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Self-host your mail server

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Re: Self-host your mail server

#81

Post by Krei-se »

close04 wrote: post #69
Krei-se wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can check your delivery rate with services there are lots that are free to check and they also offer to "warm" your reputation. I have not done that yet (money!) and outside this: - Outlook.com consumer mail addresses you can still get >99% delivery rate if you have spf, dkim and all the new cool stuff. So no, please DO NOT recommend against doing it because ONLY if mail stays a decentralized service providers wi…

Running your own email infra is not at the same level as the usual “self hosting”. Not to mention that email can be critical and missing an important email can burn a lot. Why put in that much effort on your free time, and take the risk? You don’t build your own fridge. If it’s important and not your strong suit, pay someone to do it for you.

Have you actually measured delivery rate of some service vs. doing it yourself?

Re: Self-host your mail server

#82

Post by aspbee555 »

muppetman wrote: post #5

I do. It's nowhere as hard as everyone on here makes it out to be. And I don't even use an easy solution like Mailcow. Spam is a solved problem with rspamd, and it's not even an llm

I still handle email for multiple small businesses (for over 20 years) and recently switched from the mailscanner+spamassasin to rspamd and the scanning is so much better/easier now

my backend is still dovecot+postfix, still works beautifully. I am able to run rspamd+dovecot proxy on a small vps and the storage is handled by a backend office server with dovecot. If VPS has an issue can spinup another easily/anywhere and backend is also virtualized (libvirt) so easily restored (with multiple backups in multiple places)

biggest thing to worry about with deliverability is ensuring your SPF and DKIM (opendkim) are correct, which is not too difficult and rspamd is able to handle the dkim signing/verification which is nice

Re: Self-host your mail server

#83

Post by Krei-se »

ValdikSS wrote: post #71
mmh0000 wrote: post #16

I ran my own self-hosted email server from 2008-ish to 2018, and I would highly recommend against doing it! Especially when Fastmail and Proton are so cheap. I was running Postfix+Dovecot+Seive+SpamAssassin+Fail2ban+certbot+spf+dkim+reverse-ip+ It worked! Receiving email was overall pretty easy. I know I also did things the "hard way" by ad-hoccing all that together, and today there are a lot more out-of-the-box solu…

I'm running 4 email servers, the oldest is from 2011 or so, to this day. 4 different countries, different AS. I'm always puzzled by all the issues described by others. I had about 4 issues during these 15 years, all 4 were solved by reading the bounce message and doing what was asked in the message (contacting support of the destination).

Same. People just remember it's hard because they don't test, don't like responsibility much and esp. because they test this in production not on a spare domain. Then all you remember from it is the 10 people shouting at you and that you need to fix it NOW and it's all super stressful so they never attempt this again.

Re: Self-host your mail server

#84

Post by xorcist »

UltraSane wrote: post #54
tripleee wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take a middle path. Self-host receiving mail, and use smtp2go.com for outgoing

How do this work? Do you need to use two different programs to send and read email?

You could do it any way you like, but it you have your own mail server, just configure it to route specific recepient domains (or all domains, this is called a "relayserver" in the postfix documentation) to a specific mail server. Just remember to flag your desired outgoing mail servers as approved for your domain (in the SPF record).

Re: Self-host your mail server

#85

Post by nijave »

ValdikSS wrote: post #71
mmh0000 wrote: post #16

I ran my own self-hosted email server from 2008-ish to 2018, and I would highly recommend against doing it! Especially when Fastmail and Proton are so cheap. I was running Postfix+Dovecot+Seive+SpamAssassin+Fail2ban+certbot+spf+dkim+reverse-ip+ It worked! Receiving email was overall pretty easy. I know I also did things the "hard way" by ad-hoccing all that together, and today there are a lot more out-of-the-box solu…

I'm running 4 email servers, the oldest is from 2011 or so, to this day. 4 different countries, different AS. I'm always puzzled by all the issues described by others. I had about 4 issues during these 15 years, all 4 were solved by reading the bounce message and doing what was asked in the message (contacting support of the destination).

I had a Digital Ocean VPS and it was fine about 7 years but on year 8 the entire /24 got blacklisted and it was game over

Took about 6 months initially of fiddling to get other email services to accept mail DKIM, DMARC, SPF, PTR, web form requests

Re: Self-host your mail server

#86

Post by KronisLV »

> A good starting point would be docker-mailserver which is a full mailserver suite deployable via Docker with sane defaults.

I am running Docker Mailserver because it's one of the very few options that were actually easy to administer: https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest...

But the last release was like a year ago: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver/relea... and same with the container that was published: https://hub.docker.com/r/mailserver/docker-mailserver/tags

I guess there is the edge version and more recent commits, and overall it should be stable, but you'd think there'd be more small patch releases to decrease the eventual risk of CVEs. Either way, cool that it exists.

Re: Self-host your mail server

#87

Post by nijave »

UltraSane wrote: post #54
tripleee wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take a middle path. Self-host receiving mail, and use smtp2go.com for outgoing

How do this work? Do you need to use two different programs to send and read email?

Well, generally you need 2 different programs regardless. Usually an SMTP server for accepting and storing emails and a IMAP server for clients to connect to and read stored emails.

For the parent post, you configure an outgoing SMTP relay

Iirc called smarthost in postfix

Re: Self-host your mail server

#88

Post by nijave »

Krei-se wrote: post #33
mmh0000 wrote: post #16

I ran my own self-hosted email server from 2008-ish to 2018, and I would highly recommend against doing it! Especially when Fastmail and Proton are so cheap. I was running Postfix+Dovecot+Seive+SpamAssassin+Fail2ban+certbot+spf+dkim+reverse-ip+ It worked! Receiving email was overall pretty easy. I know I also did things the "hard way" by ad-hoccing all that together, and today there are a lot more out-of-the-box solu…

you can check your delivery rate with services there are lots that are free to check and they also offer to "warm" your reputation. I have not done that yet (money!) and outside this: - Outlook.com consumer mail addresses you can still get >99% delivery rate if you have spf, dkim and all the new cool stuff. So no, please DO NOT recommend against doing it because ONLY if mail stays a decentralized service providers wi…

Easier to self host inbound and relay outbound. SMTP relays are effectively a commodity and pennies for personal usage. Worth <$1/yr to not screw with IP rep unless you own a /24. Less than /24 you risk some knucklehead getting the whole block listed

Re: Self-host your mail server

#90

Post by lbriner »

mmh0000 wrote: post #16

I ran my own self-hosted email server from 2008-ish to 2018, and I would highly recommend against doing it! Especially when Fastmail and Proton are so cheap. I was running Postfix+Dovecot+Seive+SpamAssassin+Fail2ban+certbot+spf+dkim+reverse-ip+ It worked! Receiving email was overall pretty easy. I know I also did things the "hard way" by ad-hoccing all that together, and today there are a lot more out-of-the-box solu…

Same story. Ran a set of about 20 postfix mail servers for my company. Prided myself on being proactive, setting everything up correctly. Using things like DANE even before they were mandatory but the trouble was always random blocking which was outlook.com 90% of the time and occasionally yahoo and Deutsch telekom. At least the latter provided contact details and were helpful getting things unblocked but Microsoft had horrific support. You are blocked, we won't or can't tell you why, nothing in the mail management system shows you any problems so we can't tell you what to fix, please see this 15 year old guide as to how to setup email properly and we will tweak the setting a bit to let your mail through until the next time we decide to block it.

So frustrating because they have no legal obligation to accept our emails but our product relies on them being delivered.

I gave up and moved everyone over to SES instead.

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