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Mail-in-a-Box – one-click, easy-to-deploy email server

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Re: Mail-in-a-Box – one-click, easy-to-deploy email server

#41

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

mr_blobs wrote: post #8
binaryanomaly wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I've left gmail years ago. I do not want to support this kind of "business model". I also do not want to invest the time to maintain my own email server. Imho there are good alternative solutions provided by companies such as protonmail.com or mailbox.org just to name two I have personally experience with. As with everything it is mostly about overcoming your personal comfort zone and start to act. Good lu…

It's not about being outside your 'comfort zone'. I've been running complex setups for years and am perfectly comfortable getting my hands dirty. It's about the time and effort it takes to constantly fight the blacklists and the downtime for my business.

What are you doing to constantly have to fight the blacklists?!

I've been operating my own mailserver for over a decade and I haven't ever had to remove my IP addresses from any blacklists, and I haven't ever heard such a thing from other people I know who are operating their own mailservers either.

Re: Mail-in-a-Box – one-click, easy-to-deploy email server

#42

Post by viraptor »

drdaeman wrote: post #36
viraptor wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail and other really big providers are in a unique position for spam filtering. They have so many users that they get a continuously trained filter pretty much for free. They can instantly classify never-seen-before kind of spam in minutes because someone gets push notification on their phone and clicks "this is spam". Nobody with purely-technical solution to this problem can be better in practice. (although we're…

Run a honeypot. Just an usual Postfix with catch-all virtual mailbox and a learn-spam for the destinatin. Let spammers happily fill it (they will, in no time) and train your very own rspamd/spamassasin/whatever. Sure, this works as long as they don't try to poison your filters, but given its a small and rare target, it's unlikely someone would bother.

A proper honeypot takes a lot of time and effort. You actually have to inject that email into the right environments. For example nobody will steal your honeypot address from someone's mail history, some service's stolen user database, or others.

It helps, but it's not a solution.

Re: Mail-in-a-Box – one-click, easy-to-deploy email server

#43

Post by josephb »

wjd2030 wrote: post #35
startling wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used DO for a year without a problem, and then my IP was blacklisted (apparently a neighbor was spamming) and I couldn't do anything about it. Be warned, and frequently check if Google accounts receive mail frequently.

I ended up using an smtp service from Mailjet to get around this issue. 600 free emails a month.

How does your setup interface with Mailjet?

Re: Mail-in-a-Box – one-click, easy-to-deploy email server

#44

Post by SwellJoe »

eikenberry wrote: post #12
mr_blobs wrote: post #2

I setup my own mail server last year and shortly gave up on the idea. Setting the server up isn't the problem. The problem is keeping your IP off of all the major blacklists. I wasn't even sending out mass emails and 30%+ of my email would never be delivered. I had to constantly check to see if my IP addresses were on the various spam lists (and fight to get my IPs off) and I just got tired of it. Companies like Goog…

Once you have SPF/DKIM in place and make sure your IP isn't already on a blacklist for some past (previous users) infractions you should be good to go. I've run my own mail server for years and have only had to remove it from a blacklist once. So once you get past some initial blacklist monitoring work, you are good to go. That does bring up the point of how to do blacklist monitoring. There are various commercial se…

Yep. I work on software that runs on thousands of mail servers (I work on Virtualmin), and it is entirely possible to run your own mail server with good delivery rates. It's honestly not even that hard, if you get SPF, DKIM, PTR records in DNS right, and you correctly handle bounces and unsubscribes promptly. We've been sending out a few thousand emails a day for over a decade without incident, and we have several people who run bigger mailing lists than we do.

Though there are a few minor caveats to this. Microsoft (Hotmail, Outlook, Live, etc. addresses) mail servers are ornery, in that they hold grudges against IP addresses for a long time (seemingly forever, as the server we moved to recently had been in our possession for non-email use for a couple of years, and it was still on a Microsoft blacklist from a prior owner's abuse), and they make you jump through a few hoops to get it removed. Even with SPF and DKIM, they rejected 100% of our mail until we got off of their blacklist. Our previous server never had that problem...but we'd been on the same IP for like five or six years.

You need to be on an IP that is dedicated and that you're going to own for a long time, and not part of consumer IP blocks; you can't effectively run a mail server on a cable or DSL line, even business class, without jumping through a lot of hoops. But, if you're in a colo, you'll be fine. This also applies to AWS and other cloud server IP addresses; as I understand it, huge swaths of them have been burned by spammers who spin up and spam until they get shut down, and then move to another.

