Ask HN: How would you set up your own home email server? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How would you set up your own home email server?

#11

Post by mike-cardwell » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 12:22 PM UTC

luxpir wrote: post #9

Another VPS user here. Linode and Digital Ocean offer great guides to get started. I've basically moved two domains off of the formerly free Google Apps accounts onto my own servers. Overall things have gone well. I like being able to set my own file attachment size limits. As others have said, a 'clean' IP seems quite important. I've had emails disappear into Google's spam filters despite working previously, as repo…

FWIW, I am currently using gpgit.pl with Postfix+Dovecot rather than with Exim.

I turned on "sieve_extprograms" inside Dovecot, dropped gpgit.pl into the correct directory, and now I just add stuff like this to my .sieve file:

filter "gpgit" ["--encrypt-mode", "prefer-inline", "mike.cardwell@example.com"];

Re: Ask HN: How would you set up your own home email server?

#12

Post by mike-cardwell » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 12:35 PM UTC

My mail server is a 4 inch square box sat next to the TV in my living room (1)

It runs Postfix, Dovecot, Amavis/SpamAssassin and OpenDKIM on top of Debian Jessie.

The mail is stored on a single internal M.2 SATA SSD. It is encrypted using LUKS. (I have backups of course). Also, all of my incoming mail is encrypted with GnuPG on the way in (2)

My backup MX is a Digital Ocean box in a different country. Because my primary MX is on the end of a residential ISP IP address, it does not have good reputation (even though it is static). So for outgoing mail, I route over a VPN and out via my backup MX. Unless it is over IPv6, in which case it is routed via my free Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel (3)

(1) http://www.intel.nl/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/p...

(2) https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...

(3) https://tunnelbroker.net/

Re: Ask HN: How would you set up your own home email server?

#13

Post by 27182818284 » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 4:20 PM UTC

mike-cardwell wrote: post #12

My mail server is a 4 inch square box sat next to the TV in my living room (1) It runs Postfix, Dovecot, Amavis/SpamAssassin and OpenDKIM on top of Debian Jessie. The mail is stored on a single internal M.2 SATA SSD. It is encrypted using LUKS. (I have backups of course). Also, all of my incoming mail is encrypted with GnuPG on the way in (2) My backup MX is a Digital Ocean box in a different country. Because my prim…

Where do you actually buy an intel NUC? I always just see people linking to the PDF.

Re: Ask HN: How would you set up your own home email server?

#14

Post by neiltholland » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 4:40 PM UTC

Check out iRedmail http://www.iredmail.org/

I don't have the necessary background to set up a mail server and all the attendant pieces all by myself but I've set up a perfectly acceptable mail server (with spam filter, AV etc) numerous times using iRedmail.

Did it on Ubuntu 12.4 (which was the stable release at the time) in a Xen server VM, because why tie up a whole physical server just for email? But now I'm a big fan of ZFS for RAID implementation so if I was doing it again I'd go that way instead (because I never could get ZFS to work under Zen)

It was a just to see if I could do it thing. I don't handle nearly enough email to justify the effort to maintain a mail server. Besides, gmail is amazing at filtering spam.

Re: Ask HN: How would you set up your own home email server?

#15

Post by spdustin » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 7:01 PM UTC

27182818284 wrote: post #13

mike-cardwell wrote: post #12

My mail server is a 4 inch square box sat next to the TV in my living room (1) It runs Postfix, Dovecot, Amavis/SpamAssassin and OpenDKIM on top of Debian Jessie. The mail is stored on a single internal M.2 SATA SSD. It is encrypted using LUKS. (I have backups of course). Also, all of my incoming mail is encrypted with GnuPG on the way in (2) My backup MX is a Digital Ocean box in a different country. Because my prim…

Where do you actually buy an intel NUC? I always just see people linking to the PDF.

Amazon.com is the quick solution.

Re: Ask HN: How would you set up your own home email server?

#16

Post by jason_slack » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 7:18 PM UTC

spdustin wrote: post #15

27182818284 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you actually buy an intel NUC? I always just see people linking to the PDF.

Amazon.com is the quick solution.

very nice. $275 seems to be a decent price. I already have an hd and ram sitting around...

Re: Ask HN: How would you set up your own home email server?

#17

Post by sharvil » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 8:17 PM UTC

For the software side, I would most likely use mailinabox [1] or sovereign [2]. They both setup mail servers for you with reasonable defaults using Ubuntu and Debian respectively.

Ars Technica has a great 4-part guide [3] on setting up a mailserver yourself.

[1] https://mailinabox.email/

[2] https://github.com/al3x/sovereign

[3] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-to...