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How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

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Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#151

Post by linsomniac »

catdog wrote: post #146
linsomniac wrote: post #39

How to run your own mail server: Don't. How to run your own mail server (for experts): Don't. I say this as someone who has run my own mail server for 20+ years. Now, if you absolutely have to get off Google, and the other available hosted options don't work for you, then this article looks like a good start. I'd add roundcube for web access and letsencrypt for SSL. One thing you'll never really get, in my experience…

> One thing you'll never really get, in my experience, is good spam handling. Not in my experience. I'm in general very happy with the results of SpamAssassin. Occasionally sth. slips through but when I compare it to my gmail account it's not worse, maybe even better. The only thing I use in addition is postscreen [1] (pregreet test only) to stop the dumbest category of spam bots. [1] http://www.postfix.org/POSTSCREE…

I used SpamAssassin, greylisting, SPF, a variety of RBLs, and hashcash, but never got anywhere near what my gmail experience has been. I literally almost never get spam to my main mailbox in gmail, I would get a dozen or more a day on my own server.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#152

Post by inferiorhuman »

linsomniac wrote: post #39

How to run your own mail server: Don't. How to run your own mail server (for experts): Don't. I say this as someone who has run my own mail server for 20+ years. Now, if you absolutely have to get off Google, and the other available hosted options don't work for you, then this article looks like a good start. I'd add roundcube for web access and letsencrypt for SSL. One thing you'll never really get, in my experience…

> One thing you'll never really get, in my experience, is good spam handling. The big providers just have so much more data to work with to prevent spam.

I've found the exact opposite. Big providers have to run more lenient rules than I'm willing to use. I can use SORBS and Spamhaus to bounce mail. Sure, both SORBS and SH suggest never ever doing this, but when you self-host you can check your logs, and over the course of a few years I've never had a false positive.

Now that I'm reliant on my ISP for inbound mail I don't have that low pass filter and the amount of spam I get is staggering.

Google is the worst offender in my experience. They don't take spam reports and they don't do a good job of filtering users' inboxes. Sure, there's a SORBS list to bounce mail from hosts that have bogus WHOIS info... but then you block Google... and everyone uses Google... so you just get to put up with all the spam they send out. From the other end, my gmail inbox is nothing but spam these days (the report spam link is generally useless).

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#153

Post by jacquesm »

xienze wrote: post #12
marsrover wrote: post #9

I ran my own mail server for a few months in 2013. I came to the conclusion I'd much rather pay Google $5 a month.

Fastmail will let you do it for $50 per year if you pay upfront. Just not sure why anyone would run an email server other than extreme paranoia. It’s hardly a set it and forget it affair.

> Just not sure why anyone would run an email server other than extreme paranoia.

Compliance.

NDA's.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#154

Post by Ronsenshi »

Faaak wrote: post #32

A docker container would really be useful for that !

Here's the one that I use: https://hub.docker.com/r/analogic/poste.io/

One of the easiest mailserver setups i've ever had.

If you don't like that it's not super free, there's open source alternative: https://mailu.io/

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#155

Post by drdaeman »

rsync wrote: post #143
agentultra wrote: post #41

I run my own mail infrastructure. To say the least I wouldn't recommend it even to my worst enemies. It's horrible. Actually it's fine until it's not. Then your email doesn't work and you could be missing out on important communications. And then you're scrambling to figure out how the spammers managed to exploit your setup this time. And you have to learn a tonne of crap in order to manage it... and the text files!…

"And then you're scrambling to figure out how the spammers managed to exploit your setup this time." ... " ... writing a MTA with the goal of minimizing configuration and being secure and resistant to attacks by default. " As a 20+ year UNIX sysadmin and fellow owner of my own email infrastructure for 18 of those, I am surprised to read this and am not even sure what you are talking about. Can you explain what you me…

Besides accidentally allowing relay, it could be a backscatter spam.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#156

Post by uhhhhhhh »

icebraining wrote: post #65
uhhhhhhh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

smtp will eventually give up retrying, and if you're not willing to "always" respond within a few hours, you're going to lose emails.

Is there any server with such a short default? The RFC recommends at least 4-5 days.

24-72 hours is common from my experience, but that likely varies widely and depends on volume and resources.

If you're running this in the cloud and properly automated everything, and its not a billing issue, responding and fixing things could be as simple as a few hours.

If you're running your own physical machine, repair times for hardware issues can be days.

If you're on vacation for a week or longer, and are making a concerted effort to step away from technology and lines of communication, or worse hit by a small bus and in the hospital for any length of time, you may not be aware of issues for some time.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#157

Post by Clubber »

rsync wrote: post #143
agentultra wrote: post #41

I run my own mail infrastructure. To say the least I wouldn't recommend it even to my worst enemies. It's horrible. Actually it's fine until it's not. Then your email doesn't work and you could be missing out on important communications. And then you're scrambling to figure out how the spammers managed to exploit your setup this time. And you have to learn a tonne of crap in order to manage it... and the text files!…

"And then you're scrambling to figure out how the spammers managed to exploit your setup this time." ... " ... writing a MTA with the goal of minimizing configuration and being secure and resistant to attacks by default. " As a 20+ year UNIX sysadmin and fellow owner of my own email infrastructure for 18 of those, I am surprised to read this and am not even sure what you are talking about. Can you explain what you me…

I've run my own mail server since probably 1998 or so. I have had a few problems here and there, but nothing major. The worst is when the power goes out, but smtp has a wonderful resend feature when the destination server isn't responding.

I know my emails aren't being farmed from the NSA (at least from my side). I know Google isn't scanning all my emails to sell me garbage. I know it won't be shut down because of some errant algorithm. I have a really short email address. I can setup family and friends easily. I can send newsletters without having to deal with someone else's policies (on my side anyway). I love it.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#158

Post by andris9 »

gexcolo wrote: post #148
andris9 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be able to share some stats, like how much disk space these accounts take up and such? For larger scale e-mail sending I built my own MTA ( https://github.com/zone-eu/zone-mta ), our main instance sends about 750k emails a day (mostly normal ISP traffic, maybe 25% marketing emails) and its most valuable feature is juggling with IP addresses and blacklist detection, so if some mailbox gets hacked, starts sen…

Sure, the mail storage currently takes up 1.01TB, using dovecot's mdbox. This mail store started in January 2016, after the service got raided twice by german authorities[0] (at request of u.s. gov), otherwise it would be larger. I'm not going to run like per-user stats but I know historically there's been about 11kb per E-mail on average, so that's about 90 million mails stored. The MTA itself sends and receives a b…

Nice, thanks! Our average message size is about 200kB (and total of 30-40TB). No wonder though as anything from Mailchimp is 300kB nowadays.
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