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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

#111

Post by jrnichols »

scooke wrote: post #103
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…

Without a tech stack it is impossible to self-host email, so, it is the hard part. Just this week I had huge problems with an expected email not reaching either of my gmail or outlook inboxes. It just never came, despite the sender insisting they sent it. This isn't an isolated case. With MXRoute and my own self-hosted email, I'm slowly moving away from the big ones.

" Just this week I had huge problems with an expected email not reaching either of my gmail or outlook inboxes. It just never came, despite the sender insisting they sent it."

That's been the opposite problem for me. I can see my email leaving my client, see it hitting my SMTP server, and I can see Gmail accepting it. The client cannot find the emails. Not in their Spam folder either. I have no issues sending to my test Gmail account or my friends, but new people? Forget it. Google simply loses the email. I"ve tried to contact them to no avail (no surprise) and the usual answer I get from others is "well, just use gmail. nobody self hosts anymore."

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

#112

Post by drpixie »

creshal wrote: post #7
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?

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…

> In some cases, websites weren't even allowing email registration with a self-hosted email.

I've seen that once or twice, but it was because my self-hosted is on a .one domain. There are (not surprisingly) a few organisations out there that validate against the old set of top-level domains (.com, .net, etc, and the country codes). They just won't accept any of the new top-levels as real!!

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

#113

Post by drpixie »

danpalmer wrote: post #22
creshal wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

Your right, but email is never fully reliable. How many times have you lost things into your gmail/outlook/etc's spam folder?

And with the amount of genuine spam being sent FROM GMAIL to my backup gmail address, it's unthinkable to actually check through the spam folder with any regularity.

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

#114

Post by mjl- »

infogulch wrote: post #107

Email servers are notoriously difficult to configure, hence all these solutions ranging from tutorials to "everything included" systems. Recent activity on HN about mail servers: Mox, Poste.io from yesterday [1], Mailinabox, mailcow, ispmail, maddy, stalwart jmap, etc. Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. What I'd like is a "mail reverse proxy" that does all the work to…

> Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful.

There certainly is duplication of effort, but all these systems try to bring something new to the table.

> Why doesn't this exist already?

Because you haven't written it yet? (;

But seriously, I've had a somewhat similar thought. But instead of running a "reverse mail proxy" on a VPS, I was hoping to take a VPS, set up some tunnel magic (with wireguard probably) that forwards all traffic coming in from the internet, intact with original IPs, to my local side of the tunnel, and vice versa. So my local machine just has the same public internet IPs configured as the VPS and all internet traffic is going through the tunnel. So just use a VPS for its IPs. That way my data is not stored at my hosting party. If anyone has set this up already, or thinks this is a bad/good idea, I'd like to hear.

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

#115

Post by muyuu »

infogulch wrote: post #107

Email servers are notoriously difficult to configure, hence all these solutions ranging from tutorials to "everything included" systems. Recent activity on HN about mail servers: Mox, Poste.io from yesterday [1], Mailinabox, mailcow, ispmail, maddy, stalwart jmap, etc. Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. What I'd like is a "mail reverse proxy" that does all the work to…

it's also wasteful in a different way: a lot of effort put towards building on top of a remarkably bad pseudonymous protocol based on anachronistic trust assumptions

from that point of view the refactoring to do is separating identification from transport and storage/lookup - for these things there are very good solutions but there is no cohesive protocol that is solid and widely adopted, and it's unclear if that will happen anytime soon, or ever - rather than just doing away with the mail metaphor in favour of the pager+answerphone metaphor which can be seen as a total overlap as you add features

but you're right that since email is here now and it "works" now, especially from a social perspective, then it makes sense to free up people from silos - what effectively webmail and proprietary messaging/social media are - and perhaps the best way is the toolkit approach you describe which would go about email a bit like git did with version control: establish protocols for the separate aspects of the system and then provide the user with a supervisor command tool, which can be automated to some particular use cases if need be but is flexible enough that it doesn't require one particular setup

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

#116

Post by mjl- »

mjrpes wrote: post #109
creshal wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's my impression as well. I've been wondering about this sort of setup for a while – there's a lot of moving parts in traditional email servers, and projects like poste or univention/zimbra/… that just try to glue these massive stacks together have always been far too fragile and involved for any setup that's smaller than "we can afford a dedicated sysadmin for emailling". The only feature I'd still want is…

It doesn't look like it supports mailbox sharing or public folders, which are very helpful for collaborating in a SMB, especially with shared email addresses (e.g., sales@business.com).

