Don't host TEM email yourself, sure.
I self-host my own personal email service. And it's fine. Painful at times, yes, but serviceable.
Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026
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Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026
#12happily hosting my own email, only problem has been Microslop hotmail, who use some RBL that run as a racket
https://luc.lino-framework.org/blog/2023/0725.html
(but you can just route these through someone else)
Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026
#13Part of the problem is setting up a login system relying on a complicated network of unreliable mail providers (or SMS or any other poison du jour) in the critical path. That's asking for trouble even when everything on your end is done correctly and going smoothly.
Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026
#14Personally I have never had any issues hosting my own email (for myself or for business customers) for the last 25 years.
The only time I've ever come across a big problem with email in general was when one of my customers was using 1and1.com hosted email, who apparently have a bad reputation due to spam, and some providers outright block them... but moving that company to self-hosted email fixed the problem.
Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026
#15- how do companies like mailchimp actually manage this?
- anyone got any ideas? is this their MOAT?
Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026
#16The solution to "my transactional email service does not deliver to one ISP" is "use a transactional email service". I have used transactional email services for low volume and highly variable sites and have had very few problems, none of them general blocks - there were warnings from providers and a single digit number of hard bounces when one site had a vulnerability to registration spam (owner thought the previous…
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Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026
#17Some people say "this is obviously wrong" and other people say "this is too obviously correct to be worth mentioning." That combination can sometimes indicate an interesting point.
Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026
#18This attitude is so self-defeating. If no one hosts their own email anymore, no one will be able to host their own email anymore in the future. Having said that, I host some of my mail with Hetzner, and even at their scale they sometimes have deliverability issues.
Yes, I do not agree with this kind of advice.
A warning that hosting e-mail yourself can be difficult, is very useful, but the suggestion that you should not do such a thing is not.
I have been hosting my own e-mail since 2004, for more than 2 decades and I do not intend to ever give up on this.
The cost of hosting my e-mail has been absolutely negligible and for most of these 22 years, the time spent managing my (FreeBSD) e-mail server has also been completely negligible (perhaps an hour or two per year, on average).
A good mini-PC, e.g. an ASUS NUC, with a negligible power consumption when it is operated 24/7, is completely sufficient for hosting everything that might be needed for Internet access, e.g. router, firewall, NAT, NTP server, dual DNS servers, DNS proxy and cache, SMTP server, POP3/IMAP server, HTTPS server, Web proxy and cache, DHCP server for the internal network, etc. On a mini-PC that does not come with enough Ethernet ports for your needs it is easy to add many more ports on USB.
It is true that a few years ago I have encountered enough problems with stupid e-mail servers configured to automatically reject as spam anything that does not come from a huge company like Google or Microsoft, but thankfully during the last couple of years such cases have become more rare, not more frequent.
Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026
#19I had one email bounced from that specific provider, I don't have a website on my mail domain, but I explained what I used it for and never had any issues. I send like less than 1 email per quarter to them and it kept working after they whitelisted my ip.
So this issue seems very specific to TEM
Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026
#20This attitude is so self-defeating. If no one hosts their own email anymore, no one will be able to host their own email anymore in the future. Having said that, I host some of my mail with Hetzner, and even at their scale they sometimes have deliverability issues.
Yes, the world will be a better place with a real email alternative. The current system does not work.
I should be able to refuse emails and not get spammed with life ending phishing and malicious links around every corner.
Email providers shouldn’t be able to whoopsie and delete emails on my behalf, or gatekeep information that’s needed in court.
Self hosting doesn’t fix the core problems with email even if you don’t screw it up, which you will.