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Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

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Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#101

Post by abdullahkhalids »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #44
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used https://mailinabox.email/ for about 1.5 years. Installation was dead simple, and no technical problems after.

I've heard that using your own mail server can give issues with your email ending up in spam. Is that the case if you use this?

1. I was very careful to make sure that the IP address I was assigned was not on any blacklists.

2. I don't know if it actually helped. But after setting it up, I got a whole bunch of family/friends to email me from their gmail/hotmail/o365 addresses first, and then I replied to them. The theory was that gmail/hotmail wouldn't mark me as spam if their own addresses were initiating the conversation. Seemed to have worked well.

I have had only one case of my email getting completely blackholed (not put in spam, just rejected outright) is when I emailed a friend with a @amd.com address. Right now, I am still using gmail for essential professional emails, but slowly getting all my online-services converted to the new email address.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#102

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

mjl- wrote: post #19
p4bl0 wrote: post #17

The project looks cool! However, I think the hard part of self-hosting email is not the tech stack, it's getting email delivered to your recipients using Google or Microsoft severe email servers. It's hard to rent a server that IP address is not in a block that big email providers consider suspicious already or will soon. And any mishaps can get you locked out and you need manual intervention to be allowed again. I u…

I've not really had those issues. A temporary block a few times, but that gets resolved. FWIW, with mox, I prefer not to rely on blocklists (centralized!). Incoming mail is first checked with reputation of the sender. This reputation is only per account. So one accounts junk-classification doesn't affect another accounts. Only for new senders, and without conclusive signals, would a DNSBL be used. The result is that…

Big providers, especially Microsoft, have become extremely heavy handed the last year or so. Now, if a single IP address in a /24 is sending spam, Microsoft will just block the entire /24. And we've had so much difficulty getting Microsoft to walk back that block and not reinstate it later on that we've completely given up providing any type of email service (whether that be day-to-day email needs or transactional emails). I've spent hours on calls with Microsoft support trying to remedy this and it's just impossible once it happens (and I've had it happen multiple times to multiple IPs and had multiple MS techs confirm this is what is happening)

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#103

Post by scooke »

p4bl0 wrote: post #17

The project looks cool! However, I think the hard part of self-hosting email is not the tech stack, it's getting email delivered to your recipients using Google or Microsoft severe email servers. It's hard to rent a server that IP address is not in a block that big email providers consider suspicious already or will soon. And any mishaps can get you locked out and you need manual intervention to be allowed again. I u…

Without a tech stack it is impossible to self-host email, so, it is the hard part. Just this week I had huge problems with an expected email not reaching either of my gmail or outlook inboxes. It just never came, despite the sender insisting they sent it. This isn't an isolated case.

With MXRoute and my own self-hosted email, I'm slowly moving away from the big ones.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#104

Post by scooke »

greenthrow wrote: post #87

There's lots of hosting providers who will sell you a managed VPS that includes your own mail server among other things. That seems like a better solution to me, for someone who doesn't want to get into the guts of it.

If it's managed, isn't it their mail server? I mean, I can use my own domain and such, but as posters above said, "data independence" is important.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#106

Post by mgkimsal »

thesuitonym wrote: post #92
p4bl0 wrote: post #17

The project looks cool! However, I think the hard part of self-hosting email is not the tech stack, it's getting email delivered to your recipients using Google or Microsoft severe email servers. It's hard to rent a server that IP address is not in a block that big email providers consider suspicious already or will soon. And any mishaps can get you locked out and you need manual intervention to be allowed again. I u…

It's funny how difficult it is to get email into Google or Microsoft, when, as an email admin, I want to block @gmail.com and @outlook.com because 90% of email from those domains is spam.

I had a family member work at a company that blocked gmail. They were a lotus notes shop tied with MS AD, and their admin was very anti-google. "Gmail is a cesspit of spam" or something like that. But... then was all in on MS. "MS is great - they have no spam problems". Which is just... wrong.

So... I couldn't email my family member at their work from my gmail. Not a big deal for me, but I know it impacted their ability to work with some clients and providers. And then... sure enough, they were getting spam from MS-hosted stuff (outlook.com, azure hosted stuff, etc).

He might have thought he was getting one over on google or something like that - I'm sure they didn't give a toss about it.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#107

Post by infogulch »

Email servers are notoriously difficult to configure, hence all these solutions ranging from tutorials to "everything included" systems. Recent activity on HN about mail servers: Mox, Poste.io from yesterday [1], Mailinabox, mailcow, ispmail, maddy, stalwart jmap, etc.

Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful.

What I'd like is a "mail reverse proxy" that does all the work to manage DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc and handles sending and receiving emails, but doesn't do any storage or user management. Instead it forwards mail from/to the "real" mailserver sitting somewhere in a private network. (Maybe using LMTP [2]?)

This way you could roll the dice until you get a $5 VPS with a clean static IP and just park it there permanently, where it does nothing but sends and receives emails from your real mail server wherever you want to host it. Kinda like a PO box. You never have to worry about upgrading it to get more storage, or switching providers and losing your IP, if it gets hacked the worst it can do is spy on live email traffic and send spam until its patched.

Why doesn't this exist already?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901703

[2]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2033

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#108

Post by greenthrow »

scooke wrote: post #104
greenthrow wrote: post #87

There's lots of hosting providers who will sell you a managed VPS that includes your own mail server among other things. That seems like a better solution to me, for someone who doesn't want to get into the guts of it.

If it's managed, isn't it their mail server? I mean, I can use my own domain and such, but as posters above said, "data independence" is important.

Hard to have true data independence and also have it be "turnkey". At some point you have to pick who to trust.

Beyond that, unless you're exchanging only encrypted emails, there's no such thing as data independence with email.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#109

Post by mjrpes »

creshal wrote: post #5
c0l0 wrote: post #2

This project's scope is rather impressive, and from what I've gleaned from skimming its docs, it might be the perfect solution for people who want to self-host email. It tries to have most of the advanced/difficult things (like getting DKIM set up right) taken care of for the postmaster, as far as that is possible within a single application. I love that it will print the DNS records you'll need to set up in your zon…

Yeah, that's my impression as well. I've been wondering about this sort of setup for a while – there's a lot of moving parts in traditional email servers, and projects like poste or univention/zimbra/… that just try to glue these massive stacks together have always been far too fragile and involved for any setup that's smaller than "we can afford a dedicated sysadmin for emailling". The only feature I'd still want is…

It doesn't look like it supports mailbox sharing or public folders, which are very helpful for collaborating in a SMB, especially with shared email addresses (e.g., sales@business.com).

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#110

Post by ranger207 »

c0l0 wrote: post #2

This project's scope is rather impressive, and from what I've gleaned from skimming its docs, it might be the perfect solution for people who want to self-host email. It tries to have most of the advanced/difficult things (like getting DKIM set up right) taken care of for the postmaster, as far as that is possible within a single application. I love that it will print the DNS records you'll need to set up in your zon…

I set up docker-mailserver[0] Monday in ~6 hours, most of which were me trying to be fancy using podman instead of docker and dealing with SELinux. But then again I did choose it over mail-in-a-box for just that level of customization. Obviously I can't tell how reliable it will be in the long run yet, but since it's using the classic Postfix/Dovecot stack I expect it'll be pretty stable

[0] https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

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