Do you know how this is typically used/configured? Do accounts get this shared account (mailbox(es)/folders with messages) as folders in their own account? So next to your own Inbox and Trash, you would have Sales/Inbox and Sales/Trash? If you delete a message from Sales/Inbox, does it automatically go to Sales/Trash? How is that done? Perhaps IMAP namespaces?

I have figured folks can just add another account (IMAP connection) to their mail client. Either a shared account (e.g. sales@), or account of a colleague. And then the account (mailbox) is shared.

Perhaps it's because webmails are just for a single account and folks would have to have multiple mail browser windows open? Or business folks are just not used to this approach? Or perhaps they want an admin to inject some shared mailbox into an existing account without requiring any user action?

Public folders sound a bit like a mailing list, from what I just skimmed from Exchange documentation. I presume the message flags (Seen/Read) are per-user? So it's more like delivery to each members copy of the public folder, instead of an actual shared folder?

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

#117

Post by mjl- »

berjin wrote: post #105

How does it handle spam filtering? Surely the big mail providers have a network effect going on when one person marks an email as spam it's applied to similar emails.

All per account. If account 1 marks a message (sender) as spam, account 2 is not affected. I am blocking at least one otherwise legitimate company that is incapable of unsubscribing me from the marketing mails (despite talking to their helpdesk). I block them now. But other accounts may want to still see their emails.

If you want to learn who the real bad spammers are, I think you need larger volumes of mail than a self-hoster will gather.

The network effect that mox can use is through a RBL/DNSBL, but then an external DNSBL is doing the learning/analysis and mox just uses it.

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

#118

Post by elric »

infogulch wrote: post #107

Email servers are notoriously difficult to configure, hence all these solutions ranging from tutorials to "everything included" systems. Recent activity on HN about mail servers: Mox, Poste.io from yesterday [1], Mailinabox, mailcow, ispmail, maddy, stalwart jmap, etc. Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. What I'd like is a "mail reverse proxy" that does all the work to…

The idea certainly has merit, but if it doesn't do storage or user management, how can you secure it?

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

#119

Post by infogulch »

mjl- wrote: post #114
infogulch wrote: post #107

Email servers are notoriously difficult to configure, hence all these solutions ranging from tutorials to "everything included" systems. Recent activity on HN about mail servers: Mox, Poste.io from yesterday [1], Mailinabox, mailcow, ispmail, maddy, stalwart jmap, etc. Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. What I'd like is a "mail reverse proxy" that does all the work to…

> Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. There certainly is duplication of effort, but all these systems try to bring something new to the table. > Why doesn't this exist already? Because you haven't written it yet? (; But seriously, I've had a somewhat similar thought. But instead of running a "reverse mail proxy" on a VPS, I was hoping to take a VPS, set up some tunnel…

> all these systems try to bring something new to the table

That's great, I just wish that they all didn't have to hurdle the same (very high) bar before they can get to the "something new" part.

> some tunnel magic that forwards all traffic coming in from the internet ... to my local side of the tunnel, and vice versa

Yes! I considered that too. It'd kinda be like tailscale funnel, which mostly targets web hosting scenarios. Hilariously, they poked fun at the $5/mo vps idea in their article about funnel back in November [1]:

> Yes, you could spin up a $5/month VM somewhere and forward a port from its public internet IP to your tailnet with one line in your rinetd.conf file. But is that fun? Do you really need a(nother) Linux VM in your life?

(we're definitely being called out here lol)

Sadly, funnel wouldn't work in our case because we need an unshared static IP. But that hint about rinetd could help, from the man page [2]:

> it is able to redirect a large number of connections without a severe impact on the machine. This makes it practical to run services on machines inside an IP masquerading firewall.

[1]: https://tailscale.com/blog/introducing-tailscale-funnel/

[2]: https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/rinetd/rinetd.8.en.html

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

#120

Post by infogulch »

elric wrote: post #118
infogulch wrote: post #107

Email servers are notoriously difficult to configure, hence all these solutions ranging from tutorials to "everything included" systems. Recent activity on HN about mail servers: Mox, Poste.io from yesterday [1], Mailinabox, mailcow, ispmail, maddy, stalwart jmap, etc. Many of these systems keep redoing the same work over and over which seems wasteful. What I'd like is a "mail reverse proxy" that does all the work to…

The idea certainly has merit, but if it doesn't do storage or user management, how can you secure it?

Any kind of secure tunnel between the mail gateway and the backing server would work. A wireguard or tailscale tunnel for example.
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