So, I guess it's relatively tricky to get things working at the beginning and you may have to fight a little with some of the big email vendors, but it's not really an ongoing thing, in my experience. Get it right, and then don't spam or let your users spam, respond appropriately when abuse does happen, and you can run your own mail server relatively painlessly.

Re: Mail-in-a-Box – one-click, easy-to-deploy email server

#45

Post by kalleboo »

icebraining wrote: post #24
bigiain wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: where's your IP address come from? I'd have guessed that common cloud VM IP pools are likely all trashed permanently already? I somehow doubt AWS or DO or Linode or Rackspace et al are worthwhile places to host an outbound mail server? I'd also guess ISP pools of home IP addresses are probably just as poisoned. Is proper SPF/DKIM setup "enough" to overcome that? (Or are my suspicions about pools of IP addre…

FWIW, I stopped using my home connection because it was listed on Spamhaus' PBL, you might want to check that out if you plan on using yours: https://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/ I'm using DO currently and it's been working fine, though it's just for personal email.

I'm surprised to hear there are home ISPs that still allow outgoing traffic on port 25... I used to run an email server at home, and both ISPs I used required you to route all outgoing email through their SMTP server (which presumably had an outgoing spam filter on it). This worked fine for me because it meant my outgoing mail had a good reputation.

Re: Mail-in-a-Box – one-click, easy-to-deploy email server

#46

Post by cobbzilla »

mr_blobs wrote: post #2

I setup my own mail server last year and shortly gave up on the idea. Setting the server up isn't the problem. The problem is keeping your IP off of all the major blacklists. I wasn't even sending out mass emails and 30%+ of my email would never be delivered. I had to constantly check to see if my IP addresses were on the various spam lists (and fight to get my IPs off) and I just got tired of it. Companies like Goog…

If you're only concerned about delivery and can live with a third-party SMTP relay, I'd hope you could set up this system to relay through sendgrid or mailgun. If it's only for personal use, you'd probably be fine on their free plan indefinitely.

Re: Mail-in-a-Box – one-click, easy-to-deploy email server

#47

Post by jwr »

mr_blobs wrote: post #2

I setup my own mail server last year and shortly gave up on the idea. Setting the server up isn't the problem. The problem is keeping your IP off of all the major blacklists. I wasn't even sending out mass emails and 30%+ of my email would never be delivered. I had to constantly check to see if my IP addresses were on the various spam lists (and fight to get my IPs off) and I just got tired of it. Companies like Goog…

I've been running my own mail server since 2001. Only once had a problem with blacklists when I moved the server to a new IP at a provider with bad spam reputation. Otherwise, this has never been a problem.

Don't let Google and Facebook monopolize our communications.

Re: Mail-in-a-Box – one-click, easy-to-deploy email server

#48

Post by _andromeda_ »

cobbzilla wrote: post #46
mr_blobs wrote: post #2

I setup my own mail server last year and shortly gave up on the idea. Setting the server up isn't the problem. The problem is keeping your IP off of all the major blacklists. I wasn't even sending out mass emails and 30%+ of my email would never be delivered. I had to constantly check to see if my IP addresses were on the various spam lists (and fight to get my IPs off) and I just got tired of it. Companies like Goog…

If you're only concerned about delivery and can live with a third-party SMTP relay, I'd hope you could set up this system to relay through sendgrid or mailgun. If it's only for personal use, you'd probably be fine on their free plan indefinitely.

Any thoughts on SES?

Re: Mail-in-a-Box – one-click, easy-to-deploy email server

#49

Post by ProxCoques »

mr_blobs wrote: post #2

I setup my own mail server last year and shortly gave up on the idea. Setting the server up isn't the problem. The problem is keeping your IP off of all the major blacklists. I wasn't even sending out mass emails and 30%+ of my email would never be delivered. I had to constantly check to see if my IP addresses were on the various spam lists (and fight to get my IPs off) and I just got tired of it. Companies like Goog…

While I hear you on Gmail's overbearing influence, I'm not a sysadmin (I'm a designer and I spend most of my time talking to people about "user journeys" and fonts), but I run my own (and my family's) email using Ubuntu on a VM. There are lots of easy HOWTOS on setting up Postfix with DKIM and bind with SPF. I've got an alert on one of those blacklist monitors and not been in any blocking lists at all in several years.

So if I can do it, you can too.

BTW I use Gmail as the front end though - it picks up the mail up from my POP3 server and sends it out via my server over TLS/SSL. That last step was a bit complicated to set up since Gmail doesn't accept self-signed certificates for SMTP sending. But I managed to work out how to set up and renew a free cert from StartCom.

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