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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?

#291

Some ISP don't allow SMTP at all. FWIW, if you are hosting on Amazon for example, you can't run mail server on port 25 from an EC2 until you submit a support ticket.

True, but this is a small price to pay to setup a mail server in EC2. My reverse DNS request was answered in 48 hours. It took me far longer than that to configure the server. Most spammers won't bother with rdns, dkim, and spf, which is why you should. It's at least a first level signal that you intend to run a clean mail server and that others should trust you.

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

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. You might be overestimating your own importance.

Huh? What makes you say that? This is not about me, this is about everyone getting spied on, and about anyone wanting to keep emails decentralised —which by the way has some import for everyone, not just computer geeks.

I don't buy into the whole 'everyone is getting spied on'. While the minority of individuals have valuable information, everything about the masses is completely predictable and mundane. There is nothing interesting about an average person, their lives are identical to others and there is no point in spying to get the information already known.

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

#293

Some ISP don't allow SMTP at all. FWIW, if you are hosting on Amazon for example, you can't run mail server on port 25 from an EC2 until you submit a support ticket.

I find this a bit of an odd claim, since I have a mailserver running on port 25 on EC2 right now, without a support ticket, and have no problems.

Correct and I should have been more careful.

AWS throttle port 25. So for us to use that host as a relay server, we wouldn't be able to because of the throttle.

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/ec2-p...

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

#294
post #31

Been running it for over 15 years. No SPF. No dkim. Never had complaints, though threads like these have me worried.

You and me both. I think the risks are overplayed, but at the same time it's probably about time to join the future with SPF/DKIM/DMARC.

For that, I've been looking into freeposte.io, so I can hop onto the container-train at the same time.

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

#295
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a similar thing 2 years ago and chose Fastmail. Their web-app is best of breed ex google -- unfortunately, the honest truth is nothing is as good as gmail web + gmail apps + google cal. Fastmail does have more issues -- lack of fit and finish, their web app is sometimes buggy, their spam detection is buggy, it's imap, the lack of gmail style conversations being the fundamental unit of work in the app shines thr…

I love fastmail. Really I do not like gmail style conversations so I prefer fastmail over gmail.

I too love the FastMail web interface. It rocks! On Android, unfortunately, FastMail comes up short. I have yet to find a satisfactory solution

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

#296
I had been running mail servers for a few years but didn't bother with my own until about 12 years ago. Back then all I needed was an old box in a cupboard, static IP, mx record and not have an open relay. As you have discovered things have changed a lot.

I have seen some people do cool things with qmail but unless you have a long history with it I think you are better off with postfix. Qmail requires a lot of patches to catch up with the way things are done these days.

It sounds like you have done all the best practice things. A valid PTR record, valid ssl certificate, SPF, DKIM, DMARC. You generally can't host from home anymore because your IP will likely be blacklisted so grab a vps and check your IP is clean. You will want to add ridiculous rate limiting so you don't get sin binned when someone mails to a group. Adding your IP to dnswl probably does not hurt.

Even with you doing everything else right it won't get you instant acceptance somewhere like hotmail. You are going to have to establish a reputation over time with them. Get an email address at all the free services, send emails, make as not spam, check their help websites. View full source of received emails if they let you to see what headers their mail system attached to your messages.

And ofcourse protect your reputation. If you need to send legitimate bulk email use someone like mailchimp and let them deal with any damage.

And this is only the outgoing part. You still have to worry about incoming emails, submission, retrieval, filtering etc.

I do email setups for websites where I need to ensure spam filter free communication with clients and most business mail system I encounter don't seem to bother with half the stuff I do. They will deliver all their emails plain text with no spf or dkim. And they will do brain dead things like having fake blackhole mx records as some sort of homeopathic spam remedy. And they all seem to stay in business so perhaps we just overthink this stuff sometimes.

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

#297
post #133
post #88

One little trick that I rarely see mentioned for working around the negative or neutral reputation your MTA's IP might have is that you can route your outgoing emails through another MTA that has a higher reputation. For example route them through smtp.gmail.com (or for other options see https://support.google.com/a/answer/176600?hl=en ). It does not mean you have to use Gmail. It does not mean you have to change you…

Sending email this way is typically known as smart hosting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_host . It's a pretty reliable way of sending out email if your IP has a less than perfect reputation. In this instance less than perfect could be something completely out of your hands. Are you an EC2 user, well there is a black list for those IP's. Are you on a residential connection or a dynamic IP... there is a black li…

I didn't realize this had an actual term.

I've smart-hosted using postfix, direct for incoming and gmail/sendgrid/mandrill (before it was neutered by mail chimp) for outgoing.

It was fairly cost effective - generous free tier (upto 12k emails) for outgoing, and a small vps to host postfix (~$5/month).

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

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? What makes you say that? This is not about me, this is about everyone getting spied on, and about anyone wanting to keep emails decentralised —which by the way has some import for everyone, not just computer geeks.

I don't buy into the whole 'everyone is getting spied on'. While the minority of individuals have valuable information, everything about the masses is completely predictable and mundane. There is nothing interesting about an average person, their lives are identical to others and there is no point in spying to get the information already known.

> I don't buy into the whole 'everyone is getting spied on'.

They are. At least the NSA is doing it at a global scale —thanks Mr Snowden for turning this "conspiracy theory" into an established fact.

> There is nothing interesting about an average person

Until there is. At that point, all they have to do is a nice search query into their ludicrously deep archive, so they can dig up whatever wasn't exactly average about that particular person. There has to be a trigger of course, but if you set one off, you'll be put on a watch list for higher scrutiny —at best.

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

#299
I'm running my own mail server for a couple of years now. I'm using postfix and dovecot. I have SPF and DKIM set up and I'm using spamassassin, roundcube.

Setting up a working mail server is one of the biggest challenges because so many components are involved these days and you need to make them play perfectly together. I'm against using out of the box VM images / installers because then you don't understand whats going on under the hood. Mail servers are these kinds of beasts I would suggest to understand as best as possible before letting it loose on the world.

Its like with security. There is no "Just press this button/Just install this software and you are secure" solution - There is no easy and convenient way to run your own mail server without getting really involved with it :)

Just saying this as a warning for everybody who has this thought. I've been through it and my mail set up is running for 5 years like a charm now. But it was a steep way to get there :)

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

#300
post #285
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.

Ha, I wrote that so cautiously, thinking "I'm sure this terminology's not right, I'll probably be called out on it"! Thanks though, I learned something :) Regardless of what we call it - the sender would get a copy back with a message not containing the word 'bounce' that says it failed to send, right?

No, no message will be sent until after 4-5 days have passed without connection.
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