61–70 of 209 posts
Migrating to postfix at Hetzner that forwards at home hosted server is not for the faint at heart. Still struggling with the plethora of settings that have to line up with dns and forwarding.
For testing your email settings, internet.nl/test-mail is highly recommended.
I just use FastMail with a custom domain. What's especially nice is that it lets you generate aliases that use the fastmail.com domain. Great for signing up for sites where I don't want them to be able to identify me. This wouldn't work if I was hosting my own email since you'd be able to link all my identities by matching the domain.
Do your emails ever end up in people's spam folders, or bounce outright? Considering this setup for myself
The only issues I've really had are general custom domain & address choice issues:
Choosing to use me@myfullname.tld was not the best idea. A very tiny number of sites stupidly reject the use of a 2 letter username in the email address. Easily solved by setting up an alias of mail@myfullname.tld though. If I were starting over I would have just made mail@myfullname.tld the main address (and I would have aliased male@myfullname.tld). That also makes it a bit easier for humans to read too. Only 2 letters before the @ blends in too much.
Address hiding that many sites do fails to hide anything. Many times when you log into a site, it will display your email address in a way that's meant to avoid people seeing it over your shoulder. But most sites that do that only hide the username. So I'll see things like m*e@myfullname.tld
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 inst…
For the past five years I've been using mail-in-a-box. (http://mailinabox.email) It is generally problem-free, but problems can arise if you host it on a sub-par provider (or provider network).
I highly recommend it!
In the grand scheme of things, I really appreciate this setup. All my domains can contain an infinite number of derived addresses, which makes it possible to control outgoing information. For example, it's easy to detect and eliminate multiple types of spam sources.
I continue to do so for several reasons, hosting multiple domains, ad hoc addresses, etc, but the biggest surprise reason is a completely not email one. It hosts DNS.
I LOVE hosting my own DNS. The first and most important reason is that, unlike all of the other services, there is no delay getting new records on to the net. Until MIAB, the 'will be updated in 20 minutes' thing drove me nuts. It made doing programmer stuff that relied on DNS incredibly annoying. Now, my LetsEncrypt proof is there instantly.
Of course, not being reliant on the good will of Google or having to decide if it's worth another $3.50/month for another address are all good things. But, the other main reason I choose to host my own server is, also why the MIAB guy makes it possible, to cast off the shackles of the corporate overlords.
It is bad to allow a mission critical function to be owned by five big companies. Much like the current consequences of having relied on Twitter for our short form public communication, I see the move to the decentralized Mastodon as similar to my implementation of MIAB. It is, for me, a blow in favor of internet freedom and robustness.
Used to be on a Legacy Google Apps for Domains before they pulled their forced changed to paid accounts.
Mail deliverability has, with some minor exceptions, never really been an issue. These days you need SPF, DMARC, and of course a clean outbound IP reputation, but that's all rather manageable -- biggest deal is setting up strict filtering and rate limits on outbound messages, plus ensuring mailbox passwords can't be brute-forced (complexity rules plus blocking abusive IPs).
The only real recurring issue is people setting up forwarding to gmail.com/outlook.com/whatever, and the target service then becoming temporarily upset due to all the 'spammy' messages being sent: DMARC helps with that up to a point, but not perfectly, and directing users to reverse the mail replication direction (setting up gmail.com to pull, not my server to push) is a common chore.
For the current setup, the biggest headache was finding software with an acceptable webmail and domain setup self-service web interface. Next up was shared access to large mailboxes, Outlook calendar support (which just really can't be done with only CalDAV, even though that should be possible), and (believe it or not) getting 'Drafts' folders to sync across devices.
At the moment, I use the really good Migadu Micro plan.[1] It has very nice limits for the $19/y price (half if you're a student like myself), with a pretty lax and understanding policy. They also care about standards and make an effort for you to configure your domain with all the right records. Even their support was pretty fast and helpful, even in this plan where it's best effort. I am completely satisfied by their service and recommend it to anyone wanting more control over their email, but don't want or can't run their own server.
I've heard great things about FastMail as well. In the end, I think services like these are a great compromise between independence and convenience.