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Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

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Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#181

Post by mariusor »

felipeqq2 wrote: post #13

I think it's important to at least own your email domain, so you can keep your address when changing hosts. Hosting myself is too much of a hassle, so I go with PurelyMail. It's wonderfully cheap and works great. Had no issues with delivery so far.

I'd like to add my endorsement for PurelyMail.

It's been a reliable (for the past 4 years I've used it) solution, with easy setup and laughably small cost. Currently it costs me about $0.3 per month to host personal mail for multiple domains (only one having some moderate activity in fairness).

All of these are mostly personal emails, I haven't tried to send large amount of emails to test their outgoing policies.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#182

Post by generj »

Tmpod wrote: post #69

I don't host my own email server, though I'd like to give it a go one day, even if just as a little sysadmin "adventure". At the moment, I use the really good Migadu Micro plan.[1] It has very nice limits for the $19/y price (half if you're a student like myself), with a pretty lax and understanding policy. They also care about standards and make an effort for you to configure your domain with all the right records.…

Second Migadu, great company.

Never worry about deliverability. If your DNS provider has oddities that make it annoying to setup they will run your DNS for you.

For $30 a year (domain plus Migadu) you control your email domain. No possibility of being randomly banned by Google either.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#183

Post by quags »

throwaway67743 wrote: post #173
tqwhite wrote: post #66

I do. For many years I have run a Mail in a Box server hosted on Digital Ocean. I like it very much and have had no problems. MIAB is a wonderful piece of scriptware. The guy promises to follow best practices in all things and, as best I can tell, he delivers. I have rarely had any problem with deliverability or anything else. I continue to do so for several reasons, hosting multiple domains, ad hoc addresses, etc, b…

DO is probably the worst choice as they have one of the worst reputations for emitting trash... I drop do entirely and have done for a few years, nothing appears to come from there apart from trash though so I haven't noticed any problems there. Literally anyone else (even ovh these days) would be a better choice for delivery success.

I raise the asn of do a bit using the asn module for rspamd. Same goes for ips in rbls - score higher and take a complete picture score using multiple data points. There are legitimate systems on do and you never know the email you don’t get unless someone goes out of your way to send email another way. Personally I get more spam from gmail and outlook than digital ocean but obviously due to both of their sizes it probably is less than a provider like do overall.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#184

Post by ajdude »

tqwhite wrote: post #66

I do. For many years I have run a Mail in a Box server hosted on Digital Ocean. I like it very much and have had no problems. MIAB is a wonderful piece of scriptware. The guy promises to follow best practices in all things and, as best I can tell, he delivers. I have rarely had any problem with deliverability or anything else. I continue to do so for several reasons, hosting multiple domains, ad hoc addresses, etc, b…

Also mail in a box user here, runs on a VM with both a static IP V4 and IP V6 along with all of the DNS fun that comes with it.

Mailinabox just works, and I use it for my whole family.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#185

Post by the-anarchist »

johnklos wrote: post #94

I run my own email. I have my own physical servers, that I built and tested myself, that I'm colocating. They handle both incoming and outgoing, and I've been doing it for so long that there is no previous reputation for the IP addresses I use. In spite of how vehemently some people, Reddit's /r/sysadmin, as an example, want you to NOT host your own and use issues like deliverability as reasons, it's really not hard…

You Sir are badass and should definitely share some of all that on a website/blog of yours. Would be genuinely curious to read more!

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#186

Post by josephb »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #134

I have decided not to. I prefer to support a small-tech company like Tutanota with a paid subscription to give bigtech's top line a millimetric nudge. Disclaimer: I'm a passionate Tutanota customer.

Are you using it with one of their domains or your own domain? How successful is delivery of the emails that you send out?

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#187

Post by pepa65 »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #48

I've been running my own email server for 20+ years. As of now, it costs well under 10€/month at Hetzner Cloud and it uses Debian jessie and whatever exim and dovecot that came with it. It also hosts my private git repositories in /var/git and a few other services and websites. One day, I will migrate it to Arch Linux.

Why Arch for this?? Debian is super reliable, Arch is fickle.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#188

Post by FrontierPsych »

johnklos wrote: post #94

I run my own email. I have my own physical servers, that I built and tested myself, that I'm colocating. They handle both incoming and outgoing, and I've been doing it for so long that there is no previous reputation for the IP addresses I use. In spite of how vehemently some people, Reddit's /r/sysadmin, as an example, want you to NOT host your own and use issues like deliverability as reasons, it's really not hard…

I looked into hosting my own, but wow, so technical, at least to me.

I don't know why there isn't some kind of pre-made install that you just click the "OK" and it downloads and installs the email servers.

When I looked at it last, which was about 3 years ago, you had to install 5 or 6 or more different apps, get the interoperatbility going, setting different switches....it was endless. All I want to do is click an "OK" and it is done.

Quite frankly, I don't understand how people can write very technical apps like email servers, yet be so completely unable to create a one-click installation feature. This goes with so much more than email, by the way. It seem's like it would be so exceedinly simple to do one-click setups.

But I am curious, how exactly did you learn? Did you work with someone who already knew how to do it so you didn't have to learn on your own? Or did you learn 100% on your own?

I'd be very curious to learn from you on the above issues.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Host Your Own Email?

#189

Post by t312227 »

to put it in a nutshell:

* self-hosted on a rented physical server-system running debian gnu-linux (stable)

* setup via ansible-roles

* using my own DNS-setup with isc-bind

* (open)ldap-directory (qmail-schema)

* exim4-ldap with my own configuration (not the distro-standard)

* spamassassin + clamav

* courier-imap

* roundcube for web-access

* gnu mailman ver 2.x

* letsencrypt for certificates

just my 0.02€

ps.: i'm doing this since the 2nd half of the 1990ties ... so i really know what i'm doing :))

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