51–60 of 311 posts
People do not run their own mail server for the same reason people ( including the author of that guide ) do not host jquery and bootstrap on their own servers -- it is not that it is hard, it is that not running their own mail server or not hosting their own jquery and bootstrap code is easier.
It's not 'hard', it's 'a gigantic pain in the ass' which is (in normal word use) one form of 'hard'. Which is why most sane people stopped doing it themselves say 15 years ago. Especially for the few cents you can get professional 3rd party email hosting for. Edit: I also very much like the disingenuity of articles saying 'X isnt' hard! Just execute these 20 commands!' Duh, executing those commands isn't the problem,…
> - Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it
No. Been there, done that. It was a major PITA. It's not even something I would consider again for small organizations as it's an economic nonsense too.
It's not 'hard', it's 'a gigantic pain in the ass' which is (in normal word use) one form of 'hard'. Which is why most sane people stopped doing it themselves say 15 years ago. Especially for the few cents you can get professional 3rd party email hosting for. Edit: I also very much like the disingenuity of articles saying 'X isnt' hard! Just execute these 20 commands!' Duh, executing those commands isn't the problem,…
> it's 'a gigantic pain in the ass' which is (in normal word use) one form of 'hard'. Which is why most sane people stopped doing it themselves say 15 years ago I've been running my own mail server since 2000 or so. It isn't hard, it takes almost no time at all, and I have my own independent mail that nobody reads, and I make the decision of which mail to accept. I will take the liberty of classifying the above comme…
Otherwise your mail is read in transit on the way to you anyway, so self hosting is false privacy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also a huge difference between setting up a properly configured server and actually getting things delivered. The big ones (MS, Google) mark your mail as spam even with SPF, DMARC, DKIM and the like. Even on the service I use (purelymail.com) the low volume of mail and the fact that it's less than a year old means that even when I email them first, the replies are sometimes marked as spam.
That's a bug with gmail and those who use gmail should be aware they may be missing emails.
I've been running SmarterMail on a Windows VPS for years and it's been rock solid. It's just a single Windows service and all the configuration is done via its web interface.
Why no one has come up with a simple solution like this for Linux/BSD yet?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also a huge difference between setting up a properly configured server and actually getting things delivered. The big ones (MS, Google) mark your mail as spam even with SPF, DMARC, DKIM and the like. Even on the service I use (purelymail.com) the low volume of mail and the fact that it's less than a year old means that even when I email them first, the replies are sometimes marked as spam.
That's a bug with gmail and those who use gmail should be aware they may be missing emails.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Running my own for about 2 years now. Spf dMarc and dkim set it is accepted by all mail providers. I also get daily reports from Google how well it behaves
Same here, except to Charter, who has apparently just blacklisted swaths of DigitalOcean IPs, probably for some reason. So I just can't email my mom. Other than that, a great experience.
You made the point.
To all the folks answering basically "yes it's hard" I think the headline is a bit clickbaity but there are some interesting takeaways... To summarize, (a) yes it's harder than setting up Big Corp Mail, but (b) a lot of the horror stories are either old or secondhand, and (c) it's a lot less hard to set up than it used to be. If the suggestion is, why not give it a try, one thing I feel is missed is, how hard is it n…
What exactly changed in the last ...5? 10? years that has simplified the process?
There are a bunch of guides floating online for Postfix, Dovecot etc, and some of them are pretty decent. But they go out of date quickly, or if you want to do something slightly different, you're on your own... And even if you end up with a running system, maintaining or enhancing it is a different kettle of fish. You can't just follow the guide again, you're back to man pages and usenet mailing lists with some info inside a thread 23 levels deep.
The installers from 90s and 2000s in windows that people used, were really good at extracting config questions from the users in a very user friendly way. The cloud services today are basically hiding the installation wizard but at the cost of rent seeking as opposed to running unfettered software on your own hardware.