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Self-hosting email like it's 1984

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Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#131

Post by golem14 »

watermelon0 wrote: post #29
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #7

Here is my advice to anyone wanting to test out self-hosting email. Start by using your self-hosted email to sign-up for accounts. You don't have to use the email address for your personal correspondence Use Mail-in-a-box to get started [1]. You can literally set it up in a couple of hours by following the instructions and everything should just work. After a few years, you can think about switching your personal cor…

I can recommend Stalwart [1] which is a complete mail service contained in a single binary, that doesn't really have any external dependencies, and is really easy to install and update. I've looked (and tried) a few other projects in the past, but Stalwart was the easiest to setup, and I haven't had any issues with it so far. [1] https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart

Has anyone compared Stalwart with say Mox or Maddy, in practice?

They all look about the same from a newb's perspective.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#133

Post by defanor »

dugite-code wrote: post #120

I'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 fr…

I missed an incoming message (fortunately an unimportant one) from Amazon SES recently, since its 54.240.27.30 address was listed by bl.spamcop.net: Amazon kept trying different addresses while running into greylisting, until it tried that address and was rejected. Possibly it is less of an issue when sending between large providers (e.g., Amazon to Gmail), but apparently still not a perfect solution to ensure message delivery.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#134

Post by jcynix »

mey wrote: post #82
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #57

(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?

> 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?

Postfix can easily be configured to reject incoming emails from senders without a reverse DNS mapping for their IP address, which makes it reject a lot of spam.

For spammers with reverse mapping greylisting still works fine, they almost never retry.

Certain commercial spammers (hello China :-0) use software which can be filtered with a just one rule matching their sending software, which is "nice" enough to display its name in their mail headers.

And last but not least spamassassin / rspamd work fine to filter whatever comes through.

In the end I get less than 10 spam emails per week. And these go into a separate mailbox filtered by good old procmail, based on spamassassin's ratings. I check the spam inbox maybe once a week for false positives and more often than not the box is empty.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#135

Post by defanor »

FWIW, some of the things I configure differently:

- More of anti-UCE, with postscreen (greylisting, DNSBL and DNSWL checks), policyd-spf, body_checks, check_sender_access, check_client_access, postscreen_access_list.

- Setting "home_mailbox = Maildir/", to keep mail in user directories and in the Maildir format (which seems to be less prone to corruption than mbox is, and well-supported by MUAs).

- Leaving TLS defaults, except for the paths. I used to set mandatory TLS, but then ran into some servers not using it, and figured that I do not trust the involved servers more than channels between them anyway (especially the servers that do not support TLS). Being overly strict with allowed protocol versions (or even ciphers) also reduces compatibility, while for encryption it is better to rely on OpenPGP.

- I do set Dovecot (for both IMAP and SMTP submission); the recent configuration change did not seem like a big deal to me, and it was documented, so I found it easy to update. It is nice to be able to use email from a server (and that ability does not go away with Dovecot), but a local MUA also has its advantages.

- Registered at dnswl.org, to improve deliverability in some cases.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#136

Post by rmoriz »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #61
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #57

(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…

> I decided to finally replace my aging Debian jessie setup by Arch Linux, and I rewrote all cron jobs as systemd timers. Man, I wish I had 1% of the motivation I had 20 years ago to do something like this, before all the full time job, wife and child.

Don’t hurt me: Agentic coding tools like Claude Code or opencode helped me a lot to convert things to systemd units.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#139

Post by seb1204 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #84
pembrook wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bizarrely, I also find Gmail's spam algo is actually oversensitive to marketing emails from companies these days, which I never thought was something I would complain about. But like you said its super annoying when I actually want the emails. Seems like we had the opposite problem 10ish years ago. But now the pendulum has swung a bit too far in the other direction. Ultimately most of the spam I get these days is act…

Microsoft Outlook has been flagging their own marketing emails as spam for me lately. I'm not sure if I ought to be impressed or disappointed.

Maybe because I and others mark them as spam?

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#140

Post by seb1204 »

zrm wrote: post #64
boplicity wrote: post #13

Modern email providers, especially ones offered by ISPs often have the same problems that people criticize self-hosted providers for. Even Google has problems. For example, I regularly order via companies that use Shopify. Now, all of the shopify emails are going straight to spam in Gmail, despite constantly marking them as not spam. (These even pass dmarc/spf/dkim etc, so who knows what's going on here.) Email deliv…

> For example, I regularly order via companies that use Shopify. Now, all of the shopify emails are going straight to spam in Gmail, despite constantly marking them as not spam. (These even pass dmarc/spf/dkim etc, so who knows what's going on here.) There's a pretty good chance this is because Shopify is sending a lot of email users mark as spam, or is using the same mail server as someone who does. Then you marking…

I mark them as spam. I only want the real notifications and not the free goodies and recap and others are interested in mails.
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