What's the "like it's 1984" part?
I was hoping he’d set up Citadel! Email system and an 80s bbs platform in one. citadel.org
Self-hosting email like it's 1984
111–120 of 190 posts
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#112Not sure why someone would go through the pain of cobbling up a self hosted solution based on Postfix when you have fully integrated solutions like https://stalw.art/ , which are a breeze to setup.
I came to this thread purely to see if I was the only enlightened one.
Stalwart is perfect for small self-hosters: a single binary, a single-directory resilient datastore (by default), a UI for every setting, and defaults that guide you to a DNS config which maximizes your sender score. Plus support for all of the "power user" features such as ManageSieve and shared CalDav folders.
Honestly, I love hosting my email now. And the last remaining battery which could possibly be included is now WIP: webmail!
Unix philosophy need not apply when there is exactly one use case for integrating these tools. (Or at least, one case which covers 99% of users. The remainder can keep their managerie of arcane config formats and susceptibility to unsafe language CVEs.)
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> treat self-hosting like a hobby and learn to enjoy it. This is why I have stepped away from a lot of my self hosting. I have turned my attention/time elsewhere. Apparently though the time/money balance is shifting a bit again, so it may be worth it to go back. My biggest hesitance to self hosting email specifically is dealing with spam. What does that look like these days and do you have any pointers to share?
The biggest issue isn't necessarily spam, it's proving you aren't spam.
If only we treat ads like we treat emails! Our world could probably be a bit better place to live in.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#114I've been selfhosting for like dunno 10-15 years. Cheap kimsufi box, opensmtp, dovecot, later then rspamd, done. Never really had a problem. At one point telekom.de blocked my mailserver. I contacted them via postmaster@telekom.de (or something) explaining that while kimsufix boxes are notorious for shady stuff, this is actually a legit mailserver and they whitelisted me shortly after (yeah I was surprised too how smooth that went). So, yeah, can't confirm all the troubles everyone seems to get on about. However I do own the kimsufi box (and the corresponding IP) for a long time now, so maybe I'm just lucky.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#115(had to dug my comment from under a flagged parent) I self-hosted for well over 20 years, I did not throw the towel and I do not plan to. Self-hosting is a sign of pride. Neither my government nor my Prime Minister nor even my Ministry of Interior or Foreign Ministry can host their own email. Last time I checked, only State Security self-hosted. I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one w…
> treat self-hosting like a hobby and learn to enjoy it. This is why I have stepped away from a lot of my self hosting. I have turned my attention/time elsewhere. Apparently though the time/money balance is shifting a bit again, so it may be worth it to go back. My biggest hesitance to self hosting email specifically is dealing with spam. What does that look like these days and do you have any pointers to share?
I use a combination of DNSBL and SpamAssassin. Nowadays Rspamd is supposed to be better than SpamAssassin, but SpamAssassin has served me well enough so far, and I haven't gotten around to trying out Rspamd. When a spam email gets past SpamAssassin, I copy it to a special folder, which gets processed by a cron job to train SpamAssassin on it (sa-learn).
Overall the mail server is very low maintenance. I had to add SPF and DMARC a couple years ago (DKIM isn't necessary) and integrate TLS with letsencrypt (just a few lines in a config file), and sometimes a Debian upgrade requires reviewing the configuration (several years apart as well). There's really not that much to do.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#116More like 1994 thereabouts, in 1984 most of us would be very lucky to have a dial up connection to the local BBS, under local phone call price rates.
I first started maintaining a nail server in 1997. Most of the stuff in the article is newer than that.
For 1984, I'd have expected UUCP and bang paths to peer mail hosts. Instead the article starts off by setting up DKIM, from over 2 decades later!
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, hosting on or at least tunneling through a commercial IP address is definitely required in order not to be flagged as spam. Personally, I chose the latter option of hosting my MTA at home but tunneling its traffic through a VPS in a datacenter. It's been working pretty well ever since, although I'm not sure it's worth the effort versus just using a cheap hosted provider.
Is it some kind of free VPS?
VPS are generally paid, but it's only $5 or less a month.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#118Not sure why someone would go through the pain of cobbling up a self hosted solution based on Postfix when you have fully integrated solutions like https://stalw.art/ , which are a breeze to setup.
I am basically all in on Stalwart right now, but do not have the time to deal with email deliverability issues or asking my VPS to open a port, so I have been using AWS SES as the SMTP relay for awhile. No problems so far, hosting about a dozen mailboxes for friend's and family's personal use. The whole stack is so lightweight, I have it on the cheapest Arm-based VPS at Hetzner.
My hope is that Stalwart will get to their webmail project over the next couple of years. I am on SnappyMail, but basically need to use desktop and mobile clients to get the full mail/CardDAV/CalDAV experience, which admittedly is already pretty awesome.
Currently, I have Stalwart, PostgreSQL, SnappyMail, and Caddy, all inside a docker-compose file, and I have migrated, moved servers, and all that no problem.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
My first email usage was at University, pre-WWW. After that I briefly used some ISP email service, but that was on a time of very limited storage and POP only accounts, so I started hosting my own email even before having an always-on internet connection, using a relay and dynamic DNS to receive email when online. Now a days, I use a small VPS to route and receive email, but final destination and storage is on my hom…
outlook.com keeps sending me dmarc reports with failed dkim... while every single other provider gives pass to all domains. at this point I don't even care anymore. why Microsoft is so crappy?
They want you to use outlook.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#120I've been self-hosting my email for over 10 years now (I'm going to link a bunch of my old comments on old email HN threads). I have fallen back to using Amazon's SES to send because all of Digital Ocean's IP blocks suddenly got marked as bad and I don't have enough volume to improve a new IP reputation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39891262, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38471262
I use Gmail as a free spam harvester to train my own spam filter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38843288.
But as others here have suggested greylisting is extremely helpful in this space as legitimate servers should always retry. Well only my power company is the exception and they will fall back to sending paper bills, but even Gmail falls foul for them. It's also one big reason I'm not worried about up to a week downtime. But I have two email servers, a receiving and a storage server, the receiving is cattle and I car re-deploy in minutes if needed. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38512732
On greylisting I would say using https://github.com/stevejenkins/postwhite (even if it's very old and not actively maintained) has proven very important for the annoying 2FA emails, I strongly contend that email isn't suitable for this use case but that's another conversation)