121–130 of 143 posts
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Thanks. 15 years of good luck so far
Awesome. Don’t ever let go of the domain name and IP!
Given your advice on mailservers in a public thread would you also care to share your real world practical experience with selfhosting email?
Also check out https://jmap.io - great stuff coming to the world of open source e-mail!
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I take a middle path. Self-host receiving mail, and use smtp2go.com for outgoing
Yes, I do something similar (with Amazon SES in my case) but only for domains I know are problematic (Microsoft-hosted domains are the main difficulty - I've never had issues with eg Gmail).
If they would at least dump it in the junk mail folder, I could fix it, but no, some earlier step in the process makes it silently disappear.
> 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…
Why would docker be a good solution for an email server? Why would you run it in a pseudo-vm?
I don’t want to have to install packages on the host system or pollute it with configs in case I need to get rid of something or migrate the OS separately from the software. I don’t want a complex backup story, just a /data mount for all of my stuff. I also sure as hell don’t want to copy random configs or add other config management systems into the mix. I also don’t want to have to configure cgroups or resource limits per thing I’m running. I also want to be able to version the config and deploy it easily wherever needed, and sure as hell don’t want to set it up manually; Ansible is passable but less convenient than just a Docker Compose or Swarm stack. Generally, I keep the apps separate from the more bare host system.
Especially useful when you can easily tell what is transient data vs actual data you need to store longer term per-app, alongside custom port setup across all apps and not needing to care much about individual config formats, in addition to being able to run different versions alongside one another.
Nix or other methods would probably also work for folks, but Docker (OCI) containers just get out of my way and do the thing.
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Have you actually measured delivery rate of some service vs. doing it yourself?
You’re missing the point because you’re thinking like a techie and not like a regular user. But to answer your question, 100% with 0 effort and also 0 direct cost. In my professional life I managed email infrastructures since 20 years ago. It only got harder.
If you achieve 100% delivery rate you will surely share the results, right? No? Oh i guess all those services simply tell you they make it easier for you while not actually achieving that - but why check?
Long time ago I used to run qmail for my school (about 2000 users). It was a lot of fun to do as a student sysadmin. Today, I'm tempted to build a minimal mail system for 1-10 users using agentic coding and use it for less critical use-cases like email for shopping/restaurants etc account registration. I wonder if I can get a safe and secure minimal build done completely agnatically without having to directly look at…
You can get a solution like SimpleLogin (don't get actual SimpleLogin, they don't do SRS) in minutes without the headache of having to configure, administer, secure and patch all that.
I've been doing it since late 90s for several domains, servers run in DCs.
Deliverablity wasn't a problem once I set everything well (and I forwarded most, including received phishing/spam, to my big provider account), but constant fight with incoming spam and effort to keep the servers safe, secure, updated, monitored and finally paid for, weren't really worth it.
For unlimited aliases I bought the service that lets me use my domains, for smtp for servers I was using sendgrid and ses anyway.
The effort is not worth that, especially not with the powerful LLMs looking for vulnerabilities.
I can spend the time I was sinking into keeping it afloat on something more creative.
If you are self-hosting because you care about privacy, I'm not sure why. Email requires two parties. Unless both parties are self hosting, some company has a copy of that email. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon probably see 99% of all email on the internet (ok maybe not that much but probably pretty close). I'm not sure what privacy you gain by self hosting these days, since no one else is.
My wife and I are both in our own self-hosted server. We send sensitive emails back and forth all the time. Well, she does, not me so much. Since we're on the same server it never passes through a third party. Plus there's people in Europe talking to each other that don't want the USA to read their emails. I mean there tons of situations wheee emails don't go through Google or Microsoft.
What hosting / VPS companies do you recommend? Finding one which allows you to run a mail server is some work.
Mythic beasts. Their IP ranges are pretty clean and well managed. My deliverability has been fine there for years.
On the other hand HDD is fine for a mail server and you can get 400Gb for not much more than some email providers will charge you for three 10Gb mailboxes.