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How to run your own mail server (2017)

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

#131

Post by 77pt77 »

abecode wrote: post #127
wpietri wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

+1 about the opaqueness of gmails spam filters. I once had an email from a google recruiter (@google address) go to spam in gmail so at least it's somewhat egalitarian (that was 5+ years ago).

same thing. Had an email from a recruiter and another from financial go to SPAM in gmail.

More, google knew this was a thing because they warned me.

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

#132

Post by 77pt77 »

big_chungus wrote: post #53
mgalgs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious why you're so attached to the qmail style subaddressing. Personal preference or is there a technical advantage?

Possibly not getting blocked. Many sign-up fields will block foo+spam@bar.net if I try to use it.

That's why I use "." as the separator.

Now try using an email from a domain name with more that 3 letters in the TLD.

Almost no one considers that a valid address.

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

#133

Post by XCSme »

deorder wrote: post #44
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.

GMail even considers some emails from Google to be spam. I missed some important (billing and security notification) emails from Google this way.

SkyNet is not good enough for binary classification yet, we're safe.

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

#134

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ryandrake wrote: post #34
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.

Sample size of one but I’ve run my own mail server for years and have almost never encountered problems of this nature. Right when I started with the VPS, rejections from Comcast started showing up in my logs, and I traced it back to the IP I got being in some blacklist. Requested a new IP and it has been smooth sailing ever since.

I had problems with MS (Hotmail/Live/Outlook/whatever they're call it now) when I changed hosting provider which I traced back to the hosting provider owning an IP that had in the past been associated with spam (that for-real is what I was told) -- that seemed a bit over-zealous to me.

As it wasn't possible to pre-check IP addresses (it wasn't blacklisted, and in any case the email was being served from a different IP to the one that was apparently previously an issue) for any particular hosting company - and I could only afford cheap hosting - then I decided to relent and made an Outlook online account and sent the mail from that.

It seemed totally crazy to me to reject mail from a 15 year old domain that sent at most 30 emails to Outlook per month, _always_ in replay to an email; SPF/DMARC were set AFAIR and whitelisting the email address from within my own 20+yo hotmail account didn't make any difference, MS still wouldn't let _me_ receive the emails. Like if your user says the email address is fine, and sends an email to that address, .. then perhaps you should allow the user to receive that one email??

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

#135

Post by tacon »

efesak wrote: post #64

These tutorials are nice but you can just hack https://hub.docker.com/r/analogic/poste.io (shameless ad) or any other containerized solution. You will get fully working solution in couple minutes and it will be somewhat easy to keep mailserver updated...

This. I have been running my own mail server since UUCP bang paths and sendmail. I am slowly preparing to migrate to a containerized solution for exactly this reason. Managing the updates of all the parts going forward is just too heavy a load, while swapping in a new container is easy. The initial configuration is painful, just because there are so many options to decide on, but those decisions are all there anyway, whether you realize them on day one or not. I am planning to use this image[0].

[0] https://hub.docker.com/r/tvial/docker-mailserver/

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

#136

Post by thiagoeh »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #54
wpietri wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny. I'm somewhat new to the game but my email server has had very few problems delivering anywhere (hosting a small business' email, and personal email for the employees.) I've got spf, dkim, and dmarc. I use tls on everything. Got a static ip (linode) with rdns. I've never had a problem delivering to gmail. For a while i had problems delivering to Hotmail/outlook, but participating in some sort of junk mail repor…

Where your IP came from? More specifically, who is the IP block owner? Ana ISP? A cloud provider, like AWS?

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

#137

Post by shirro »

magashna wrote: post #82
megous wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is not. At most it can be tedious, because it has large surface area of protocols and formats. Most of them other than SMTP and message format are optional. Minimal mail system involves just postfix with config in a bunch of files, delivering mail to a folder on the server, and pretty much everything on top, like SPF,DKIM,DMARC,... is optional. You can ssh to your server from anywhere and run mutt there, or…

Confirming your emails are getting through to providers like gmail is the hard part

You can configure your dmarc so the big mail systems all provide you with reports on delivery failures. I get lots of them when I reply to a mailing list that doesn't deal with spf or dkim sensibly.

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

#138

Post by Boulth »

q3k wrote: post #37
derrick_jensen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd recommend Rackspace. $3 per user per month, and allowed me to bring my own domain. Haven't had any issues after setting everything up. I tried registering this domain through G Suite and Zoho first, but they both said my domain had a TLD that's commonly used by spammers, and refused to bind it. Zoho eventually made an exception but took over a week for them to get back to me.

Huh, that's the first time I hear of rejection due to a TLD. What is it?

I guess that would be .tk

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

#139

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #54
wpietri wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny. I'm somewhat new to the game but my email server has had very few problems delivering anywhere (hosting a small business' email, and personal email for the employees.) I've got spf, dkim, and dmarc. I use tls on everything. Got a static ip (linode) with rdns. I've never had a problem delivering to gmail. For a while i had problems delivering to Hotmail/outlook, but participating in some sort of junk mail repor…

That's been my experience. I've been running a server since 2012. I've had more problem with incoming mail - specifically being unable to whitelist certain Yahoo servers which get killed by SORB and other spam trackers - than with sending email.

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

#140

Post by pmlnr »

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.

It's nearly always a badly set reverse dns vs mail server helo name difference.
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