201–210 of 314 posts
I run my own mail server on a dynamic IP. Not being marked as spam is mainly a matter of how you send mail. Make your next SMTP hop a server of decent repute. Don't send mail directly.
Why on dynamic IP? Why?
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I've been running my own mail server off of a residential connection since 1998, so... 18 years. I do pay for a static IP, and I switched ISPs away from Comcast (who had inherited me as a customer) when they abruptly started to filter inbound port 25 and claimed I had a malware infestation. For years it was qmail, but when I wanted to use SMTP/SSL as much as possible, switching to Postfix was easier than maintaining…
FYI they don't filter inbound OR outbound port 25 if you're a Comcast Business customer; in fact I think the only ports they filter for business customers are a couple of ports only used for remote attacks on MS Windows boxes.
As far as I can tell Comcast employs a number of very competent network engineers and an astounding number of horrendous customer service and executive managers.
It's absolutely possible to run an email server in 2016 and I encourage anyone capable to do so! 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…
> Email is one of the bastions of the decentralised Internet and we should hang on to it. This. I hope someone will eventually create an "E-mail server in a box" package for Ubuntu LTS, so that more people can run their own E-mail. I'm not saying it has to be super-easy for everyone, just that it should avoid unnecessary chore work (like configuring postfix to always use TLS, or plugging postgrey into postfix).
It's such an easy-to-use email system. Been working great on a home static-IP address for me for a couple years now.
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> Email is one of the bastions of the decentralised Internet and we should hang on to it. This. I hope someone will eventually create an "E-mail server in a box" package for Ubuntu LTS, so that more people can run their own E-mail. I'm not saying it has to be super-easy for everyone, just that it should avoid unnecessary chore work (like configuring postfix to always use TLS, or plugging postgrey into postfix).
The problem there is most of the hard work the OP mentions has nothing to do with the mail server itself, but instead it's around DNS, networking, certificates, and monitoring 3rd party services. Some of this may be able to be automated, but that's the hard part; not installing and configuring a few software packages.
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 you…
Huh..never thought of this. I run my own e-mail server on a Linode. I have constant trouble not being classified as spam. I did a whole post on it: http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-... The sad reality is, I'm thinking of moving my e-mail back to someone else. It might be Fastmail, might be Amazon. Running my own e-mail server is a pain and I hate having to send people a message on Facebook…
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This is at a level before 'mark as junk', where a mail provider will refuse to deliver your message at all - or potentially even refuse to accept it. The earlier the mail providers can detect/block spam the less resources they have to dedicate to storing and transmitting the spam.
Ah, so cost is the reason why the won't let the email through at all… All those people who mistakenly think email is free… (even gmail is not free: you pay for it by letting them spy on you and sending you targeted ads).
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What is it if anything that happens if my internet cuts out at my home, should I instead use some sort of hosting provider for my mail server?
> What is it if anything that happens if my internet cuts > out at my home, You bounce any incoming emails in that period, and (obviously) can't send any. > should I instead use some sort of hosting provider > for my mail server? I suppose that's a trade-off against how reliable you consider your ISP and electricity supply, and the volume or importance of email you'd be likely to receive in such a period.
Mail was written to be resilient against network downtime.
http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/
It'll take about three hours to get everything working right (and passing spam checks), but it's a great introduction to running your own mail server, and when you're done you can simply create an image of the machine to use in the future.
Before I explain what I do, I'll just mention that if you run the server that is the destination of your MX record, then you probably also want to run a back-up spooler at a remote site for when the connection to the primary server, or the server itself, is down. Down for security patching, for instance. Running a rock-solid mail service is kind of a pain, because it never fails at a convenient time.
So... I let my ISPs handle the high up-time requirement stuff, and let them be the mail spool as far as the outside world is concerned. Then I pop it down and requeue the mail on a machine that sits behind my firewall and isn't even on the front lines of the internet. I run an IMAP server on that. If it goes down, pfffft, the mail spools up a the ISP for a while and it gets popped down when my sever comes back up. It actually all works pretty well, but since I use my ISP's SMTP server for outgoing, all of my e-mail clients have a rather funky asymmetric set-up. The e-mail setup wizards just don't handle it. At. All. As long as you remember how to do old-school e-mail config settings, and can convince the new-fangled e-mail client to let you do a manual config, the asymmetric server is not much of an issue.
For remote access, I port-forward IMAP in my firewall.
So I should probably modernize this whole kit, but.... I think I mentioned above that I am lazy.
I've been running my own MTA for about 15 years now, so it's definitely possible without spending the majority of one's waking hours to do so. Even when I switched mail server IPs twice over the last few years I didn't run into the issues you ran into. A large part of it depends on where you run it - if you, say, run it on your home Internet connection that's usually an immediate strike against you because of the ins…
You are me, almost. I run a small amount of mail out of an OVH box with few issues; before that I hosted from my house on a static IP address. I don't actually greylist any more, though -- I've found that postfix's protocol violation detection (postscreen[0]) is just as good, if not better, and I like my mail to come through immediately :). Amavis is set up to do pre-queue filtering, which means that mail is either r…