It's a funny coincidence that this happened today as just yesterday I created a personal email for my custom domain with Zoho[0]. While not quite the same as having your own mail server it is nice to have at least one email not on Gmail.
Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
21–30 of 56 posts
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#22Buy a domain on a service that allows API-based DNS updates. Put up a RPI at home. postfix + dovecot + roundcube should do the trick. Add FW forwardings for 80/443/25 (or allow IPv6 to pass through) Update DNS records every N minutes. (cron, nsupdate, dyndns clients, amazon command line tools....). You will need SPF/DKIM. The RFC for SMTP says Mail Servers have to retry for 7 days before giving up on mail delivery. T…
I think a lot of IP blocks show up in blacklists just by virtue of belonging to cable companies.
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#23Buy a domain on a service that allows API-based DNS updates. Put up a RPI at home. postfix + dovecot + roundcube should do the trick. Add FW forwardings for 80/443/25 (or allow IPv6 to pass through) Update DNS records every N minutes. (cron, nsupdate, dyndns clients, amazon command line tools....). You will need SPF/DKIM. The RFC for SMTP says Mail Servers have to retry for 7 days before giving up on mail delivery. T…
> PS: Some old firewalls block dynamic IPs for mail delivery. I'm not sure how common this is today, especially as SPAM and botnets have evolved a lot.
The problem is not that firewalls block dynamic IPs, but that a lot of mail servers, to deal with spam servers, started accepting mail only from some trusted smarthosts.
So there might be some server that will reject your mails. (I don't honestly know how much SPF makes things better.)
However, your ISP SMTP server will accept mail from its IP range (as they know how to find you if you abuse the service) and will relay mail for you. So probably your best bet is setup outgoing mail to go through it (Internet site with Smarthost, or something like that).
Ah, and don't forget to setup your server for SSL!
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#24Buy a domain on a service that allows API-based DNS updates. Put up a RPI at home. postfix + dovecot + roundcube should do the trick. Add FW forwardings for 80/443/25 (or allow IPv6 to pass through) Update DNS records every N minutes. (cron, nsupdate, dyndns clients, amazon command line tools....). You will need SPF/DKIM. The RFC for SMTP says Mail Servers have to retry for 7 days before giving up on mail delivery. T…
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Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#25I would love to see some instructions to deploy something on a custom server or VPS. I'm currently using NameCheap's e-mail service because setting up the software was too complicated.
I loved this [0] guide. You may not need the encrypted partition part of it so you can leave it out but I've followed it multiple times, all successfully. [0] http://sealedabstract.com/code/nsa-proof-your-e-mail-in-2-ho...
I mentioned the other day that I'd been thinking of writing a HOWTO for setting up a VPS as a mail server. Now I don't have to; your link is quite close to what I'd have written -- same VPS host, same SMTP and IMAP servers, very similar configurations -- except much better written, and also useful for people who care about at-rest encryption the way I don't. (I also do TLS via stunnel instead of natively in postfix and dovecot, for reasons I no longer remember, but it works quite well so I haven't bothered changing it.)
Thanks for linking this! I'm planning on rebuilding my mail host pretty soon, since most of it's been untouched for almost a decade and I'm a much better sysadmin now than I used to be; that's not least evident in how I didn't bother to document anything the first time around, so having this HOWTO handy will save me a lot of time.
(Edit on further reading: I tried Z-push, but the version I tried didn't support message flags, which I require; push also annoyed me and sucked more battery life than it was worth, so I disabled it and got rid of Z-push. And I don't see the need for Solr; Dovecot, I'm not sure what version but I set it up something like five years ago, gives me full-text message search for free.)
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#26You might try Sovereign: https://github.com/al3x/sovereign A large dollop of group experience wrapped up in Ansible recipes for your cheap VPS.
Nice, but using a VPS kind of defeats most of the point of self-hosting.
There is still a third party that can give away your data, block your service and delete your emails pushing a virtual button.
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#27Mailgun's api allows you to send and receive email using your own domain - I really like it, and it's free while your volumes are down.
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#28Buy a domain on a service that allows API-based DNS updates. Put up a RPI at home. postfix + dovecot + roundcube should do the trick. Add FW forwardings for 80/443/25 (or allow IPv6 to pass through) Update DNS records every N minutes. (cron, nsupdate, dyndns clients, amazon command line tools....). You will need SPF/DKIM. The RFC for SMTP says Mail Servers have to retry for 7 days before giving up on mail delivery. T…
> PS: Some old firewalls block dynamic IPs for mail delivery. I'm not sure how common this is today, especially as SPAM and botnets have evolved a lot. The problem is not that firewalls block dynamic IPs, but that a lot of mail servers, to deal with spam servers, started accepting mail only from some trusted smarthosts. So there might be some server that will reject your mails. (I don't honestly know how much SPF mak…
Most ISPs block outbound tcp port 25, which is why you'll likely need to setup your ISP's smtp server as a smarthost for a consumer connection.
FWIW running a personal mail server on Linode for 8 years, I've never had a remote mail server refuse acceptance due to my IP address not being on some protocartel whitelist.
I have had a few annoying false positives from Mailavenger, but clearly that's not my config that's broken :>
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#29You might try Sovereign: https://github.com/al3x/sovereign A large dollop of group experience wrapped up in Ansible recipes for your cheap VPS.
Nice, but using a VPS kind of defeats most of the point of self-hosting. There is still a third party that can give away your data, block your service and delete your emails pushing a virtual button.
IMHO, it's a good first step. First cloud hardware, next own hardware + dynDNS[1].
[1] http://minireference.com/blog/a-scriptable-future-for-the-we...
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#30My cheap solution a few years ago was:
1 year micro EC2 instance. This runs bind and dovecot/postfix. This could probably be done even cheaper with a home hosted RPI, but depends on your ISP's smtp relay rules.
free gTLD from dot.tk
done!