Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to run your own mail server (2017)

c0ffee.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 270 posts

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

#251

Post by GordonS »

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…

I've had a similar experience.

Setting everything up in the first place was a massive pain in the arse, definitely not for the feint hearted (I imagine there are tools/scripts to make it much easier nowadays), but it's been almost plain sailing since.

It's very rare that I have delivery problems, maybe once every year or two, which is roughly the same as through my O365 mailboxes!

Only issue is when there is a delivery problem, there is usually nothing you can do. Some of the block lists have a procedure for removal, many don't.

But after running my own mail server for something like 15 years, I've decided I just don't want the hassle any more (even if it isn't much work), and plan to move everything to O365.

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

#252

Post by wpietri »

pera wrote: post #179
wpietri wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a physical server (at Datacate [1] in Santa Clara), so switching ISPs is not a small undertaking, especially given that I'm only using 1U of space. Last I looked the netblock reputation seemed fine, so I'd only be inclined to switch if I had clear evidence that was the real problem. [1] in this block if it matters: https://rdap.arin.net/registry/ip/198.167.232.0

Yeah, the IP address of your MX looks clean indeed, and your config looks good too... I wonder, have you ever tried sending from @scissor.com instead of @williampietri.com?

I definitely observe the problem on both domains. Maybe less on my name domain, but it's hard to tell.

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

#253

Post by wpietri »

Jaruzel wrote: post #245
huhtenberg wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The BIG problem is Spam. YMMV, but a combination of graylisting, RBL and "sender address valiation" tends to drop inbound spam rate to nearly zero.

I'm currently hosting a spamassassin instance, and route incoming mail via that, however a lot still gets through :(

I'm using SA as well; it's fine for me. My big trick is to route a bunch of stuff right into the spam training system. E.g., when a tagged address I've given out is compromised, that goes right to training. The same goes for spam to random names: also right to SA spam training.

My theory here is that statistically, by the time a spammer tries to send one to an active address, they're likely to have already fed things into the trainer, often multiple times.

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

#254

Post by wpietri »

jimmaswell wrote: post #197
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…

If nobody supports it then why did you choose it?

This sort of snotty reply is one of the reasons I discourage people from using HN.

I chose it 20+ years ago because that's what qmail supported, back when subaddresing was a new idea. Over the ensuing years, most people ended up converging on + as the more common option, but that's only convention, not a standard. And what standard exists wasn't written until 2008: https://tools.https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233ietf.org/ht...

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

#255

Post by wpietri »

throw0101a wrote: post #247
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…

> I've been running my own mail server for 20+ years ... Out of curiosity, where does your MTA live? Do you have a VPS? VM/instance at a cloud provider? ISP with static IP? Other?

I have a physical server colocated with Datacate in Santa Clara. As far as I can tell the address space is good, and I've had the server there for a number of years.

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

#256

Post by aidenn0 »

Karunamon wrote: post #187
aidenn0 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you use Google's SMTP servers.

Judging from some of the experiences upthread, even that isn't enough. Billing messages from google themselves and gsuite-to-gsuite messages getting spammed.

Any source can have some fraction their messages treated as spam; I was just saying that if you take a random IP address and set it up as SMTP, you will have trouble getting any messages through, even if DKIM &c. are setup correctly.

If you send too few messages, you're untrusted.

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

#257

Post by 77pt77 »

zigzaggy wrote: post #194
77pt77 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So if I bought my “name.rocks” I’ll have trouble using that as an email? I was looking forward to “firstname@lastname.rocks” and I never even considered it would be a problem. I’m disappointed

Yes. I'd say way more than half of sites won't accept that as a valid email.

And you'll be flagged for fraud as well.

It's very frustrating.

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

#258

Post by jimmaswell »

wpietri wrote: post #254
jimmaswell wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If nobody supports it then why did you choose it?

This sort of snotty reply is one of the reasons I discourage people from using HN. I chose it 20+ years ago because that's what qmail supported, back when subaddresing was a new idea. Over the ensuing years, most people ended up converging on + as the more common option, but that's only convention, not a standard. And what standard exists wasn't written until 2008: https://tools.https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233iet…

If you took that as snotty then that's on you. Maybe people who can't take every simple question not being a delicately delivered paragraph full of qualifiers should be discouraged from using HN, yeah.

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

#259

Post by linsomniac »

kazinator wrote: post #190
linsomniac wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your recommendation to having your mail not go directly to spam is to run it for a decade? Got it! :-) I run a mail server for a few thousand users that has been going for ~20 years, and have regularly had to spend significant time figuring out adjustments the big mail providers make along the way. Spending a day roughly every year figuring out and implementing countermeasures isn't that bad, when you get paid for…

If you have to do it for your personal mail compared to a few thousand users, the problems will obviously be fewer, because you don't send to as many different destinations as a crew of a few thousand users. > "Just do that for 300 years and your lawn will look like this." My point is that I've never had problems in that decade, not that it took a decade to fix. I think on two or three occasions, mail to a gmail user…

And my point, not to belabor it, is that reputation seems to be a pretty big deal these days, and your experience running a mail server with a decade of reputation may be different than the experience someone has setting up an e-mail server today. :-)

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

#260

Post by derrick_jensen »

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?

It was a .ml domain, wanted to have a play on .ai
Post reply on HN