Mailcow dockerized is great if you would like to host yourself, but dont want to spend too much time building or upgrading.
Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
11–20 of 31 posts
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#12I've self-hosted email since around 2000, it used to be relatively simple.. Your ISP would assign you a public static IP, and they'd apologize for blocking outgoing port 25 right there in their documentation, and also tell you, the address of their relay server, which you could configure as a "smarthost". Done. Email right there, on my harddisk, in my server, in my home.
Time has a tendency to make some things worse, self-hosting your email was not spared. Some great stuff has been added over the years, DKIM, DMARC and SPF are all quite easy to manage, but the quality of internet providers has nosedived. Today the generally biggest problem of hosting anything online is that your ISP may not want to provide you with a public routable static IP. The second problem is even worse, and relates to email in specific, your ISP probably still blocks outgoing port 25, meaning that while your self-hosted server can RECEIVE emails well enough, it won't be able to send anything out. You need the aforementioned "smart host" for this, and your ISP might not provide one anymore, leaving their customer with an "Internet" connection that cannot do Internet related things, such as sending email! This is obviously an outrage, but apparantly there are not legislation defining minimum requirements for internet connections.. Imagine if electricity and water providers were allowed the same freedom.. "What? you want around 50 hz at around 230volt? Sorry sir, that's our premium package, what we deliver is between 23 and 120 hz at whatever the volt we want!" and your water company being "Oh, this definitely _IS_ water, guaranteed 25% of it!"
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#13Note they are paying 6 euro/month per VPS with 40 GB disk, which probably leaves 20-30 GB for messages themselves. A commercial email provider like Fastmail charges $5/month (less if paying annually) for mailbox with 30 GB limit, with free unlimited email aliases and free custom domains. If you are happy with a single mail storage location, this is much easier and cheaper too.
Or 365 Personal with 1TB Onedrive, 50GB mailbox. If you want to add a custom domain you need to buy one at GoDaddy (yuck!)
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#14Seems a bit overcomplicated. I am using self-configured Postfix, PostfixAdmin, Dovecot (with xaps daemon for apple push), SpamAssassin, Rainloop (webmail). Everything works on a tiny DigitalOcean VM serving tens of domains, hundereds of mailboxes and millions of emails on daily basis for already more than 10 years. Using any "package" with require unnecessary management, updates, etc. Surely there are fancy bells and…
so it is download source tar balls and build your own for ultimate stability?
what do you do when a vulnerability has been posted and impacts you?
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#15I have been self-hosting my email for few years on Digital Ocean VPS. The biggest downside is that your messages are very often classified as spam by big players such as GMail or Microsoft, despite implementing DKIM, DMARC and SPF etc properly on my side. If it's important for me to get my message through, I have to use my "backup" GMail account, which pretty much defeants the point of self-hosting your email.
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#16After 10 years of hosting my own email-server, I stopped last year. Getting DKIM, DMARC, and SPF right were a nuisance, but worked in the end. My biggest problem was that my mailserver had been blacklisted multiple times due to IP's in the same subnet misbehaving.
In 2022 I am going to host it somewhere more reliant, but for now i use the mailserver of my ISP.
Bit offtopic: I used AnonAdddy (https://github.com/anonaddy/docker) for my email-aliases.
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#17Go to lowendbox.com search for racknerd.com and find their annual plan for like $20-25. Use mailinabox. You will be ready in less than an hour all included and won't have to me try for a year.
Be very careful when recommending Racknerd. Owner of that hosting company was involved in Alpharacks exit scam. Google properly before signup, don't be blinded by the price of service.
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#18Mailcow dockerized is great if you would like to host yourself, but dont want to spend too much time building or upgrading.
I love (and donate to) mailcow, it's an amazing piece of work which makes it simple to get up and running and to maintain a email stack.
The problems you end up with is dealing with the big fish in this space. For instance, Microsoft are currently blocking all/most/a lot-of mail from Linode IPs and have been since 21 Dec regardless of individual server reputation[0].
[0] https://www.linode.com/community/questions/22287/550-57511-a...
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#19Go to lowendbox.com search for racknerd.com and find their annual plan for like $20-25. Use mailinabox. You will be ready in less than an hour all included and won't have to me try for a year.
Be very careful when recommending Racknerd. Owner of that hosting company was involved in Alpharacks exit scam. Google properly before signup, don't be blinded by the price of service.
You're the first person I've heard with those sorts of accusations, so not sure what to make of them.
But more broadly, any prepaid service is potentially an 'exit scam' and the point is to minimise your risk.
So in the end the price of the service (along with quality/value) is really the main consideration. Losing $20 at some point in a year is not much of a risk. I've used many providers, maybe using a bit of judgement, and I've only once come anywhere close to this, but even that seemed to just be a business failure and my account was sold but the replacement service was not as good.
Re: Self Hosted Email vs. Gmail
#20As a productivity tool, i don't see the need to self host email.
I used to self host email about a decade ago, but considering how complicated it can get with blocklists, residential IP blocks and just functional spam filtering, it seems to be much better to just leave it to dedicated people. I'm aware that people self host email for privacy, but email is not a private communication form, at least not in 2022. Any email will have at least 2 parties, and if you don't control the remote end, your privacy is non existing.
Up to 30% of all emails will go to Gmail alone (https://emailanalytics.com/gmail-statistics/), and then you can add all the Google Workspace users, Outlook (personal or business users), and you'll easily end up with 60-70% of all emails at some point ending up with one of the cloud email providers.