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Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

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Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#1
I often see comments about how it's a bad idea or not practical or whatever in 2022, so I'm curious what others do here. Do you run a mailserver/host email accounts on your domain? Use a free service like Gmail or Hotmail? Go with a paid setup like ProtonMail or FastMail? A sort of combined setup where you host your email on another service but have it tied to your domain?

What's your setup for your email account these days?

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#4
About a third of my domains are on Fastmail for family members to use and for emailing businesses that would spam-flag VPS CIDR blocks. I've taught family members to create aliases for email canaries so they can nullify companies that sell or leak their address.

About a third just point to my name servers and accept email for my domains and most of the popular email domains to give spammers a feeling of accomplishment and to pre-populate ISP DNS caches. Those servers just dump the email into a single flat file. I use these for sending to known malicious entities or when I need a throw-away temporary email address. I just grep out what I need from the text file.

The remainder of my domains just point to non-routable public addresses.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#5
I self host my email. From the very start I had no problems with being rejected. What I have noticed is some companies won't _send_ to me but it's rare so it's not worth paying for hosting service. It really hasn't been very complicated. In the last 3 years I've done it has broken twice.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#6
Primary mailserver at home. Secondary MX in a VM at one of the services; it only stores mail if primary is down, otherwise relays immediately.

Dovecot and Postfix, SpamAssassin and ClamAV; greylisting, SPF and DMARC but not DKIM. I handle mail for my family, some friends, and a few mailing lists.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#7
Using fastmail atm, but going to migrate to my server eventually (because I like to tinker with servers in my spare time). I'm using mail mostly to receive email, so sending mail reliably is not a priority for me.

That said, I used to host my mail server for a while and my mail always went to Gmail inboxes. My recipients don't use some exotic providers like outlook or yahoo, so it was pretty smoooth for me. I know that people have issues with self-hosting mail, so may be it was just luck for me.

My opinion is that as long as you correctly configured stuff on your side, it boils down to IP history and reputation. So buy VPS from some expensive provider in a reputable country (so spammers are unlikely to host in this provider), ensure that received IP is clean (and its subnet is clean), set up DNS, keep it running for few months and it should be good.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#8
I host at a couple of levels:

* Mail in a Box for a bunch of low-volume domains, hosted on a major cloud provider VM. Total SMTP volume ~2k outbound emails a month. This was previously hosted on my own server in a datacenter.

* Plesk/Postfix for a higher volume domain tied to a nonprofit, SMTP relayed out through Amazon AWS. Total SMTP volume ~100k emails a month. Likely moving this to a standalone Mail in a Box installation as well.

Neither has given me any deliverability issues, but I did take the time to register with Google Postmaster, Microsoft's similar service, etc. The only problem I ever encountered was a spammer getting hold of a transactional account last year for about a week -- Google put a hard bounce on not just the server IP but also all domains tied to it. Took about 2-3 weeks before they decided to trust it again.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#9
Yes. At a VPS for the last decade with my own domain. Postfix and dovecot using the ispmail tutorials. SPF and DKIM, no DMARC. Virtual user Maildir storage style. It is only for me. No web mail interface, only imap. The first few years there was a problem with MS Office365 but I managed to get de-listed within a day. I can't remember my last problem. I migrated to Debian 10 in 2019.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#10
I'm still running an older Postfix. Mostly incoming but a few outgoing. Have SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured. My sent mails don't go to Spam except for some times on o365. That issue is well documented, even MXRoute has that issue.
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