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

Small users generally don't use Qmail anymore, so if you're a small sender and use Qmail, then perhaps that's odd, and iff spammers (perhaps for Qmail's efficiency (1)) are using Qmail often, then...

(1) although you can attain higher efficiency with a custom MTA that's not safe, i.e. big spammers generally don't even retry for efficiency (that's why greylisting works).

A friend of mine runs several mail servers on OpenBSD, using OpenSMTPD, and says he's got almost zero problems and scratches his head on what I'm doing. So there's 3 hypothetical reasons for that for me:

- basically no spammers will be using OpenBSD (why should they?), - and hence also none be using OpenSMTPD, - and hence also none of them will be using a OpenBSD hoster (netblock!).

Relatively many spammers (perhaps not the biggest ones, but still spammy senders) will be using services like Hetzner, and will most likely be running Linux. Now if Gmail etc. do check the MTA you're running, and perhaps do OS fingerprinting, they'll "know" how to judge you.

Anyway, I don't have evidence that Qmail is a big reason, it seems likely the netblock is much more important (or at least that's what I'm inclined to think because the alternative would indeed be rather frustrating).

These days you also have to get a bunch of different VPSs and test sending e-mails from their IPs and choose the ones working. That's what e-mail marketing companies do. Because a lot of IPs and subnetworks out there have poor reputation or even completely blacklisted and that reputation is not generally recoverable.

[0] https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/postgrey

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 while. Even when SPF and DKIM is ignored, this usually solves it in a few emails.

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 by default by them :Having said that, here's my check list for successfully delivering email:

- make sure your IP (IPv6) is clean and not listed in any RBL, use e.g. http://multirbl.valli.org/ to check

- make sure you have a correct reverse dns (ptr) entry for said IP and that ptr/hostname's A record is also valid

- make sure your MTA does not append to the message headers your client's IP (ie x-originating-ip), messages can be blocked based only on "dodgy" x-originating-ip (see eg https://major.io/2013/04/14/remove-sensitive-information-fro... )

- set up SSL properly in your MTA, there are so many providers giving away free certs nowadays

- SPF, DKIM, DMARC - set them up, properly, this site can come in handy for checking yourself https://www.mail-tester.com/

- do not share the IP of your email server with a web server running any sort of scripting engine - if it gets exploited in any way usually sending spam is what the abusers will do

- last but not least - and while I loved qmail and vpopmail - use Postfix or Exim, they are both more fit for 2016, more configurable and with much, much larger user bases and as such bigger community and documentation.

HTH