There's a way better solution for self hosted email these days - Stalwart[1]. Supports all necessary protocols and extensions, including modern JMAP. And, of course, it's memory safe, unlike Postfix and friends.
Self-hosting email like it's 1984
161–170 of 190 posts
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#162If you host your email on a VPS, you might as well let an email provider manage it all for you. In both cases, a company has access to your emails. What you have achieved is doing the dirty job of administration for the company, while not getting the privacy benefits of self hosting. If you host it at home, can you endure uptime?
This argument is absurd.
You have a trust relationship with your VPS provider. Yes, they can access it, if they want to. The difference is that with a VPS you have contractual privacy and with e.g. Gmail they outright tell you that they scan your emails. So it is a big difference.
With everything, it's question of budget and what risks you accept.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I had my email banned by Yahoo because I would get rate limited and I didn't have a way of surfacing those messages (huzzah opensearch)
What got me out entirely was when I attempted to send an email to a colleague at a random ass no name university and my email was flat out rejected with no way to reach out to the administrators. I wouldn't have cared if it wasn't such a unique project (oil and gas exploration using ML). I have not self hosted email (in earnest) since that day over 10 years ago.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#164I used to do this. What finally killed it wasn't reputation, it was the fact that I needed 100% uptime or risk losing messages, getting my address blacklisted, etc. Email is supposed to be resilient to down time (retries, trying each MX record, etc.) but I found that large mail providers tend to just bounce and walk away. Worse, GitHub (back in 2016 and 2018) would mark a recipient as "unavailable" after a single bou…
This is fearmongering. My mails always got resent after some hours or a day. It's absolutely NOT possible to tell if the problem is on your side, senders side or somewhere in between why a mail is not delivered once and no standard server config would simply toss it. Host your own mail. I get 99% deliverability with 0 repuation since i do dkim and spf correct. Don't be distracted by the "complexity" - if you config r…
Until that one email you wish to send to someone important never goes through.
The fact is, big email providers have all the leverage and you will have to play their game ($$$) in order for your email to work everywhere.
It happened to me and that made me realize it's not worth the hassle. Good luck
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is fearmongering. My mails always got resent after some hours or a day. It's absolutely NOT possible to tell if the problem is on your side, senders side or somewhere in between why a mail is not delivered once and no standard server config would simply toss it. Host your own mail. I get 99% deliverability with 0 repuation since i do dkim and spf correct. Don't be distracted by the "complexity" - if you config r…
>I get 99% deliverability with 0 repuation since i do dkim and spf correct. Your anecdote of success doesn't matter to the others that correctly configured DKIM/SPF and still don't get their emails delivered to Gmail/Outlook/Yahoo/etc. E.g. : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437 One of the reasons for hard-to-diagnose sending failures is that Gmail/Outlook have "extra invisible rules" that override correct D…
>ip reputation
Get this. I owened a /23 for 7 years (still own it today) and kept the mail server ip on a /27 just for the mail server on a /24 that was not used for anything production (firewalled and maybe 3 ip's responded on port 443). My mails were banned for bad reputation. The provider which hosted my /23 was well known for responding to abuse, even falsely flagging my account as abusive in the early days for simply _sending_ valid smtp mails.
IP reputation turned out to mean, if they never saw your IP, you were in the banned bucket. How do you even fight against that
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#166Modern 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…
I have self hosted my email for about twenty years; fr about ten or fifteen I just forwarded everything to Gmail but had to revert to local ( started with local mail in emacs, but switched to imapd to solve the airplane ticket in the airport issue) because so much important stuff was marked as spam. Like in the middle of a conversation between me and on other person their reply to my email (which I always bcc:ed ack…
How do you guarantee uptime for yourself?
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#167(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've been lucky never to get very much spam to my self-hosted domain, but it went to zero once I implemented geo-IP blocking for a few obvious countries and has stayed that way ever since.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#168I used to do this. What finally killed it wasn't reputation, it was the fact that I needed 100% uptime or risk losing messages, getting my address blacklisted, etc. Email is supposed to be resilient to down time (retries, trying each MX record, etc.) but I found that large mail providers tend to just bounce and walk away. Worse, GitHub (back in 2016 and 2018) would mark a recipient as "unavailable" after a single bou…
I have a feature (called greylisting) whereby my server intentionally rejects the first mail it receives from a domain. I have never had anyone claim that their mail has not been delivered to me, and I get a lot of mail. Retry is built in to the spec, and if you’re really worried you can put a second “receive” SMTP server on the internet with a lower priority, and have it backhaul with LMTP. ——— Email was designed in…
GMail itself will sometimes temporarily reject messages, then accept them later.
I have Postfix logs showing things like "this address is receiving a high rate of email" which are later accepted.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#169I would love to be able to self-host like it was 2025, and with that I mean giving a piece of software the api token to my DNS api, a database, a list of domains and having it figure everything out (certificates, MX records, DKIM etc.) by itself. It should not be impossible.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#170I’ve been running Mailcow for 5+ years. After getting over initial reputation issues, it’s been smooth sailing.