I love MIAB, but their insistence that the mail server is also the primary DNS server for any hosted domains is beyond irritating.
I don't think "insist" is the right word here. They certainly push for it but they also make using your own DNS really easy.
You can just head over to the "External DNS" page where MIAB will tell you what DNS entries you need and what each entry does. Then you just copy the DNS entries you need.
I love MIAB, but their insistence that the mail server is also the primary DNS server for any hosted domains is beyond irritating.
I don't think "insist" is the right word here. They certainly push for it but they also make using your own DNS really easy. You can just head over to the "External DNS" page where MIAB will tell you what DNS entries you need and what each entry does. Then you just copy the DNS entries you need.
You're right; I was being too broad in my critique.
Intellectually, I don't like domain DNS on the same box; practically speaking? It works and works well -- so well that it's often easier to disable per-domain DNS where my sites are hosted and just point A records over to the sites from MAIB.
I run my own mail server and have never experienced such issues. The important thing is that your mail server is not an open relay and you set up DKIM and SPF. Oh, and never run a mail server with an ip originating in a residential area, you'll get blacklisted almost instantly by virtually any mail provider.
It isn't even necessarily 'residential' IP's. It's IP's that don't have a valid reverse dns, preferably one that is also forward resolvable. Most ISP's won't let you set your reverse DNS on 'residential' connections, so it ends up being a blocker. Now you could set up a vpn tunnel to a vps provider that lets you set your reverse dns, and then things get a bit easier. So prereqs - 1) Valid reverse DNS on your sending…
Anecdotally, I have a valid reverse DNS on my home ISP-provided static IP, and when I tried setting up a mail server I got blacklisted on the spot.
I've had a lot of discussions with technical-minded peers about how the only real options for email on your own domain are fastmail or gsuite, which work out to about the same amount of money for a family of 5+, which is a surprisingly large amount (imo worth it). This looks like something worth combining with alps[0] for easy self-hosted email. I might give it a go and ditch gsuite! [0] https://git.sr.ht/~migadu/alp…
I recently set up simple standard setup (postfix/dovecot/spamassassin) and it works fine. There's small amount of spam, like few mails per week, nothing to worry about. I can receive and send mail just fine. Though I admit that for someone who did not tinker with UNIX for years, configuring this kind of setup might be daunting. Personal mail could be solved by some kind of daemon which provides SMTP, IMAP, built-in s…
I've been running my own mail servers for ~15 years and yes you can run your own, but the biggest issue I've run into is other servers blocking me as spam:
I've had a lot of discussions with technical-minded peers about how the only real options for email on your own domain are fastmail or gsuite, which work out to about the same amount of money for a family of 5+, which is a surprisingly large amount (imo worth it). This looks like something worth combining with alps[0] for easy self-hosted email. I might give it a go and ditch gsuite! [0] https://git.sr.ht/~migadu/alp…
Replace phone number with encoded IPv6. Run mail server on your phone. Would solve a lot of issues.
Not really. The phone is roaming into other networks with different prefixes.
When I last looked into setting up my own email server, I read that your messages ending up in the spam folder was almost inevitable if the receiver is using a major host (Gmail, iCloud etc.) Is that still an issue?
I run my own mail server and have never experienced such issues. The important thing is that your mail server is not an open relay and you set up DKIM and SPF. Oh, and never run a mail server with an ip originating in a residential area, you'll get blacklisted almost instantly by virtually any mail provider.
T-mobile also requires that you match your forward and reverse DNS and run a webserver with a posting address on the domain in order to whitelist your mail server.
These anecdotes are heartwarming but in the end useless as advice. If your mail is getting through it only means that there are no spammers on your network, i.e. you are lucky. Having an abusive mailer on your network (IP subnet, ASN, or even sharing your registrar) could happen at any time, with unknown impact to your IP reputation and deliverability of your mail.
I feel there is a lot of fear mongering around deliverability of emails all over the Internet which is helping the big companies to centralise a thing like email. I have had my own email server sending emails which were not marked as spam. also I have had cases where email from Gmail addresses/ips would be actually spam. I urge everyone to start using their own mail servers so the ecosystem around self hosting emails…
If it wasn't an effective feature for classifying spam, then people wouldn't use it. But, in reality, it's incredibly effective because the only people who want to use residential IPs and rent-a-server IPs for running mailers are criminals and a much smaller population of dorks.
Putting aside issues with sending mail to recipients using third party providers, have you been able to receive mail reliably from (a) senders using third party providers or (b) senders running their own SMTP.