I’d go AuthSMTP or similar rather than 365 for pure outbound as it will be much more cost effective.
(This is exactly what I do.)
Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?
41–50 of 105 posts
Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?
#42I'd say just rent hosted dovecot from a reputable company and you're then free to build your own filters, tools, pipelines on top of that.
My favorite is mailbox.org
Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?
#43A 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 stat…
The problem with deliverability issues is the impossibility of proving a negative.
If I send an e-mail to a company's customer support, or to my senator, or I reply to a potential client, or I contact an open source mailing list and I don't receive a reply - do I know if my message made it to them or not?
I mean, it's plausible that JohnDoe@senate.gov just didn't deign to reply to my e-mail. But it's equally plausible there's some subtle misconfiguration - like an e-mail forwarder that breaks the SPF signature. It's not like I can sign up for a senate.gov e-mail address to test with.
Meanwhile, to paraphrase an old joke, when your senator rejects your e-mails you have a problem. When your senator rejects @gmail.com they have a problem.
Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?
#44I did different setups over time, but currently settled on forwardemail.net for incoming catch-all custom domain and iCloud+ SMTP servers for sending.
Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 i…
When I hosted my own mail I did all of that except (e). I had trouble, as seems to be typical, with deliverability to Microsoft-hosted addresses. I wonder if (e) would have helped (doubt it).
Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?
#46Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
It sounded like he's actually keeping the emails on google, even though they come on a custom domain. And that doesn't seem safe to me.
Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?
#48A 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 stat…
For me, thinking about potential deliverability issues is just too stressful. Even if it works 99% of the time, who knows how important the remaining 1% of emails will be. Personally, having control over my own domain is a good-enough middle ground.
Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?
#49I 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…
I agree on your middle ground, with the added step to maintain a local backup of your mail (i.e. .eml files or similar).
Re: Ask HN: The middle ground for email self-hosting?
#50I 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...
The same thing camps happen with any company. If you have your own domain you can get a new email host, change your mx record. Update your email client to use the new credentials. If you use mobile email, upload existing recent email from your desktop or restore/ import from backup. This means not registering the domain with your email host to avoid problematic delays