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Self-hosting email like it's 1984

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Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#171

Post by sam_lowry_ »

commandersaki wrote: post #103
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…

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…

> Email for me is a critical service

This is exactly why I only trust myself to do it. I almost lost my gmail account a couple of times in the past, and every time it was quite stressful. Since then, I use gmail as a backup email provider, than is, pretty much never.

Due to the way mail servers work, you have a couple of days to sort out your troubles before you will start missing emails. At worst, you can always buy Google for Work or some other SaaS and point your MX servers there.

Backup is always a hard problem, but I got to live with Hetzer Clould backing up my VMs, Hetzher Backup boxes as restic backup targets and a tiny Celeron server in the laundry closet for local backups.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#172

Post by mzhaase »

dataflow wrote: post #23
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…

> These even pass dmarc/spf/dkim etc, so who knows what's going on here. Those have nothing to do with being spam, right? Spam is about content, those are about authenticity. Anybody can send authentic trash, or unauthenticated gold.

Your spam score goes up without DKIM or SPF.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#173

Post by calgoo »

jasode wrote: post #83
Krei-se wrote: post #74

Earlier 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…

I think i found a loophole for the google and outlook ones... I have had my domains on both providers, and then left to my own (but left a couple of google and ms txt records by mistake) and never had any issues delivering to both providers. Thinking of doing the same thing again honestly, but looking at good providers at the moment.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#174

Post by dataflow »

mzhaase wrote: post #172
dataflow wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These even pass dmarc/spf/dkim etc, so who knows what's going on here. Those have nothing to do with being spam, right? Spam is about content, those are about authenticity. Anybody can send authentic trash, or unauthenticated gold.

Your spam score goes up without DKIM or SPF.

Sure but that's just because spammers don't tend to authenticate their email. But that obviously doesn't mean they get to send spam if they do.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#175

Post by atoav »

Mailcow is pretty good actually. Setup on a virtual hetzner server took me half an hour, as it is a pretty simple docker container. What took a little longer was migrating my mails over, and setting all the needed DNS records (SPF and the likes).

I had a small blacklisting issue in the beginning that could be resolved within 24 hours, since then it works flawlessly.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#177

Post by ptman »

lifty wrote: post #56
behringer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because postfix is foss, will work with everything and for all time and if there's a problem with it you'll actually be able to fix it.

I thought Stalwart’s license, AGPL is foss.

Stalwart does have limits that postfix doesn't though. https://stalw.art/compare/

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#178

Post by auxbuss »

Symbiote wrote: post #168
dijit wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gmail always rejects the first email I send to a new gmail account. It does this every time – and has done for years – despite the fact I have sent emails to hundreds of other gmail accounts, and send emails to such accounts every day.

This is the reason I personally will not touch any Google services. And in business, I excise Google services as a priority. If a company cannot handle email in a civil manner, it certainly can't be trusted with anything of importance.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#179

Post by realaaa »

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…

hear hear !

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#180

Post by realaaa »

mrighele wrote: post #169

I 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.

you can do SmarterMail for 1 domain for free - they are quite good, one of few decent remaining mail systems out there (of course it's commercial for business use)
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