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Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
51–56 of 56 posts
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#52dovecot+postfix is all that is to it, but to ensure it doesn't land in spam you'll have to do a bunch of things (like contacting your ISP) http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-sen...
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do NOT host at home. For one, this violates every second provider's ToS, if not every single one. For two, lots of providers block incoming SMTP connections on TCP/25. More importantly, they may start blocking it without notice and you'll have no clue that they did. For three, you will most likely end up on a RBL (blacklist) in no time solely because you come from a "consumer" IP range. I mean, hosting at home is tec…
1. My ISP send me a router that has a feature to host a internet accessible fileserver. Out-of-the-box. ISPs in germany do not promote home-hosting but they give you devices that do it. 2. Incoming / Outgoing TCP/25 blocking: Not a problem with ISPs in Germany. 3. Blacklisting: At most a problem if you send mails. Plus GMAIL requires SPF/DKIM for just about evey IP, so yes, you are on a blacklist unless you do some D…
Re #3 - it is safe to assume that a shitty setup is a norm rather than an exception. Gmail is the exception. Everyone else just run postfix + rbl_filter and would have none of these modern SPF nonsense.
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#54My Synology NAS comes with a relatively easy to setup mail server. I wouldn't call it cheap, as a mail server alone; but all of the other functionality has made it well worth the price.
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#55Buy a domain on a service that allows API-based DNS updates. Put up a RPI at home. postfix + dovecot + roundcube should do the trick. Add FW forwardings for 80/443/25 (or allow IPv6 to pass through) Update DNS records every N minutes. (cron, nsupdate, dyndns clients, amazon command line tools....). You will need SPF/DKIM. The RFC for SMTP says Mail Servers have to retry for 7 days before giving up on mail delivery. T…
Do NOT host at home. For one, this violates every second provider's ToS, if not every single one. For two, lots of providers block incoming SMTP connections on TCP/25. More importantly, they may start blocking it without notice and you'll have no clue that they did. For three, you will most likely end up on a RBL (blacklist) in no time solely because you come from a "consumer" IP range. I mean, hosting at home is tec…
Not everyone is in the US.
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#56It would be great if there was some PaaS-type mail service provider. I'd like to get away from hosting it with a single VPS, and running multiple VPSes for redundancy seems frustratingly expensive for such low-intensity load like a personal email server. Ideally, I'd sign up with one or two services and have each listed as an MX for my domain so there's always some service online to take the email. I can write my own…
That sounds pretty cool actually. Assuming two servers had equal weight in MX records, such that mail had a 50/50 chance of going to either, you could unify it via fetchmail, or similar, if you polled both backends directly.
Usually it is a pain if you have mail going to more than one host - ie. no shared storage amongst all the hosts that receive mails, but if you were looking for redundancy and didn't mind the "manual fixup" this would be almost trivial to setup with 2+ VPS from different providers.