Where do people self-host these emails? When email self-hosting is talked about, my thoughts wander to Fastmail, Migadu, etcetera (I use one like these), but I quickly realise that's not it. On those lines, I do not believe these mail self-hosting folks are talking about some VPS, or server from some provider, or even AWS, et al., either — not self-hosting enough. It must be a computer/server always running at their home/basement/or so (with whatever power/Internet backup setup they have—or maybe not, as they might find it acceptable if something was missed/dropped). So is it that? And if that's what it is, then what is that mail self-hosting home setup of yours? What all have you got there? Just curious, I doubt I can go through that, as my patience gives in even trying to set up a VPS for a seedbox when it is time for the first maintenance/tweak.
Self-hosting email like it's 1984
141–150 of 190 posts
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Configure the dmarc reports, they tell you a lot and automatically why someone swallowed your mail.
I'm thinking of self-hosting email sending for my applications. Does anyone know if, with DMARC/DKIM, email reputation moved from the IP to the domain? If I can make sure only my server can send mail from my domain, shouldn't the sending IP then be irrelevant?
The sending IP remains very relevant; it may be in a third-party blacklist (RBL) or site local blacklist due to prior spam from said IP or even nearby IP(s). Let's have a look through /var/log/maillog... okay that didn't take long.
$ rubbled 86.54.42.238
86.54.42.238 zen.spamhaus.org. XBL (exploit)
86.54.42.238 zen.spamhaus.org. 127.0.0.9
86.54.42.238 zen.spamhaus.org. SBL (spammers)
Yes, I self-host email. Gmail was routing OpenBSD mailing list traffic to the spam "folder", and self-hosting that email was easier than fighting with some rink-a-dink web UI.
Oh, one time about half the customers were in Google and the other half in Microsoft and Google and Microsoft were having some mail snit so yeah good luck getting some of those mails through. That took a while to clear up, and what can you do?
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#143Where do people self-host these emails? When email self-hosting is talked about, my thoughts wander to Fastmail, Migadu, etcetera (I use one like these), but I quickly realise that's not it. On those lines, I do not believe these mail self-hosting folks are talking about some VPS, or server from some provider, or even AWS, et al., either — not self-hosting enough. It must be a computer/server always running at their…
I have a VPS at Hetzner. I pay 4 euro per month.
It's inside a FreeBSD jail for separation.
Keeping FreeBSD up to date is extremely simple. run pkg update && pkg upgrade. It rarely breaks. Can't remember it ever breaking.
The main reason I prefer FreeBSD over Linux distros are the far superior package managers(pkg for binaries and ports for source code).
I also host my own web server using nginx, and sometimes other stuff. All in separate jails.
Back when I was a kid, I used to have my own servers.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#144How big a deal is reverse DNS for this and anything else in 2025? I've not created any PTR records for anything for about 20 years now...
Ironically, self-hosted mail servers are more likely to bounce incoming mail from someone without a proper PTR than the big mail service providers.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#145Earlier 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 have a crappy internal DNS caching server in the email infra that times out early and returns NXDOMAIN for timeouted requests, causing permfail for DKIM instead of tempfail as RFC suggests in case of DNS timeouts. This crap has been going on for years.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#146Where do people self-host these emails? When email self-hosting is talked about, my thoughts wander to Fastmail, Migadu, etcetera (I use one like these), but I quickly realise that's not it. On those lines, I do not believe these mail self-hosting folks are talking about some VPS, or server from some provider, or even AWS, et al., either — not self-hosting enough. It must be a computer/server always running at their…
I host it at home.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Email for me is a critical service, and the reasons I stopped self hosting after about 15 years is: 1. Because I couldn't ensure consistent backup and restore with regular monitoring, 2. no disaster recovery plan and in doing so it'd be more expensive than going through another email provider, 3. not always on top of security (my friend that I colo'd with also ran an email server and his system was struck with ransom…
DR: MX and retry email has easily one of the best responses to failure modes ever and its ancient! Most smtp daemons will put outbound emails in a queue and run the queue. If the other end is unavailable then it will generally retry on a schedule with some sort of increasing period and then give up after a week or so. You can easily define multiple inbound relays via your MX records which predate SRV and generic TXT…
I had a client domain banned by Gmail due to a missing DKIM, even though they had fewer than 1000 emails per month and SPF was correctly set up a decade ago. The bounce message explicitly said they are bouncing because DKIM is missing.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#148Earlier 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?
I’m not sure that there is any pre made product for this, but I’ve been playing around with LLMs to identify spam, or just generally sorting emails for you. And even the self hosted models seem to be pretty good at classifying emails even without external information like spam blacklists or IP reputation.
Naive Bayes classifiers have been working fine for decades.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#149IMHO, there are two components to "email" that do not necessarily need to be connected 1. receving mail 2. sending mail Only #2 became difficult Internet subscribers receive lots of email to which they never reply Sometimes "throwaway" disposable email addresses are useful^1 Various third parties offer this as a "service", i.e., #1 is disconnected from #2 Self-hosting #1 can provide an alternative to using third part…
You missed filtering spam in #1.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#150What do people do about PTR records on residential addresses?
I don't think a PTR record is strictly necessary for good deliverability. In fact, I regularly receive emails from IPs with nonexistent or mistmatched PTR records.
A lot of small self-hosted SMTP servers bounce on missing PTR records. It is easy to configure and it filters out a lot of spam.