the reason why my ISP at the time blocked both outbound and inbound port 25. It took a couple of weeks to convince them that they where wrong and open for inbound again.

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

#264

Post by ommunist »

dasil003 wrote: post #247
ommunist wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How on Earth MacMini with 8GB of RAM and i7 CPU is underpowered for the use? It is underpowered in only one way - energy consumption is so low that there are even server farms built on MacMinis, and colocation services targeting this brave little server.

Not for the use, for the price.

Like the others noted here - it is well worth the price, since it saves a lot of time for admin, is easy to use and provides extra value for money.

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

#265

Post by syshum »

lucb1e wrote: post #57
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…

> if you, say, run it on your home Internet connection that's usually an immediate strike against you While true, some IP addresses were not previously used, either by home connections or by anyone, so you may be in luck there. There seems to be a correlation with my latest IP switch (three years ago or so) and less mail server trouble. Most services are also smart enough to learn to trust IP addresses after a little…

Some ISP turn over their Residential IP Blocks to Blacklist providers to add automatically to the blacklists.

ISP state in their TOS you are not to run "servers" from your home connection, as such they simply blacklist all Residential IP;s from the start, because if you are running a email server on a Residential Connection it is either a Botnet, or you are violating the TOS of your plan.

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

#268

Post by lucb1e »

syshum wrote: post #265
lucb1e wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you, say, run it on your home Internet connection that's usually an immediate strike against you While true, some IP addresses were not previously used, either by home connections or by anyone, so you may be in luck there. There seems to be a correlation with my latest IP switch (three years ago or so) and less mail server trouble. Most services are also smart enough to learn to trust IP addresses after a little…

Some ISP turn over their Residential IP Blocks to Blacklist providers to add automatically to the blacklists. ISP state in their TOS you are not to run "servers" from your home connection, as such they simply blacklist all Residential IP;s from the start, because if you are running a email server on a Residential Connection it is either a Botnet, or you are violating the TOS of your plan.

> ISP state in their TOS you are not to run "servers" from your home connection

I don't know what evil ISP that is but running your own server is 1) encouraged by my ISP since forever (XS4ALL, the Netherlands) and 2) these days it's illegal to tell people not to run servers because of net neutrality laws.

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

#269

Post by lucb1e »

TheMog wrote: post #66
lucb1e wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you, say, run it on your home Internet connection that's usually an immediate strike against you While true, some IP addresses were not previously used, either by home connections or by anyone, so you may be in luck there. There seems to be a correlation with my latest IP switch (three years ago or so) and less mail server trouble. Most services are also smart enough to learn to trust IP addresses after a little…

Being able to use a previously unused IP address is usually a good thing, pity that there are so few of those left. ISPs definitely seem to have an impact as well, but some spamfilters at least used to automatically assign a negative score to anything originating from an IP block used by an ISP for domestic Internet connections.

Well, there's plenty of IPv6 around. My ISP gives out /48 blocks to all customers together with a single, static v4 address. The difference in number of public addresses is incredible.

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

#270

Post by Karlozkiller »

XorNot wrote: post #226
mozumder wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely an issue. The emails server is easy. The tedious part is the infrastructure setup.

The real problem is that the unencrypted nature of email makes most solutions non-starters. If end-to-end were the default, then you could imagine having a process whereby you ran a P2P service which kept your MX records pointed to a cluster of network members, all of whom agreed to act as your MX fallback if you went down and which collectively handled monitoring and distributing blacklist notifications.

You're implying that this is not advisable to do because any such fallback could snoop the data?

I'm sorry I'm not sure I quite understand what you say the problem is and how it relates to the unencrypted nature of email.

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