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Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

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Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#11

Post by liotier »

c0l0 wrote: post #2

This project's scope is rather impressive, and from what I've gleaned from skimming its docs, it might be the perfect solution for people who want to self-host email. It tries to have most of the advanced/difficult things (like getting DKIM set up right) taken care of for the postmaster, as far as that is possible within a single application. I love that it will print the DNS records you'll need to set up in your zon…

> If I were to start over my personal email setup (postfix with postscreen, dovecot with fts, opendkim, amavis/spamassassin), I sure would try it with this.

I am tempted to give that sort of thing a try, as successor to the franken-"postfix with postscreen, dovecot with fts, opendkim, amavis/spamassassin" contraption (actually Courier, not to mention LDAP, greylisting, a couple webmails, OCR, blacklists etc.) that we have been maintaining for two decades in service of friends & family.

But, for all its flaws, once put in production that setup on Debian packages Just Works - with upgrades and distribution version jumps handled almost flawlessly. I doubt that any of the new generation of integrated "mail things in a box" products that pop up since a couple of years have anywhere near that staying power. Does someone here know some that put long-term maintainability at the top of their priorities ? It seems to me that they all optimize for quick onboarding.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#12

Post by mjl- »

mattbee wrote: post #8
c0l0 wrote: post #2

This project's scope is rather impressive, and from what I've gleaned from skimming its docs, it might be the perfect solution for people who want to self-host email. It tries to have most of the advanced/difficult things (like getting DKIM set up right) taken care of for the postmaster, as far as that is possible within a single application. I love that it will print the DNS records you'll need to set up in your zon…

The scope isn't revolutionary - I've used https://mailu.io/ for years for a few 10s of users, and I really like it. I've heard similar good stories from Mailcow users. On a quick skim I couldn't tell what was new relative to these older compose-based solutions but (as co-author of similar solution 10-15 years ago) I'm interested to know!

I suppose it's mostly from a technical perspective: Single code-base, single binary, written in modern language (Go).

There are advantages to an integrated solution: The junk/nonjunk flags you set in your mail client are used to assess incoming email (based on full sender/domain/orgdomain/spf/dkim/ip/ipsubnets). I'm not sure how common/feasible that is with solutions that combine mail server components. I've used postfix & dovecot before mox, I admittedly didn't closely look into it but assumed that combo cannot do that.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#13

Post by callesgg »

Lucasoato wrote: post #4

When I tried a similar project, every email I sent from a self-hosted email server were considered spam from Gmail. In some cases, websites weren't even allowing email registration with a self-hosted email. Is there any general advice about avoiding such problems?

You need to get a proper self owned ip range with your own WHOIS info for your mail server.

On google I found that one can get a IPv4 /30 subnet for about 11 USD a year.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#14

Post by scandox »

callesgg wrote: post #13
Lucasoato wrote: post #4

When I tried a similar project, every email I sent from a self-hosted email server were considered spam from Gmail. In some cases, websites weren't even allowing email registration with a self-hosted email. Is there any general advice about avoiding such problems?

You need to get a proper self owned ip range with your own WHOIS info for your mail server. On google I found that one can get a IPv4 /30 subnet for about 11 USD a year.

Not a huge amount of hosting companies support Bring Your Own IP do they?

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#15

Post by mattbee »

creshal wrote: post #10
mattbee wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scope isn't revolutionary - I've used https://mailu.io/ for years for a few 10s of users, and I really like it. I've heard similar good stories from Mailcow users. On a quick skim I couldn't tell what was new relative to these older compose-based solutions but (as co-author of similar solution 10-15 years ago) I'm interested to know!

What's revolutionary is that mox implements the entire stack itself as tightly coupled monolith. With mailu and everything else you get a gargantuan stack of half a dozen massive, enterprise scale servers that are held together with duct tape and prayers. They can scale out to hundreds of thousands of users, but if anything breaks they expect there to be dedicated sysadmin staff to fix it, and gluing leaky abstractio…

Ooo that's really cool and I'd like an excuse to try it. I had a career in duct tape and prayers so very comfortable in that domain :)

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#17

Post by p4bl0 »

The project looks cool! However, I think the hard part of self-hosting email is not the tech stack, it's getting email delivered to your recipients using Google or Microsoft severe email servers. It's hard to rent a server that IP address is not in a block that big email providers consider suspicious already or will soon. And any mishaps can get you locked out and you need manual intervention to be allowed again.

I used to self-host years ago but I've abandoned the idea now.

Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server

#19

Post by mjl- »

p4bl0 wrote: post #17

The project looks cool! However, I think the hard part of self-hosting email is not the tech stack, it's getting email delivered to your recipients using Google or Microsoft severe email servers. It's hard to rent a server that IP address is not in a block that big email providers consider suspicious already or will soon. And any mishaps can get you locked out and you need manual intervention to be allowed again. I u…

I've not really had those issues. A temporary block a few times, but that gets resolved.

FWIW, with mox, I prefer not to rely on blocklists (centralized!). Incoming mail is first checked with reputation of the sender. This reputation is only per account. So one accounts junk-classification doesn't affect another accounts. Only for new senders, and without conclusive signals, would a DNSBL be used. The result is that you can keep communicating with folks you've been communicating with for years, even if their IP is on a blocklist.

I wonder if the large providers are doing something like this as well. I suspect many mail servers use a DNSBL early in an SMTP session.

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