Doubtful that anything you do yourself, especially "relatively-cheap" is going to have better uptime and less hassle than gmail (or other major provider), despite today's brief outage.
Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
31–40 of 56 posts
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#32Doubtful that anything you do yourself, especially "relatively-cheap" is going to have better uptime and less hassle than gmail (or other major provider), despite today's brief outage.
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Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#33I use a managed cPanel host and setup "catch-all" email addresses on my domains to forward to my gmail account. In the event of an outage or Google deciding to delete my gmail account I could change the forwarder or simply begin to use cPanel's built in mail clients. Having your email hosted at your own domain is one of the easiest things to do to gain control over something you normally let somebody else manage. As…
Where do people get these misguided notions about email? You don't need dkim or spf at all, few people check either, and they are just to prevent backscatter. Running your own mail server is trivially easy.
Sorry but that's not true at all. DKIM keys, spf records and gmail: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en
Recent Exim exploit: http://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/25970/
Dovecot exploit: https://www.rapid7.com/db/modules/exploit/linux/smtp/exim4_d...
I found a few Sendmail exploits as well but nothing from this year. Sure this stuff is easy to install but there is a reason managed email exists.
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#34You 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.
Launch a Docker container and use its private-namespaced address as the host for the script...
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#35I found the guide "A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail" [1] extremely helpful in setting up my own email server. I run mine on a VPS which still makes me liable to 3rd party screw-ups or snooping, but it's a nice compromise between a massive service like Gmail and running a home server behind Dynamic DNS.
[1] http://dbpmail.net/essays/2013-06-29-hackers-replacement-for...
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#36Would anyone be interested if we did offer an alternative to Gmail? I've been noticing more and more of my friends wanting to move to something new, but not having better alternatives to move to.
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do people get these misguided notions about email? You don't need dkim or spf at all, few people check either, and they are just to prevent backscatter. Running your own mail server is trivially easy.
Sorry but that's not true at all. DKIM keys, spf records and gmail: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en Recent Exim exploit: http://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/25970/ Dovecot exploit: https://www.rapid7.com/db/modules/exploit/linux/smtp/exim4_d... I found a few Sendmail exploits as well but nothing from this year. Sure this stuff is easy to install but there is a reason managed email exists.
If you are going to say "that's not true at all" you need to present an argument for why I am wrong. You posted something completely irrelevant, and a couple of exploits. There are security vulnerabilities found in all kinds of software, so what?
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do people get these misguided notions about email? You don't need dkim or spf at all, few people check either, and they are just to prevent backscatter. Running your own mail server is trivially easy.
Can you point to a trivially easy set of instructions please? ;-)
apt-get install postfix openldap dovecot
I really don't know what the deal is with email, but since the mid 90s there's been this weird thing where everyone wants to follow some kind of step by step guide. But it is just simple software like anything else. If you can setup a webserver or a database server or anything else you can setup a mail server.
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#39For future reference (it's not ready yet):
(Features--privacy, encryption--are supposed to satisfy the most discerning HN reader.)
Re: Ask HN: cheap ways to host your own email server?
#40It would be great if there was some PaaS-type mail service provider. I'd like to get away from hosting it with a single VPS, and running multiple VPSes for redundancy seems frustratingly expensive for such low-intensity load like a personal email server.
Ideally, I'd sign up with one or two services and have each listed as an MX for my domain so there's always some service online to take the email. I can write my own app to hit both services and unify the two streams.