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

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

#81

Post by soneil »

It's worth checking whether you're running IPv6. It does become very relevant. e.g., SPF records need to include it, it must also have a good rDNS, etc.

In particular, I know gmail hold IPv6 to higher standards. Some things (e.g. rDNS) that we traditionally treat as 'should', gmail will treat as 'must' over IPv6 - it's being treated as a chance to drop a lot of legacy leeway.

I do run my own MTA. It's not high-maintenance, at all. Understand the pitfalls, iron them out, and then stick with it to build your reputation. There is no magic bullet - the big providers won't tell us how they measure us - the best we can do is be well-behaved, stay well-behaved, and adopt modern standards (TLS, SPF, DKIM, etc) as they're thrown at us.

My best advice is to choose a reputable host. There's a lot of race-to-the-bottom in the web hosting market, and VPS are turning out no different. Keeping a clean house is good for your reputation - but so is living in a nice neighbourhood. It's well worth a couple of bucks extra to find such a neighbourhood.

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

#83

Post by pja »

Yes, absolutely. I do this & have done for a decade or more.

But that decade probably helps - my mail server has kept the same static IP the entire time, so has a pristine spam reputation.

I added SPF a couple of years ago as otherwise Google was started to look askance at some of the emails sent from my server but I haven’t bothered with DKIM (apart from added a DKIM policy that says “I don’t do DKIM” that is). No problems so far.

Where are you hosting your mailserver? If it’s on a dynamic IP on your home internet, then you’re on a hiding to nothing. Static IP on a home internet might be OK, if you can fix your reverse DNS to be something sane rather than the more usual adsl123455.isp.net or something. Google generally hates reverse DNS entries that look like consumer internet connections.

If you’re hosting with AWS or another cloud provider, then I believe the only way to get an server on an IP address that doesn’t come with a terrible reputation for spam is to cycle through IP addresses until you find one that works - this is what the big mail delivery companies do I believe.

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

#84

Post by takeda »

lucb1e wrote: post #52

> is it possible to run your own MTA, for personal use in 2016? Who, here, is doing it successfully? Hello, I run my own mail server, though admittedly with an attitude of "your spam filter thinks I'm spam? That filter is broken; have fun reading your spambox." Company email addresses are actually never any trouble anyway, only personal ones (the free ones like yahoo, gmail and hotmail) are the ones where people have…

Regarding spam filtering, you actually can get as good if not better than Google's. I use bogofilter, the main issue though is that when you first start using it will be quite bad at filtering, you will have to continue to train it.

I actually use sendmail with bogofilter-milter.pl script (there is also bogom program with does similar thing) as opposed to usual way of running it with procmail, it essentially does the filtering at the moment it is being sent to you and rejects spam right on the spot. The advantage of it is that sender will get notification that spam was not delivered, also many spammers might drop you from their lists when they can't deliver spam.

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

#87

Post by pcl »

zzzcpan wrote: post #53

> I don't know what else to do 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.

That's what e-mail marketing companies do.

... and that, in turn, is why so many IPs have poor reputations.

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

#88

Post by mrb »

One little trick that I rarely see mentioned for working around the negative or neutral reputation your MTA's IP might have is that you can route your outgoing emails through another MTA that has a higher reputation. For example route them through smtp.gmail.com (or for other options see https://support.google.com/a/answer/176600?hl=en). It does not mean you have to use Gmail. It does not mean you have to change your MX records. It does not mean you have to use a @gmail.com address. None of that. Your recipients will not even notice you are routing through smtp.gmail.com (unless they inspect the detailed headers). All you need is a Google account and password to authenticate against smtp.gmail.com, and Google will happily route your email to wherever, to any external domains, etc.

Doing this makes you retain all the advantages of running your own MTA: none of your emails are hosted at a third party provider, no scanning of your emails to personalize ads, no government agency can knock at the door of an email provider and ask them for the content of your inbox, etc.

The only downside is that in theory Google can scan and block your outgoing emails (not incoming emails since these hit your MTA directly). But if you don't send spam, this should never happen.

Another option is to route your mail through your ISP's MTA. Yes ISPs usually offer SMTP relay service accessible only from their customer's IP addresses (eg. for Comcast it is "smtp.comcast.net" IIRC.) However the reputation factor of an ISP's MTA might be worse than Google's MTA.

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

#89

Post by lucb1e »

takeda wrote: post #84
lucb1e wrote: post #52

> is it possible to run your own MTA, for personal use in 2016? Who, here, is doing it successfully? Hello, I run my own mail server, though admittedly with an attitude of "your spam filter thinks I'm spam? That filter is broken; have fun reading your spambox." Company email addresses are actually never any trouble anyway, only personal ones (the free ones like yahoo, gmail and hotmail) are the ones where people have…

Regarding spam filtering, you actually can get as good if not better than Google's. I use bogofilter, the main issue though is that when you first start using it will be quite bad at filtering, you will have to continue to train it. I actually use sendmail with bogofilter-milter.pl script (there is also bogom program with does similar thing) as opposed to usual way of running it with procmail, it essentially does the…

Using another method (catch-all with a blacklist) I also get better filtering than gmail can offer. Much less sophisticated and a little more trouble, but much more effective.

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

#90

Post by soneil »

mverwijs wrote: post #16

Been running it for over 15 years. No SPF. No dkim. Never had complaints, though threads like these have me worried.

I think 15 years of "good behaviour" is exactly what they're missing. gmails 12 years old. If you've had a well-behaved service for as long as they've been keeping track, that probably weighs in your favour much better than anything else.

That said, SPF is worth looking into - but it's more a "good neighbour" thing. Rather than having any direct benefit for you, it helps other hosts spot mails that claim to be from you. "Be the change you want to see" type deal.

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