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After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

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Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#451

Post by kazinator »

dn3500 wrote: post #433
SoftTalker wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your ISP can log and analyze all SMTP traffic if they want to, whether it's being processed by their mail relays or not.

Well sure, but if you're worried about traffic analysis you've got bigger problems. The difference here is that if you relay through your ISP they can read the contents of your messages. If you don't, they can't.

But this is the fault of the party you'd like to connect to; they are the ones refusing your direct SMTP connection because your IP address smells funny so that you have to resort to forwarding.

Maybe it's possible to work things out with particular such destinations. If there are certain parties to whom you'd like to send mail more securely, maybe they can give you an account on their SMTP server.

To everywhere else you go through your SMTP provider.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#452

Post by josephcsible »

waz0wski wrote: post #449
arriu wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m genuinely interested. Where would you recommend a newcomer starts?

There's alot that goes into a mail server stack, but it's no more complicated than k8s or other stacks these days. My preferred setup is rspamd/postfix/dovecot/roundcube. The docs are good and the mailing lists are active & archived for easy searching For a pre-packaged mailserver environment, take a look at mailcow or mailinabox https://mailcow.email https://mailinabox.email/ There's a variety of ansible/chef/puppet…

> it's no more complicated than k8s

That's not really saying much.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#453

Post by zanny »

arriu wrote: post #393
teddyh wrote: post #147

E-mail is complicated, sure. But I’ve had it up to here with people who give up running their own server and then go on to vastly exaggerate how infeasible it is, in order to placate their own conscience. It’s not that they’ve gotten tired of doing it, oh no; (they say,) it’s entirely the fault of Google, Microsoft, etc. who’ve made it literally impossible to run your own e-mail server. Except it’s not impossible – l…

I’m genuinely interested. Where would you recommend a newcomer starts?

I've been self hosting my own email on a Dell Poweredge for just over a year now, if you want my smtpd, dovecot, and rspamd confs I'll share them :x

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#454

Post by cma »

jasode wrote: post #21

The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want instead of self-hosting a server at home. Same philosophy for exposing a your personal blog of html files or content like mp4 videos. The sweet spot is to focus on buying a domain name you control. Then let Amazon S3, or C…

> The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want instead of self-hosting a server at home.

So, mandatory third-party doctrine/warrantless surveillance.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#455

Post by jhugo »

yomkippur wrote: post #101
zahllos wrote: post #71

I'm on 12 years of self hosting email and counting. Once every so often, I do end up being blocked, usually by Outlook and once by Yahoo. I'm in their 'sender program' and they still don't actually bother to contact postmaster@, but a few emails is usually enough to unblock the block within 24h. Agree with a sibling comment that many major providers fail to operate the SPF/DKIM/DMARC tools they insist you do. Each to…

was just gonna ask how you would handle DKIM and SPF stuff. Hetzner? Digitalocean?

Find a clueful small provider, local to you if possible. On huge providers like Hetzner and DO, you are guaranteed to have spammers as neighbours some of the time, even if the provider rapidly shuts them down. On the other hand, a good-quality small provider may rarely if ever host spammers.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#456

Post by jhugo »

jwr wrote: post #250

I've been hosting my mail for 20+ years now, with minor issues. I guess I've been lucky. Reading the comments here makes me incredibly sad. Every answer that tells me to use a provider misses the point. The Internet was created so that there could be many independent nodes, not so that everybody has to rely on one of several blessed providers. I should be able to run my own E-mail. The real problem is lack of incenti…

Also 20+ years, only very minor issues. The spam situation has gotten much better over that time, too. This topic comes up every so often on HN and I feel like the "never self-host, it's guaranteed to be a disaster, you have to use a centralised provider" crowd are just louder. Self-hosting my mail isn't something I think about much or talk about much. It's so obvious to me that it's worth doing, and it's extremely low effort.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#458

Post by jhugo »

neop1x wrote: post #319
jwr wrote: post #250

I've been hosting my mail for 20+ years now, with minor issues. I guess I've been lucky. Reading the comments here makes me incredibly sad. Every answer that tells me to use a provider misses the point. The Internet was created so that there could be many independent nodes, not so that everybody has to rely on one of several blessed providers. I should be able to run my own E-mail. The real problem is lack of incenti…

I have also been self-hosting email for 15 years and only had couple of problems at the beginning, mainly until my IP got enough reputation. I have been hosting it on a bare metal Supermicro server in a proper datacenter, though. It has reverse-DNS, SPF, DKIM, TLS, MTA-STS and even DANE with DNSSEC (on a self-hosted BIND but that's another story). It is implemented using Exim, Dovecot, SpamAssasin, DNSBL and Roundcub…

> I have been hosting it on a bare metal Supermicro server in a proper datacenter, though.

This is a key difference. Many people who have a bad time self-hosting mail set up with a minimum-effort major provider like Hetzner or DO — you're guaranteed to have spammers as neighbours some of the time, and other networks will behave accordingly when deciding whether to accept your mail.

A real server in a proper datacentre is great — I do the same — but as a lower-cost option a virtual server with a small, clueful provider who knows their customers also works just as well.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#459

Post by tempestn »

xanaxagoras wrote: post #233
Animats wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers. Yes. My outgoing email goes out via Sonic's SMTP server, with the SPF records to allow it to have a source address of my own domain. Incoming email goes to my own domains and gets forwarded. This seems to be trouble-free. The domain is on a cheap shared hosting account. I'm not running a server. I own the domain, and not though the hosting company, so I…

I do this too with a different provider whose whole business is relaying for self hosters. I have had exactly 0 problems since I started a couple of years ago. Its kind of perfect.

Which provider is this? I'm thinking of switching to this middle ground option too.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#460

Post by hardwaresofton »

For those who might choose to run their own email these days, you don't have to postfix + dovecot:

https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy

https://blitiri.com.ar/p/chasquid/

These options are much easier to set up, will do things like generate DKIM for you, etc.

I talk about this a lot[0]. There are positively awesome tools for email out there.

[EDIT] - Since I'm repeating myself I've collected all the options into a post[1] I can just link to.

[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[1]: https://vadosware.io/post/its-never-been-easier-or-harder-to...

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