Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

Do you have business class internet at home? I've always found that ports for SMTP are blocked on residential lines

I think it's important to at least own your email domain, so you can keep your address when changing hosts. Hosting myself is too much of a hassle, so I go with PurelyMail. It's wonderfully cheap and works great. Had no issues with delivery so far.

Yes. Using Mailinabox.email on a €3 VPS, since 2016. Have had zero issues with it.

I mostly use aerc but recent versions of Roundcube are pretty slick as well.

used to be also on protonmail for a couple of years. acutally since they started, but i dont like the mobile clients or the bridge. also there had been some shady messaging in the last year (previous discussions on hn). what i also dislike is they cancelled a bunch of pro plans and replaced with way more expensive ones, and i had no way to continue my older plan.

i recently moved to microsoft o365 basic, which is good and also gives the smtp etc, so you get any client to work. The biggest pro i miss is a catch all mail solution, which was amazing for protonmail. i didnt have enough time to tinker with o365 to find out catch all mail so far, everything else it beats protonmail hands down.

I'm self-hosting since 2005, moved from Courier to Postfix/Dovecot/Rspamd to dual server Maddy/Dovecot (replicated)/Rspamd + legacy Postfix (to be scrapped when I find time) setup. I've changed IP addresses and domains over time, and everything was perfectly smooth. Both machines are my own hardware, on residential ISP connections on different continents (with some tunnels for one machine where ISP is less friendly). Have some plans to throw in asymmetric encryption and add some MTAs running on machines outside of my physical control (a VPS or something) - but I'm quite fine with what I currently have.

Maddy instead of Postfix because Postfix configuration gets quite messy with complex virtual users logic. I was trying to refactor it, trying to devise some sort of DSL to make things more bearable - and found myself wishing there'd be something more straightforward. Maddy was a good fit (and it has a modern easy-to-understand codebase that I can hack on it if I need to). It's much smaller and simpler than Haraka, but still has all the features I need, and looks secure (I swept through the source code and found nothing obvious).

Dovecot is a very fine piece of software. I was considering Wildduck, but haven't figured out a contingency plan if I'm going to dislike it in the long run. As long as all my mail is a Maildir (with some extra indexes I can just ditch), I have no worries - I'll always be able to read it. So I've just set up dsync for the failover (in case one of my servers has a network or power outage) and can't be happier.

Once (somewhere in early 2010s) I had a backscatter issue that put me on a couple DNSBLs, fixed that the same hour I've learned of the issue, filled out some forms on RBLs I was listed on, got removed in a couple days.

Delivery-wise, I've had some issues with Outlook (to an extent I've almost set up an "embassy" there, tricking the system into thinking that my domain is hosted with them and using their own MSA for my outgoing mail to Outlook-hosted domains - proof-of-concept had worked, but I haven't really bothered to implement it in practice as they had suddenly started to receive my mail without issues, and this whole idea is a dirty hack), but otherwise email delivers fine. A couple times Gmail put my emails into spam, but mostly everything worked as expected. Not that I send many emails, maybe a couple dozen a year - it's mostly receiving.

I'd say the main problem is lack of decent mail clients.