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Ask HN: Self hosted email, Cloud storage and dovecot

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Re: Ask HN: Self hosted email, Cloud storage and dovecot

#21

Post by mpalfrey »

asne11 wrote: post #12

Not addressing your question, but FWIW: Mail is the one thing I eventually caved on and offload to Microsoft. It's an uphill battle keeping your mail out of Spam folders. You setup DKIM, SPF, etc. according to the latest spec, and at the end of the day, the MS and Google still drop your mail in spam. They simply don't care. Second, the forces and money keeping MS above legally bound 99.9% uptime tower in comparison t…

Exactly the same here. I had email hosted with TSOHost here a few years ago and had no end of problems with bounce backs.

In the end I moved it all to GSuite for a few bucks a month. It's simply worth it to avoid the issues with sender rep.

Re: Ask HN: Self hosted email, Cloud storage and dovecot

#22

Post by a-user-you-like »

necovek wrote: post #8
a-user-you-like wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are volume size limits on my cloud provider, but it sounds like combining multiple ones together might not be a great idea.

It's totally a good idea. There is a different question of whether that provides enough reliability, but that depends on if your cloud provider already offers safety in case of hardware failure for your volumes. Note that even today, with a single volume, if you lose it, you lose all your email. Most cloud providers would provide some resiliency for storage volumes though.

Would you prefer to use ZFS or LVM to handle something like the storage of mail for files which might need to add a volume from time to time?

Re: Ask HN: Self hosted email, Cloud storage and dovecot

#23

Post by citrin_ru »

boisgerault wrote: post #19
citrin_ru wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I self host my email spending a couple hours a month at most. But I have email related experience and if this is a new for you area you will need to learn it spending more time. Risk of being blocked by big players (gmail/O365) is real but IMHO very low if you follow BCP. The main problem is that big companies make it very hard or impossible to contact them to resolve the issue.

Could you elaborate what BCP is? (I am not familiar with the term)

BCP is Best Current Practice, which for email includes at least having Forward-confirmed reverse DNS for mailserver hostname (with the same FQDN in EHLO hostname), SPF, DKIM, DMARC.

I'm sure most people here know about DMARC but there are still a lot of mail senders which either have no DMARC record, or send some messages in a way that either DKIM or SPF or even both fail, or have a syntax error in SPD/DKIM/DMARC DNS records.

On top of this it is good to ensure that your servers doesn't generate email backsatter when possible. Send rate limits is a simple but rarely enforced by small servers way to limit amount of spam which can be send if user credentials or web-app hosted on the same server are compromised.

Re: Ask HN: Self hosted email, Cloud storage and dovecot

#24

Post by necovek »

a-user-you-like wrote: post #22
necovek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's totally a good idea. There is a different question of whether that provides enough reliability, but that depends on if your cloud provider already offers safety in case of hardware failure for your volumes. Note that even today, with a single volume, if you lose it, you lose all your email. Most cloud providers would provide some resiliency for storage volumes though.

Would you prefer to use ZFS or LVM to handle something like the storage of mail for files which might need to add a volume from time to time?

I would personally use LVM because that's what I've been using for decades. If you don't know either, you might want to explore ZFS since it's a different concept a bit, but you don't have the baggage of "I already know this other thing" that might get in the way.

I'd certainly would like to start using ZFS at some point, but can't justify the investment.

Re: Ask HN: Self hosted email, Cloud storage and dovecot

#25

Post by lathiat »

a-user-you-like wrote: post #11
ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes it worse; cheap VPS providers tend to have lots of abuse issues, so their IP blocks tend to have poor reputation.

But besides that I can mount multiple volumes and use LVM to make it look like one?

Yes

Re: Ask HN: Self hosted email, Cloud storage and dovecot

#26

Post by a-user-you-like »

martinkivi wrote: post #16

Your question doesn't directly indicate which problem you are trying to solve. It would be helpful if you would mention the hosting provider as their service offerings do differ. If you are trying to solve storage reliability for single mail server then creating a file system level failover would be way to go as mentioned previously (LVM, soft RAID over multiple volumes, etc). If you are trying to solve mail service…

Nice I didn’t know about dsync. I imagine it works on large amounts of email, in case I want to host it for a nonprofit?
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