Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

You just have to keep opening tickets every few days telling them that the previous ticket(s) haven't been addressed. They're dumb.

No.

Yes, postfix+dovecot+sqlgrey+postfixadmin, since about two decades. Well I started out with qmail+vpopmail+courier way back - no one recommends that nowadays I'd wager! My current setup is about 15 years old and takes very little effort to maintain.

Several domains, several aliases, but I'm intentionally the only user. Because if I would hand out aliases to people they'll inevitably start receiving some spam there, that then gets forwarded to the {hotmail, gmail, ...} that they're alased to, and when at those termini it can be subsequently marked as spam. I surmise that that could be bad for my mail server's reputation and that's why I don't hand out aliases. That's just caution. There's plenty signal for the top-10 mail hosters to tune their reputation heuristics to so that that wouldn't happen, but I don't trust that they worry enough to invest smarts in improving the general state of email delivery. The incentives are not there. They're the incumbents, and interoperable federated services were good news when they were starting up (whooo hey we bought Postini and now we're doing this web based office thing where you can send and receive email, come join us in the beta, free forever, promised!" aka GSuite), but now that they're incumbents it's better to stamp out those cooperative federated protocols. Before anyone gets any ideas that you could actually own your own data and and could communicate with people over the internet independently of some FAANG-size corp, you know.

> Which software are you using to push/receive emails on your own servers?

Still using sendmail ;)

> This is valid if all the other parties that you send emails to self host their email servers as well.

I used the word "sitting" deliberately. Of course we can't control the rest of the world's servers, and we can't even fully control those owned by others but rented to us, but we can control our own.

Yes I host my own email infrastructure for my own business and personal use. The "plumbing" is IMO trivial. I have no delivery issues.

The headache is with people who want to do things which aren't in my "acceptable use" envelope. I know there are adversaries out there ranging from the simply venal and self-righteous to the outright evil. That ranges from spam to tracking to phishing to malware delivery; and from scanning for open relays to credential stuffing to SYN attacks and more.

I actively map and target adversary infrastructure (and sometimes the "friendlies" are useful idiots). I use and encourage the use of 1:1 email aliases (I wrote and support TruAlias). I mess with DNS; I mess with L2. So around here if something doesn't work, you'd better ask me or your designated contact if you're expecting it to. There is no privacy around DNS or netflow info on my network.

My support issues are largely people-driven / political, which shouldn't be surprising given the above. However overall the support and IR load is light and the most problematic and chronic interlopers are the self-entitled aaS providers themselves.