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Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

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Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#31

Post by caeruleus »

ssl232 wrote: post #25
caeruleus wrote: post #21

I have been selfhosting my email stack on a cheap VPS (~ $10) for many years now, probably since 2009 or so. I used to set up everything manually, but that was quite painful and there were some rough edges. Nowadays, I just use mailcow ( https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized ) for the setup part and have a much more polished experience. Email deliverability is not a problem. Generally, you just have to make s…

> I wrote a short mail to the admin contact and got told I had to host a web page with contact information on the same IP. Interesting. Was that just to prove to that particular provider that you, the emailer, own the domain? Or is it some more widely used (beyond that provider) practice?

Afaik, it is specific to this provider. I'm not entirely sure why exactly tbh, probably to require some kind of associated identity (the policy is likely targeted to larger providers). It was a manual process and I never had to do anything similar for a different one.

They require that

a) the sending IP address has a PTR record b) from a domain that you own c) that resolves to the same IP address.

This is also very important for general deliverability (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-confirmed_reverse_DNS).

They furthermore recommend d) that your host name should clearly mark it as a mail server and e) to make sure the domain leads to a web page that contains provider details and contact information.

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#33

Post by nottorp »

dmje wrote: post #18

I just don't understand the attraction of self hosting email. The pain seems extreme, even for those who understand the considerable number of nuances. To me the happy middle ground is email on your own domain but using an existing provider such as G / MS or whoever. That way you've got control but don't need to worry about the pain. It does require paying for but really on balance not much. If you're spending more t…

> If you're spending more than an hour a year maintaining your self hosted email (which you will, big time!) then your Google Workspace / O365 is paid for.

But what's the cost when Google's "AI" bans your account?

For paid email hosting I'd go to some provider with actual support...

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#34

Post by JoshTriplett »

I used to do something similar: I hosted my own IMAP, while using Gandi for receiving mail and sending mail. That meant I didn't lose mail on the receiving side if my mail server had an issue, and I didn't fail to deliver mail to others because I hadn't jumped through enough hoops. (Literally everyone I personally know who has run their own mail server has had one or both of those problems at least once.)

This worked well for me because it gave me the feeling of having more control and privacy and security over my email.

I switched away from that solution when I realized that in practice I have less ability to effectively provide security than the whole security and product teams of a major email provider.

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#35

Post by defanor »

A major theme in self-hosted email discussions is deliverability issues (particularly to larger email service providers), and I tend to be unsure how bad it actually is: sometimes it does seem pretty bad, other times it sounds like it's fine, and possibly the chatter about failed deliveries is caused by misconfigured servers and/or misunderstandings.

Seems like it shouldn't be hard to check and collect reference statistics with a survey, though I'm failing to find surveys of that kind, and getting accounts on public services would be the tricky part for me personally (since I don't like to provide my phone number), so not doing that myself either. Only occasionally tried to check it with others, and messages were delivered fine in those cases -- but that's just a few samples.

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#36

Post by raegis »

outsomnia wrote: post #11

Incoming email is simple, MTAs have no problem at all delivering to residential IPs if that's what your MX says. So ideally you should run your own postfix + dovecot at your premises and point your MX to that. You have to take additional steps for sending email. > would my custom domain be free from being marked by spam? The receipient's mail service gets to choose if it thinks your email is spam, this will happen wh…

I think $30 a month is high just for email. I do $5/month now and have been doing this for over 20 years on my domain. (It was more expensive in the past.)

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#37

Post by caeruleus »

egberts1 wrote: post #30
caeruleus wrote: post #21

I have been selfhosting my email stack on a cheap VPS (~ $10) for many years now, probably since 2009 or so. I used to set up everything manually, but that was quite painful and there were some rough edges. Nowadays, I just use mailcow ( https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized ) for the setup part and have a much more polished experience. Email deliverability is not a problem. Generally, you just have to make s…

Lemme guess, Well-known Security? As in ` http://mydomain.example/.well-known/security.txt ? https://securitytxt.org/

Nope, it really was a static HTML page containing a name and contact information, like you would write on traditional mail. ^^

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#39

Post by laurent123456 »

nottorp wrote: post #33
dmje wrote: post #18

I just don't understand the attraction of self hosting email. The pain seems extreme, even for those who understand the considerable number of nuances. To me the happy middle ground is email on your own domain but using an existing provider such as G / MS or whoever. That way you've got control but don't need to worry about the pain. It does require paying for but really on balance not much. If you're spending more t…

> If you're spending more than an hour a year maintaining your self hosted email (which you will, big time!) then your Google Workspace / O365 is paid for. But what's the cost when Google's "AI" bans your account? For paid email hosting I'd go to some provider with actual support...

Since he uses his own domain, he can move elsewhere if there's a problem with Google. I do that too, and it's indeed much simpler than self-hosting.

Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?

#40

Post by b3kart »

nottorp wrote: post #33
dmje wrote: post #18

I just don't understand the attraction of self hosting email. The pain seems extreme, even for those who understand the considerable number of nuances. To me the happy middle ground is email on your own domain but using an existing provider such as G / MS or whoever. That way you've got control but don't need to worry about the pain. It does require paying for but really on balance not much. If you're spending more t…

> If you're spending more than an hour a year maintaining your self hosted email (which you will, big time!) then your Google Workspace / O365 is paid for. But what's the cost when Google's "AI" bans your account? For paid email hosting I'd go to some provider with actual support...

If you use your own domain (as the parent suggests), the cost is creating an account with any other e-mail provider that supports custom domains and updating DNS entries.
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