I have been using selfhosted email for over 2 years now. mail in a box once setup I haven't done anything! other than occasional updates from the admin interface.
Ask HN: What is the best option for hosting your own mailserver?
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Re: Ask HN: What is the best option for hosting your own mailserver?
#12Cloudron.io works pretty great as it automated all the DNS setup. It also gives you the option to run other apps like GitLab, Rocket.Chat etc as well.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best option for hosting your own mailserver?
#13I’m curious about your usecase/motivation. Would you mind sharing?
I am setting up mail for my business. I do not want to go the gmail route. I also happen to have a VPS server free to use. I have seen the occasional gmail alternative threads and the more rare self hosted mail threads here on HN. Maybe I have been swayed by the arguments in those threads ;) . I wanted to know if there is a stable mail server that I can run on my own machine, without putting too much effort after the…
Thanks!
How do you plan to address other mail servers classifying yours as span since you don’t have a reliable history?
Re: Ask HN: What is the best option for hosting your own mailserver?
#14I've just been using Postfix+Dovecot for years now and, initial setup aside, it kinda "just works". I can't remember the last time I had to actually do any maintenance other than security patches, it must be over a year ago now.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best option for hosting your own mailserver?
#15Back in 2003, I successfully used the qmailrocks website.
Not sure how relevant it is now but might be worth a look
Re: Ask HN: What is the best option for hosting your own mailserver?
#16Yea MailInaBox looks good even though I have not used it yet.
Looks like MailInABox is postfix/dovecot at its core, with a wrapper to make it easier for SMTP non-experts (which is nice).
Re: Ask HN: What is the best option for hosting your own mailserver?
#17As you mention in another comment that it's for your business and you don't want to spend time maintaining it once it's running I'd strongly suggest not to go that route and pay someone to do the work for you.
If you do it for your personal email, experimenting around is probably fine for a while but for a business working email is mission critical. Mails getting stuck in filters somewhere, clients not seeing your emails because they got classified as spam along the way will just cost you money and will cause headaches.
Just go with GSuite or Fastmail Business if you don't like Google.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best option for hosting your own mailserver?
#18Just use a paid service. If you have to spend more than hour setting up your own mail server then you already spent more on labor than a year of Mailgun.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best option for hosting your own mailserver?
#19I use Zimbra. I've been running it as a selfhosted service for 8 years now. It does need quite a powerful server (it's written in Java, so it needs lots of RAM), but it works wonderfully, and their web interface is just great!
Maintenance is quite simple, just install updated versions when they come out, I haven't had any problems with it.
Regarding mobile integration, I use Android. Any IMAP client will sync mail correctly, Zcal and Zcard for synchronizing calendar and contacts.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best option for hosting your own mailserver?
#20I've had very positive experiences with Mail-in-a-Box for exactly the sort of situation you describe. I think it's a great project that pulls together other packages very nicely.
I was fed up with configuring everything constantly and tuning this, that and the other. These sort of threads always seem to have plenty of people who have a bad time running their own mailserver (and of course your mileage may vary), but I don't really have to touch it at all.