Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

I wouldn't go back to use something else, what I much prefer: - I'm in control of my email address which is at the center of most of digital life. None of the big provider are up to the task, they do not care at all about me, they do not care at all about the impact of their mistakes (if they decide to block me). - I can manage my own backups much more easily - I can monitor and troubleshoot (with a 3rd party you are totally blind when something doesn't work) - I trust myself not applying any censorship (hotmail and gmail will take the decision to make email based on spam assumption disappear without any visibility from the user)

The downside: - Depending on where you host your system, you can have some issue due to ip reputation. It is something to be careful with before setting up a server - It requires a fair amount of testing, with different providers to ensure that your emails are delivered. - It takes a bit of time. Not too much, but it is still a commitment as, when it goes down, it's quite problematic.

To make it do what I want, the mail configuration is a bit complicated. Well it is for me, doing it once every 2+ years and forgetting most of how it all works in the meantime. Presumably it's not complicated compared to large-scale setups or for people who do this as their main job.

Upgrading the OS every 2+ years is a pain, because there tend to be quite a few configuration file changes in the new OS, sometimes different software packages, I have to review everything well enough to understand it, then merge my own changes from the previous setup. And in fact the last time I tried the upgrade failed anyway, I don't know why. Very possibly nothing to do with my mail setup though.

So I've concluded that for OS upgrades it's probably as quick to install on a new VM and reconfigure everything from scratch. That takes me me about a day in total, working from my bad notes, comparing the old and new systems, copying data files etc. Which does not seem like a good way to do things, but it does mean I end up with a clean installation. Also I've been able to switch the underlying VM, so now I'm on the allegedly faster/cheaper ARM instead of Intel architecture. That would not have been possible otherwise, because the OS and application software binaries are different for the different architecture. Also the underlying SSDs are the newest types, and the latest ones are allegedly faster/cheaper.

I have seriously considered trying to script the setup or updates somehow. But I think there are enough changes in the OS between upgrades that for a single system it's just not worthwhile. I'd have to review and fix the scripts, then run them once, then not use them for another 2+ years. Plus learn the tool (Ansible?). Plus I would guess some of my configuration changes are not common so I'd probably be writing custom stuff for the tool as well.

And... I almost never have problems with it. As far as I know mail is sent and received reliably, and for years the server almost never went down. More recently it did hang a few times, though I don't know why. But I suspect it was because the wimpy VM just gets overloaded sometimes. It's not easy to find the reason though, and I didn't want to spend much time on it. Also since that happened I've upgraded from Ubuntu 20.04, and for whatever reasons, it's been fine so far.

Whether this is all worthwhile or not I'm not really sure nowadays. Originally for me it was to learn about the mail software, also because some software I wrote for an older project did a lot with email, so I had a kind of professional interest. Also I wanted to use my own domains and be independent of an ISP. Plus I sometimes use the VM for other things, such as a rarely used OpenVPN server in the past, replaced with Wireguard now. Also technical experiments sometimes. And if I could think of anything worthwhile to have on a website I would use it for that.

But if you just wanted easy and cheap email with your own domain(s), I think the best way could be a "traditional" hosting service. Compared to what I'm doing, you could get far better performance, storage space, bandwidth, backups, reliability, maybe security, everything else. And probably more cheaply, with near zero time and effort and hassle, and without having to be try to be a biennial mail configuration expert. Plus if there were any problems the hosting company would fix them, or provide support for you.

So for most people I think it's difficult to justify running your own mail server. There'd have to be some specific reason. Which might just be that you want to!

Dovecot and the postfix submission port (587) are only accessible internally, or through my home wireguard VPN.

Rspamd catches just about all junk mail. I might have one or two messages a week slip through. Moving messages to/from the Junk folder trains Rspamd to recognize spam/ham.

Make sure the IP of your mail server has reverse DNS in place, and set up SPF/DMARC records and DKIM signing, and you should be fine. I've been doing this for a decade and never had any problems.

I do maintain a separate, paid email account at a commercial provider for things like banking. In case I die, I don't want my poor wife to deal with my crazy email setup.

This topic always brings up so many hysterical naysayers, I almost wonder if some are paid Gmail shills!