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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)

#191

Post by m104 »

thro1237 wrote: post #173

Isn't it possible to make all these changes in a server and make it available as a docker container or VM (with minimal customization required for end users?)

For sure! After years of running a personal mail server with a setup similar to what's described in the article, I moved to using a pre-built docker setup and haven't looked back: https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver

The easiest way to get this type of VM setup going is to start up the container on your mail host with all of the fun features (filters mostly) turned off, verify that the new mail container works as expected, then slowly start turning on features one by one so that if you happen to break something with a bad configuration you know how to roll back to a configuration that is functional.

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

#192

Post by nerpderp83 »

ryandrake wrote: post #97
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!…

I recently moved off of Gmail and now run my own personal/family E-mail server, and I have to say so far it has been pretty pain free. I probably just haven't been doing it for long enough to run into trouble yet. Bog standard Debian install, Exim4 + dovecot + SpamAssassin. TLS, SPF, DKIM, and other acronyms all set up and working. The initial setup was a few days config file tweaking (why don't these things come wor…

Having run both Exim and Postfix, I would highly recommend you run Postfix, if not for the security for the configuration.

If you can't run Postfix, run Exim in a container.

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

#193

Post by spac »

storsjt wrote: post #159

Would a better and easier alternative be to run your mail service through AWS?[1] Sure it's _hosted_ in a centralised place but since you're paying for it Amazon shouldn't have an incentive to harvest your data. [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/ses/

Then why not pay for Fastmail for example?

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

#194

Post by Shoothe »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #64
marpstar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention, regardless of time there's little chance you could do it as good as FastMail.

Yeah - that's a very important point. Part of what you're paying for is expertise in a fairly complex and changing field, and with that in mind the price FastMail charges seems to be a bargain.

Email is a "changing field"?

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

#195

Post by ryanlol »

andris9 wrote: post #188
ryanlol wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>most users are probably still using the same password for their email as they used for LinkedIn in 2012 This is absolutely not true.

Oh yes it is, we have around 200k users and fighting with old leaked passwords is like a full time job. Very easy to abuse as well, the attackers can make low frequency requests from scattered IPs and thus are almost impoasible to prevent

I made a very specific claim which I can back up with actual data if necessary.

I will make that claim even more specific:

Less than 5% of the email:password combinations in the linkedin dump work today as email logins. “most” suggests a far higher success rate.

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

#196

Post by jycallahan »

notinventedhear wrote: post #16

Yeesh, there's so much involved. I've been running my own mail server with https://mailinabox.email for ~2 years and can heartily recommend it. Still, even with that there are gotchas if you want to be able to send messages from your server to Google et al, eg. reverse-DNS-records, DKIM, SPF. Not for the pressed-for-time.

Big upvotes for mail-in-a-box! Three years and counting on DigitalOcean!

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

#197

Post by robotmay »

amdavidson wrote: post #17
vog wrote: post #13

I appreciate the write-up! I always wanted to do a similar write-up for my own setup, but I never got around to it. (My setup uses slightly with different components: exim+dovecot+spamassassin+openldap.) However, after reading this, the software developer in me feels like "These tutorials should not be necessary." This should be a GitHub repo, trivial to fork and trivial to test out locally for anyone.

There are several projects that do just that: - https://mailinabox.email/ - https://mailcow.email/ - https://modoboa.org/en/

I've been running a mailcow install for the past year and it has worked remarkably well. Not sure if I'll stick with it when I move my server, but I've got no complaints.

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

#198

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

Shoothe wrote: post #194
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - that's a very important point. Part of what you're paying for is expertise in a fairly complex and changing field, and with that in mind the price FastMail charges seems to be a bargain.

Email is a "changing field"?

Some of the underlying technologies are, yes.

Off the top of my head, DKIM and SPF are somewhat new, using TLS for server-to-server communication is somewhat new and not fully deployed, etc. Mail server operators need to keep track of new developments and update their software and infrastructure to account for them.

There is no possible way that the current state of email is how it will be forever.

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

#200

Post by smolsky »

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!…

I ran my own mail server (a few VMs in the cloud) for about five years. It's fun as you have control over accounts, aliases, forwarding, sieve tricks as well as backups. It's good to know that your broker and doctor's mail is delivered directly to your server and not Google.

It sucks ass when your mail does not get through as GMail/Hotmail rejects a connection from the IP address your cloud company allocated for you, in spite of DKIM etc. Or they decide to mark your mail is "suspicious" and it goes into the recipient's Spam folder. Fighting these huge hosting companies is impossible as they don't want to talk to you.

Also constant tweaking Spamassassin is not fun. My setup worked well for for the first four years but then started letting more crafty junk through... So, I had to compromise by moving the mail to Fastmail.

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