11–20 of 122 posts
Unrelated but: what VPS hosts are reliable for email? I've had trouble with Linode being blocked in the past. I'm aware Google Cloud blocks port 25. I haven't tried EC2 but I assume the worst.
I've been using Maddy now for about a month for my email, and it's incredible. The dev says it's not caddy for email – but in my experience, it's certainly been that easy. I've got to write a longer article about this, but self-hosting email is incredibly liberating. I now own my entire digital identity. I can work on open source projects with developers around the world completely while relying only on my own capabi…
It was a traumatizing experience. It rarely worked, all my email went to spam and I absolutely hated the amount of hackery and duct tape required to keep it working. Configuration files, missed emails...
It was so unpleasant, to this day I avoid messing with mail on servers at all costs. I'd much rather pay for Mailgun or some provider.
Lately I've been seeing an uptick of these apps making self-hosted email easier. Mail in a box, Maddy, etc. I will unconditionally support anything that makes doing this easier.
I'm not switching from GSuite, but I'm happy to see progress in the space.
Unrelated but: what VPS hosts are reliable for email? I've had trouble with Linode being blocked in the past. I'm aware Google Cloud blocks port 25. I haven't tried EC2 but I assume the worst.
This is a great initiative. The last time I remember setting up a mail server using Postfix or Dovecot was around 2015. It was a traumatizing experience. It rarely worked, all my email went to spam and I absolutely hated the amount of hackery and duct tape required to keep it working. Configuration files, missed emails... It was so unpleasant, to this day I avoid messing with mail on servers at all costs. I'd much ra…
I've been using Maddy now for about a month for my email, and it's incredible. The dev says it's not caddy for email – but in my experience, it's certainly been that easy. I've got to write a longer article about this, but self-hosting email is incredibly liberating. I now own my entire digital identity. I can work on open source projects with developers around the world completely while relying only on my own capabi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mail is one of the easier things to backup IMO. It's just a directory if you use Maildir. Just tar it up with other important stuff on your filesystem you probably also want to save. No need for fancy "streaming SQLite replication."
I recall Litestream citing a ~3s streaming replication lag. What replication lag could tar-on-a-cronjob reasonably achieve for a moderate 5GB mail store? Even tar'ing isn't trivial: I've seen casing of people having missed preserving file permissions, making restoration difficult.
But proper backup tools like rsnapshot, borg, etc. pp. have no trouble correctly backing up email servers even at 10 or 100 times your mail store size.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recall Litestream citing a ~3s streaming replication lag. What replication lag could tar-on-a-cronjob reasonably achieve for a moderate 5GB mail store? Even tar'ing isn't trivial: I've seen casing of people having missed preserving file permissions, making restoration difficult.
At 5G size you could do something with ZFS and tons of snapshots and zfs send.
(Backups are done by rsnapshot pulling from a snapshot, so we have another copy outside ZFS just in case.)
It is pretty awesome to see new projects that try to improve the user experience for the system admins, for example, the Caddy web server and now the Maddy mail server. I'm not sure whether i'd have been able to set up a mail server the "old fashioned way", seemingly in line with the concerns of the other people here who have tried that more extensively. Somehow, while e-mail is super widespread and works decently for getting text information from place A to place B, it also feels a tad overcomplicated (the different components for sending/receiving mail, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, the sad need for anti virus scanning, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, the similarly sad need for anti spam protection).
That said, the containerized solution above has also worked nicely for me - i'll still probably use GMail/other hosted solutions for personal e-mail stuff and communication, but right now i've already switched over to using my own mail server for all of the automated e-mails that i need, such as from SonarQube and Zabbix, as well as GitLab.
I wonder how it compares in multi account management and spam, phishing, & virus blocking, is it extensible?