What's your setup for your email account these days?
Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
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Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#2Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
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#4About 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?
#5Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#6Dovecot 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?
#7That 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* 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.