How to run your own mail server (2017)

There is also no need to perpetuate the fear of running your own email. Decentralization of core internet services helps us all, not just the person doing it. So to anyone seriously interested and willing to learn, I highly recommend running your own email servers.

If you expect 100% delivery rate, you won't necessarily get that, no matter who is running your email infrastructure. At multiple companies, I've seen email end up in spam even though it is sent from gmail-hosted company account to gmail-hosted company account. So that's the bar you want to meet or beat and beating it is not hard.

From ~7 years experience now, I don't observe any problems with email delivery. I don't do anything special. I use postfix, it is well configured and everything works fine. I host several personal domains and a couple small business domains.

And by doing so I avoid giving google the power to cut me off from email because some arbitrary ML gone bad.

> I mostly just shrug if some big advertising/surveillance company's email system won't deliver my mail, I just won't email that person.

Because that changes the tone of the opening paragraphs significantly:

> Luckily, running your own mail server is not as daunting as many would have you believe.

Sure, if you can afford to shrug off deliverability issues to major e-mail providers. Then it is, I daresay, a walk in the park!

gmail spam filtering is quite bad, in both directions. Legit email goes to spam (even when sent from gmail itself) and spam does get through.

The basic open source tools are actually very, very good at it. I get about 0-2 spams a month, everything else is caught by either my postfix configuration or by spamprobe. And I never get legit email in my spam spool.

This is a much better success rate than what I observe at my gmail account.

I redirected my gmail account to forward all emails to this new domain, and changed all my account emails to theservicename@chrisdone.com e.g. for github it’s git@chrisdone.com. Once I’m done, Gmail won’t be receiving any new mail.

It has SPF which has captured most spam. I haven’t implemented sending yet. I thought this would be a problem initially, but after a year I’ve realized I rarely send personal email out. But I’ll do it one day just for completeness.

I’ve found two bugs of my server, which were easy to debug because mail sending is very robust. I fixed the bug, and the sender server tried again the next day automatically.

I did it for exactly the same reasons as the author, to control my own data. I wrote my own because existing open source offferings are silly complicated, but receiving mail is not.

Duta is easy to deploy with docker machine and DigitalOcean. My current setup has been deployed like this. It connects to a managed DO Postgres database, which runs separately, has monitoring and backups, so it’s easy to redeploy the mail server without worrying about losing my data.

That leaves you with either using some protocol that already exists (IMAP or now JMAP as another persion mentioned in the thread) or coming up with my own.