How to run your own mail server (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#21

Post by twobat » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

jjirsa wrote: post #11

EVERYONE did this for decades. Then EVERYONE stopped because it's awful. Modern ISPs don't like SMTP floating around, (DKIM, DMARC, SPF) are a pain to maintain over time, exploits will happen, and your free off-the-shelf virus and spam filters suck compared to the big companies seeing billions of messages per day.

Most ISP don't care about it. But there are certain enterprises that know almost nothing about email, they employ "specialized tools" that scan and classify incoming email (read Symantec whatever) and make evereyone's lives harder.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#22

Post by dpcan » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

Then you realize the true pain of having a near-zero reputation when trying to email anything to people on Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etc, etc. Expect to go to spam even if you have DKIM, SPF, and no relaying. If anyone actually knows the secret to not having your own mail-server's mail go to spam on these bigger systems, please tell, I've Googled it for years with no success.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#23

Post by q3k » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 7:31 PM UTC

pharrington wrote: post #19

adontz wrote: post #4

Always wonder if any of these guides will ever include decent web-mail?

Writing one yourself is it's own fun project!

Fun is a very curious way of putting it, considering how batshit crazy IMAP is. The rest of the involved email standards are also a huge dumpster fire.

I'll let Ricardo Signes do the talking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JENdgiAPD6c

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#24

Post by scarejunba » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

Used to host my own everything. One day went on holiday, thing went down due to complex sequence of events, got no email. Disaster.

From then on, MX'd my shit to aspmx.l.google.com. and called it a day.

Any hosted solution is probably better than this.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#25

Post by pixelHD » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 7:33 PM UTC

jjirsa wrote: post #11

EVERYONE did this for decades. Then EVERYONE stopped because it's awful. Modern ISPs don't like SMTP floating around, (DKIM, DMARC, SPF) are a pain to maintain over time, exploits will happen, and your free off-the-shelf virus and spam filters suck compared to the big companies seeing billions of messages per day.

I had my own mail server running for close to a year after which i gave up because i started seeing issues delivering mail to gmail and apple mail accounts. I had to keep tinkering with the DKIM/DMARC/SPF entries to make sure i'm compliant with gmail/outlook/etc. At somepoint i gave up because it wasn't worth the investment of time.

FWIW, i used mail cow [0], which was a delight to setup and use. And it comes bundled with a decent-ish material design webclient.

I would love to go back to hosting my own mail server though. As of now, i shut it down, and use gsuite.

[0]: https://mailcow.email/

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#26

Post by couchand » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 7:33 PM UTC

blowski wrote: post #13

benbristow wrote: post #3

Alternatively pay for a GSuite account for like £3 a month (Or Office 365) and all of this is handled for you with superior spam filtering, search, webmail, no manual administration and no issues with email delivery due to other filters thinking your server is a bit dodgy. It's too much effort to run your own email server well.

The obvious rebuttal here is that not everyone is comfortable having a Google or Microsoft account, or having Google and Microsoft scanning their emails. In that case, Fastmail is a good alternative. It’s not quite as good as Gmail on security and anti-spam, but it’s much better on privacy.

Can you clarify what you mean by "security"? I've found Fastmail's spam filtering to be quite excellent: very few false positives (usually just non-spam marketing messages) and almost no false negatives.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#27

Post by mlrotter » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 7:33 PM UTC

I feel like if people are gonna take back email this process needs to be easier; like a single application with a web front-end.

Hosting email is a pain! This is why everyone seems to outsource their email hosting.

Read the comments in the 2017 discussion. Favorite quote: "I run my own mail infrastructure. To say the least I wouldn't recommend it even to my worst enemies. It's horrible." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16238937

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#28

Post by curiousfab » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

dpcan wrote: post #22

Then you realize the true pain of having a near-zero reputation when trying to email anything to people on Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etc, etc. Expect to go to spam even if you have DKIM, SPF, and no relaying. If anyone actually knows the secret to not having your own mail-server's mail go to spam on these bigger systems, please tell, I've Googled it for years with no success.

For some reason I never had problems, even after a recent change of my IP address because I moved to a new VPS.

Hetzner VPS, proper reverse DNS, SPF, that's all, not even DKIM. The only big ISP that doesn't like my mails is AT&T and I couldn't care less (in Europe, rarely have to deal with people @att.net).

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#29

Post by singron » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

dpcan wrote: post #22

Then you realize the true pain of having a near-zero reputation when trying to email anything to people on Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etc, etc. Expect to go to spam even if you have DKIM, SPF, and no relaying. If anyone actually knows the secret to not having your own mail-server's mail go to spam on these bigger systems, please tell, I've Googled it for years with no success.

I had DKIM, SPF, rDNS, etc. at first and went to Gmail spam. I registered on gmail postmaster tools and got some friends and family to add me to their contact lists and send me some outbound mail. Google now sends me more mail than I send them, and now I don't go to the spam list, even for gmail accounts I haven't contacted before. This was for personal email. If you are trying to send commercial email this strategy probably won't work.

Re: How to run your own mail server (2017)

#30

Post by wpietri » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

dpcan wrote: post #22

Then you realize the true pain of having a near-zero reputation when trying to email anything to people on Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etc, etc. Expect to go to spam even if you have DKIM, SPF, and no relaying. If anyone actually knows the secret to not having your own mail-server's mail go to spam on these bigger systems, please tell, I've Googled it for years with no success.

Agreed! I've been running my own mail server for 20+ years, and I would not recommend that anybody do this on a lark. Deliverability to GMail is a huge problem for me and has been for years. I even asked friends at Google to find out what the story was. All I got back is that the mail group was so careful/paranoid it wouldn't talk to them either.

I would long ago have switched over to a vendor, but I use qmail-style tagging for sub-addresses (that is, instead of user+sub@domain, I use user-sub@domain). Almost nobody supports that. Especially not GMail (where my friends could tell me that was tagged as WONTFIX).

If anybody has solved this, please do let me know (on here, via Twitter, or the email address in my bio). It's maddening.