No, I pay fastmail [1] to do it all for me. I am reading in the comments that a lot of people have success with self-hosting, and maybe I will look into it someday when I am not busy every hour of every day studying chemical engineering, but for now I am happy to pay £50/yr to have someone else deal with hosting, clean IP addresses, DNS/SPF/DKIM, or whatever else is necessary to make sure my emails land in people's inboxes.
Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
121–130 of 209 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#122I hosted my own mail for years. I stopped just due to inflation. I have been cutting every single cost that I can. I already pay for iCloud+ and it now supports custom domains and the like and has encryption, so I moved my email over.
If I wasn’t trying to trim every possible cost currently, I would still selfhost. It’s trivial if you have any sysadmin/syseng experience and a little time for setup. IME, the main thing that trips people up has already been mentioned. You need SPF, PTR, and DKIM records to get delivery to big providers. You can usually request to be removed from blacklists if your IP was flagged before you got it.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#123I 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…
Do you have any services you'd recommend to smarthost outgoing mail?
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#124Been running my own email server since January 2000. Most of that time, it's been running postfix, courier etc. I also run spamassassin, have reverse DNS set up etc. No issues but then I also have few users receiving e-mail - about 10, including myself.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#125I 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…
> or the reputation of your IP is poor I'd add that it's not just the reputation of your IP, but the reputation of your whole /24 block. That seems to be where a lot of filtering based on reputation takes place. I've got my corporate email server on a VPS (running FreeBSD with exim) with a hosting company that cares about its reputation (and charges a bit more for it) and email delivery is never a problem. I've also…
> but the reputation of your whole /24 block. That seems to be where a lot of filtering based on reputation takes place.
That is due to the prevalence of what is known as Snowshoe Spam.
Spammers get old of (or infiltrate) large net blocks and then spread out their spamming across the entire range.
The extreme version of Snowshoe Spam is known as Hailstorm Spam. For fairly obvious reasons ... spammers get hold of (or infiltrate) a large netblock, intensively abuse the hell out of it and then move on.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#126I gave up 5 years ago after running qmail for 15 years, I just didn't want to deal with the spam anymore, it constantly needed some adjustments.
I use one of these domain+email only webhosters, doesn't cost much more than the domain itself and they do a better job than I did in my spare time. I still get spam but it's maybe 5 mails per day and I have catchall on a 20 year old domain.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#127I 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…
Do you have any services you'd recommend to smarthost outgoing mail?
Most service providers don't advertise anything they call "smarthost", but most that do email and that have good reputations will know what you're asking for if you contact their sales. I've recommended Linode and Panix before.
Be sure to search for "smarthost" in quotes, because "smarthosting" is a marketing term.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#128Yup, OpenBSD + OpenSMTPD off a wholesaleinternet dedicated box, for roughly a dozen domains. Previously, Postfix and/or qmail. If anyone's got any tips or contacts for getting off of Microsoft's (live.com, outlook.com, hotmail.com ,etc) blacklist, I'd be much obliged. Their webform for such matters goes nowhere, and postmaster@ goes unanswered. It apparently has to do with the ASN of my hosting provider, but I've bee…
I think I had that issue with them one time and used the following to get it fixed IIRC: https://sender.office.com/Delist/
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#129I use an outgoing postfix server if that's the question. It has the same IP from hetzner for > 7 years and emails seem to be delivered most of the time, at least i dont get complaints about them. No special setup just SPF
Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?
#130I 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.
I'd say if enough people share this sentiment, then there are legitimate problems in self-hosting email. I don't think deliverability is a made up problem. Differing complexities can contribute to one person thinking it's easy, and another knowing it's not.
Both perspectives may be entirely correct, but the devil is in the details. It seems more right to say that in general, self-hosting email is hard, rather than act like it's easy because you figured it out and everyone else running into issues is just inexperienced/dumb/not good enough. Chances are, those folks were dealing with more complexity than you have.