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How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

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Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#11
post #6
post #2

Usually you are supposed to add a year to older articles :) Curious if you looked into other mail server options? I mean Postfix (not Postgres) easily handles the load of a single user, but it is still rather hard to configure and modify. I recently started to work with Haraka and even thought its ment for high traffic use cases i wont ever look back to Postfix (not Postgres).

Wow. I must have really been abused (likely) by other mail servers to consider Postfix easy then.

Given my first real Postfix experience was a scaleable forwarding service that is supposed to support a variation of configs without breaking the config file.

Postfix is super easy, and well documented for normal use cases.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#12

I ran my own mail server for a few months in 2013. I came to the conclusion I'd much rather pay Google $5 a month.

Fastmail will let you do it for $50 per year if you pay upfront. Just not sure why anyone would run an email server other than extreme paranoia. It’s hardly a set it and forget it affair.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#13
I appreciate the write-up! I always wanted to do a similar write-up for my own setup, but I never got around to it. (My setup uses slightly with different components: exim+dovecot+spamassassin+openldap.)

However, after reading this, the software developer in me feels like "These tutorials should not be necessary."

This should be a GitHub repo, trivial to fork and trivial to test out locally for anyone.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#14
Icing on the cake: Sprinkle a little Let's Encrypt in there to cover SSL. It doesn't take much to have a cron make a new cert and restart dovecot and postfix.

My setup is similar, but it uses MySQL instead of LDAP.

I love being able to make aliases and even better - deleting them when I'm done with them.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#16
Yeesh, there's so much involved.

I've been running my own mail server with https://mailinabox.email for ~2 years and can heartily recommend it.

Still, even with that there are gotchas if you want to be able to send messages from your server to Google et al, eg. reverse-DNS-records, DKIM, SPF.

Not for the pressed-for-time.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#17
post #13

I appreciate the write-up! I always wanted to do a similar write-up for my own setup, but I never got around to it. (My setup uses slightly with different components: exim+dovecot+spamassassin+openldap.) However, after reading this, the software developer in me feels like "These tutorials should not be necessary." This should be a GitHub repo, trivial to fork and trivial to test out locally for anyone.

There are several projects that do just that:

- https://mailinabox.email/

- https://mailcow.email/

- https://modoboa.org/en/

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#18
post #12

I ran my own mail server for a few months in 2013. I came to the conclusion I'd much rather pay Google $5 a month.

Fastmail will let you do it for $50 per year if you pay upfront. Just not sure why anyone would run an email server other than extreme paranoia. It’s hardly a set it and forget it affair.

Just have somebody else run one for you, like Hillary Clinton did.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#19
Love this, I spend many nights in the past fiddling with email.. and giving up. But I manged to get it to work one day and I learned a lot! I started with [0], but eventually found the mail-stack-delivery package in the Ubuntu repos, it sets up almost everything correctly out of the box and I ran with that. While Googling that package name I found this: [1], may also be nice.

I also learned that having it in your basement means trouble: Someone pulls the plug, your IP changes or ends up on a spam list. For some years I ran my own server on a DO droplet. It is very cost effective when you can make as much mailboxes as you want for family (+ unlimited aliases, addresses that deliver to both you and your wife, being able to email 500 mb to familie, etc). I still don't know down what sinkhole emails to my brother-in-law's outlook.com address went down. The literal response of MS at the time: We don't manage our own spam filter, try adding more text, make it look more real...

But man, the pain, the complexity, the reverse DNS, the startTLS, the SPF record, the DKIM records. It took me a long time to understand the difference between mail servers and MTAs and why there are different ports for them. Also, few providers in the Netherlands even allow you to use port 25, luckily mine did. Email is truly an old protocol that has been hacked up-to-date (more or less) and setting up your own mail server will make this very clear to you :)

I'd recommend it though, you'll learn a lot! But to be honest, I now pay 3 euros a months to a dutch email provider because email is too important and I didn't want to go through the pain again when 16.04 came out. I might still have a go at it in the future, there is something beautiful about running your own email server :)

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-t...

[1] https://www.iredmail.org/

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#20
Honestly if you're lazy or want the support it might be nice to get the VPS cPanel license. It sets it up for you with full customization allowed. It also has spamassassin with RBL support in the interface. I think it's $17~ a month excluding VPS cost. You'll also get so many other features that can be disabled.
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