The readme mentions spam filtering, but I don't see any mention of virus scanning... does it do that too?
Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
21–30 of 131 posts
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#22When 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?
Email reputation is a complex topic, but generally as long as you • don't use an IP range classified as "consumer" (known dynamic IP DSL/cable ranges) • set up SPF • set up DKIM • don't send actual spam …it generally gets through. Mox is so far the easiest solution for SPF/DKIM I've seen, but if you don't mind spending a weekend tinkering, it should be solveable with any email stack. > In some cases, websites weren't…
I did all of this when self hosting for a few years. It was mostly fine, but for a couple of undelivered emails. Those were just enough that I lost trust in the system and eventually stopped running my own email.
People mostly expect email to be fully reliable. It’s not, but that doesn’t stop people treating it like that. As a result, even if you only fail to deliver 1 in 1000 emails, that could have significant consequences. Gmail et. al have a high enough deliverability rate that most people can get away with treating it as reliable.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t self host, but I think they need to be very aware of how it will change their trust of email.
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#23When 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?
The largest issue is often where you are hosting it – the address/range might not be well trusted due to either how it is categorised (if it is address known to be assigned to residential accounts then all mail may be dismissed as junk from a compromised host without any inspection) or who has used it before you (if using an inexpensive VPS (or dedicated server) provider the addresses you have may have been used by a spammer in the past). I've had very few problems with my home server sending mail, but I'm with an ISP more known for commercial users (so they take keeping their ranges clean seriously, and they aren't listed in IP databases as residential), I've had these addresses for over a decade (back when you could get a /29 fairly easily if not using a cheap ISP) so no one has sent junk from them (actually a friend was infected by something that sent web junk out, but that goes over the primary address not the range the mail service is on), and so forth.
The easiest way to solve this if you aren't as lucky as I am, is unfortunately not a free solution: send via a 3rd party relay such as companies like mxroute offer – you still control your entire mail server, your store all the mail, etc, but someone else deals with final delivery of outgoing mail (a good provider will multiple outgoing feeds themselves and deal with resending in response to some types of rejection, as well as making sure all their outgoing routes are reputation clean). For small volumes this is actually quite cheap, potentially far less expensive than your admin time dealing with delivery failures yourself.
Other common issues are not having SPF records set properly, or not implementing DKIM signing. Both of these are now essential and have been for some time, whether you send directly or via a 3rd party MTA, so if you didn't verify those that could be your issue.
Also, some mail receivers don't trust brand-new domains (the newest domain my main mail server regularly sends for was registered in 2010) so if you tested the mail server with a throwaway domain that could be a significant part of the problem. If you want to use a throwaway domain for testing, at very least wait until after the 5-day “domain tasting” grace period. Also pick a throwaway domain name that is relatively long and otherwise unlikely to have been used before (and unlikely to have ever been used as a from address in junk messages).
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#24When 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.
Can you link to this please? Everything I see seems much more expensive...
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#25The readme mentions spam filtering, but I don't see any mention of virus scanning... does it do that too?
No. I'm not sure, but it feels not feasible to implement that inside mox, so would have to be checked with an external tool. ClamAV springs to mind, but I haven't looked into that topic. If anyone knows what the options are, and how one would integrate, I'm intrested in hearing about it.
In the past decade, I think I've received maybe a handful emails with dodgy attachments. Obiously malicious. It never occurred to me I should implement support in mox. Probably different for settings with non-technical users.
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#26When 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?
Email reputation is a complex topic, but generally as long as you • don't use an IP range classified as "consumer" (known dynamic IP DSL/cable ranges) • set up SPF • set up DKIM • don't send actual spam …it generally gets through. Mox is so far the easiest solution for SPF/DKIM I've seen, but if you don't mind spending a weekend tinkering, it should be solveable with any email stack. > In some cases, websites weren't…
> don't use an IP range classified as "consumer" (known dynamic IP DSL/cable ranges)
How can you tell if the IP you use is or has been in one of those ranges?
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#27Very interesting project. This should be a "Show HN", since the submitter is apparently the developer.
Thanks, added the prefix.
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#28This 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…
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#29Looks good, but since it's a young project I would suggest to anyone interested to consider Mailu [1], which is a mature project and looks easier to configure. [1] https://mailu.io
Mailu, like poste, zimbra, univention, and a dozen other projects like it, suffers from being just a layer of glue scripts and leaky abstractions on top of very complicated dedicated software stacks – dovecot, postfix, rspamd, etc. are all complex beasts on their own, and have 30 years worth of accumulated configuration knobs to fiddle with. Postfix and dovecot in particular are also service orchestration frameworks…
> nor do the authors care about "this silly new fad"
In fairness, if you have chosen a platform that potentially introduces its own issues that isn't their problem unless they want it to be.
A friend of mine has a project out there that only has official builds and build instructions for plain debian-based Linux, and he finds demands for direct docker support to be irritating (far worse than demands for a supported native Windows build ever were). And demand is the right word: many don't just ask, and some seem to get personally offended when he responds that he doesn't use docker much himself so wouldn't be comfortable offering support for it directly.
Re: Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Email reputation is a complex topic, but generally as long as you • don't use an IP range classified as "consumer" (known dynamic IP DSL/cable ranges) • set up SPF • set up DKIM • don't send actual spam …it generally gets through. Mox is so far the easiest solution for SPF/DKIM I've seen, but if you don't mind spending a weekend tinkering, it should be solveable with any email stack. > In some cases, websites weren't…
I did all of this when self hosting for a few years. It was mostly fine, but for a couple of undelivered emails. Those were just enough that I lost trust in the system and eventually stopped running my own email. People mostly expect email to be fully reliable. It’s not, but that doesn’t stop people treating it like that. As a result, even if you only fail to deliver 1 in 1000 emails, that could have significant cons…
This sums up the problem quite nicely.
IMO, what needs to happen is for people to see the 1 in 1000 as a problem with Gmail et al. rather than a problem with someone hosting their own STMP server.
Generally speaking, people I know who self-host their email do not have problems. However, inevitably there is the 1 in 1000. IMO, unreached recipients using Gmail et al. are likely to see the problem as with the self-hosted sender, not their own third party email provider.
One idea is to have a backup for emergencies. That is, a Gmail user could have an alternative, self-hosted means of receiving email on port 587 or 2525. By default, this mail drop accepts mail from no one. When there's a 1 in 1000 problem, the recipient could add the sender to a list of acceptable senders, either temporaily or permanently. The sender can then use the alternative instead of Gmail.