Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#171

Post by quickthrower2 » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 10:24 PM UTC

betaby wrote: post #87

Yes, since ~2008. Yes, sometimes mails go straight to google's 'spam' folder or I get cryptic bounces from MS. Once you have your SPF, DKIM and DNS RTR records it's mostly a smooth sailing. Yes, I'm totally fine with investing 2-4 hours per year troubleshooting delivery issues. I don't by argument "I'm paid $50/hour so I won't", I, in contrast, paid yearly+bonus and outside of 40 hours/week my time is 'free' and I'm…

I agree. Why do people even think to treat hours as fungible? “Time is money” is a criticism of over capitalist thinking, not a playbook!

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#172

Post by throwaway67743 » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 11:16 PM UTC

Running my own mail for 20 years, I've never experienced any of the commonly cited problems re delivery to cartels like Gmail etc, but YMMV there...

Tech wise, in the old days it was sendmail and pine/mutt/etc, more recently courier, these days postfix and dovecot.

I wouldn't ever consider outsourcing something as crucial as email as it's not e2ee and being able to diagnose delivery issues and fix them quickly is very important.

Also related: former mailop

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#173

Post by throwaway67743 » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 11:19 PM UTC

tqwhite wrote: post #66

I 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…

DO is probably the worst choice as they have one of the worst reputations for emitting trash... I drop do entirely and have done for a few years, nothing appears to come from there apart from trash though so I haven't noticed any problems there. Literally anyone else (even ovh these days) would be a better choice for delivery success.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#174

Post by throwaway67743 » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 11:27 PM UTC

traceroute66 wrote: post #125

technothrasher wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That has been on a downward trend for some time thankfully, due to the way things work these days it's much easier and more reliable to hijack a vm or rent one with a stolen card, rpki, urpf and carrier verification means using thieved IP space is a lot of effort these days

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#175

Post by catherd » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 11:43 PM UTC

drdaeman wrote: post #156

catherd wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What client do you currently use? I'm looking for a bearable web client.

Apple’s stock apps on macOS (it’s pretty good, fast, stable, has almost all the features I need) and iOS (sucks but I haven’t found anything better), Thunderbird on Windows and GNU/Linux (sucks badly in terms of performance, but everything else is much worse in some regard). Rainloop for the web, but I almost never use it - it’s a backup option for me, I’m mostly hosting it for friends and family.

We use Rainloop and the 2 biggest issues are almost nonexistent address auto-complete (it will only try to pull addresses from contacts, which nobody bothers setting up any more), and no support for .ics/calendar invites. Have you found a usable solution for either of those?

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#176

Post by cetinsert » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 12:02 AM UTC

haunter wrote: post #78

Does anyone have experience with Amazon Workmail? Considering moving to there from Gmail

Great experience! Using it with Outlook and iOS Mail. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33906085

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#177

Post by saurik » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 12:30 AM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #141

johnklos wrote: post #94

I 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…

So self-hosting is so easy and problem free, everyone is making up fiction about the problems, and yet in your very first "solution" you tell people to not self-host outbound email at all and to pay money to a third party to solve a lot of the hard parts for you? > 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 o…

I mean, that is explained in the comment you respond to: the value most people are looking for with self-hosting email comes from self-hosting inbound SMTP reception and email storage, not the first hop of outbound SMTP submission for relay.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#178

Post by patwoz » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 12:40 AM UTC

tommica wrote: post #72

patwoz wrote: post #70

Did it for 5 years with mailinabox hosted on a cheap 3€/month vps on OVH with a custom .de domain. But I had severals issues in this time e.g. with mails coming from Office 365 Mails. So I switched 3 months ago to mailinabox.org along with my custom domain. Also paying just 3€/month.

Curious what service you are using, as site for mailinabox.org does not exist.

Uh sorry. Yes, I meant mailbox.org

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#179

Post by johnklos » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 12:54 AM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #143

johnklos wrote: post #94

I 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…

> then pay a company to smarthost your outgoing mail through them. It's a few $ a month, and poof! Poof is right. There goes the primary reason people want to host on their own.

What's the primary reason people want to host on their own, in your opinion?

I know of two primary reasons, and neither disappears because of smarthosting.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#180

Post by t0k0l0sh » Sun, Dec 25, 2022, 1:53 AM UTC

Self-hosted for about 20 years now. Currently running a few VMs in a Hetzner cloud project built with terraform and managed with Ansible - dovecot proxy, postfix and rspamd on the public host, dovecot with encrypted-at-rest storage (mail-crypt) on the private host and another host running monitoring (Prometheus, graylog etc etc)