It's the only way to do mailing lists without spending tens of thousands a month (once you're at a certain amount of recipients)
Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
91–100 of 209 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#92I used to in the late 90s early 2000s, but it became impractical. I also maintained one as part of my job in the 2000s, and it became obvious that the amount of upkeep/time was not worth it just to host it yourself. The main headache? Anti-spam. A lot of IP ranges are just outright broadly blacklisted (e.g. residential IPs, some hosting services), but also a lot of individual IPs reused by hosting providers got black…
Self-hosting email for over 20 years, I will say most of what you stated is either greatly exaggerated or grossly factually incorrect.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#93I do. For many years I have run a Mail in a Box server hosted on Digital Ocean. I like it very much and have had no problems. MIAB is a wonderful piece of scriptware. The guy promises to follow best practices in all things and, as best I can tell, he delivers. I have rarely had any problem with deliverability or anything else. I continue to do so for several reasons, hosting multiple domains, ad hoc addresses, etc, b…
This is off topic but are you able to go further into how you're doing DNS or is there perhaps a jumping off point that you can direct me to? Oddly fascinated by it and you make compelling points.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#94I run my own email.
I have my own physical servers, that I built and tested myself, that I'm colocating. They handle both incoming and outgoing, and I've been doing it for so long that there is no previous reputation for the IP addresses I use.
In spite of how vehemently some people, Reddit's /r/sysadmin, as an example, want you to NOT host your own and use issues like deliverability as reasons, it's really not hard at all. It's super simple to refute all the major points they make, because they're so painfully weak that anyone that believes them may actually not have the aptitude to do it, and therefore shouldn't be telling others to not do it.
1) The primary issue brought up is deliverability. If you don't have a static IP, or you don't have control over your reverse DNS PTR, or the reputation of your IP is poor, then pay a company to smarthost your outgoing mail through them. It's a few $ a month, and poof! Problem solved.
2) There is no problem 2! Incoming email is incredibly straightforward. Even if you're on a residential network that blocks incoming port 25, you can pay for a VPS or something like that on a public address and port forward to your mail server.
Why make a distinction between simply hosting your email with a VPS and doing this? Well, one of the primary reasons for people hosting their own email is being able to possess your own email - that is, your email isn't sitting unencrypted on a server that you don't control.
I've even run an email server in my car while driving across the country, just to show how easy it is. It uses tinc to forward a public address and had no issues with email in either direction :)
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#95I've been hosting my own email for 20 years.
I started on grokthis.net, they got acquired by Rackspace, stuck w/ rackspace longer than I should, groomed an elastic AWS IP for a year, got reverse DNS Mapping on it, and it's been pretty good.
Years ago, I was blocked once a year, and have not really seen much deliverability issues. More recently, either due to the reputation, or AWS being more diligent in blocking abusers, or blocklists being more focused, I have not had many if any issues. DKIM, SPF, DMARC all setup help.
Rspamd, postfix, dovecot, and roundcube are the tools I use to manage it, and it works for my pretty light load. There was a fun incident early on where my Bank did not send a 'Date: ' header (which is legal, per spec), but an rspamd default rule scored that as a high spam signal.
It's helped me learn about SMTP and all the related tech, and for someone who's in systems + operations, it's not that heavy a lift to do on the off time.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#96I 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.
> 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. I love this feature so much. It also integrates into 1Password and you can automatically create a masked email on any signup. I exclusively use it now. It's awesome
Yes I love that integration too. Pretty much all of my aliases have been set up using 1password’s interface that integrates into signup forms.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#97Someone change my mind but I find hosting your email to be risky. I could lose my domain through social engineering or just by being in a coma and there is 0 grace period so if someone registers I lose everything.
You've never heard of pre-paying for up to ten years?
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#98Installing a working e-mail server takes a few minutes in a terminal, and you are basically ready to send and receive e-mail out-of-the-box, even from a laptop if you wish. Only thing you need is setup SPF records and other similar small-effort requirements, and then your e-mail should reach the inbox rather than the spam folder on must proper services. If you do have multiple users, then you also need to protect the…
"Some hosting providers has insecure server images. E.g. Ubuntu where the root user has no password, since, as they might argue: "you login with key file on SSH anyway""
Ubuntu is not insecure regarding root user access.
Reference
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/security-users/11881
"This does not mean that the root account has been deleted or that it may not be accessed. It merely has been given a password hash which matches no possible value, therefore may not log in directly by itself."
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#99Hosting it myself on legacy system for 25years now. 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.
ssh -g with keys is super simple.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#100I have two custom domains for email. Used Fastmail for them for several years, but now have both in iCloud Mail through the custom domains support that comes with Apple’s iCloud+ product. This support was pretty rough-edged a year ago, but has improved sufficiently that it’s now worth saving the $50/year for Fastmail (one domain was only an alias, so I didn’t have to pay for two accounts).