Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

Back when I was first learning about Tech (early 2000's), I installed a mail server at home and configured it all wrong so I gave up on it. A few days later I noticed that my drive was getting full and didn't know why. This is how I learned about a honeypot, I had left it running, someone had used it for sending spam but since I screwed up the setup all the spam was stuck on my computer with nowhere to route out.

Last time I setup a mail server

Hosting email yourself is fine. Once you figure out the right incantations and order of animal sacrifice, it will stay fine.

Mine has been online for 15 years, and I have no issues. I don't even get much spam because it's a weird domain. No routing issues to anyone. It's been my one and only email service for many years.

However, I must strongly caution everyone: do NOT give an account to someone you aren't already married to. I've been administering my ex's email for ten years, and I expect I'll be maintaining their account until one of us dies. I could kick them out, but we all know how catastrophic it would be to lose your primary email, even if you were given years of time to migrate.

So I'll just grumble about it until I die.

Run your own email server. It's fun-ish. Just don't give your partner an account unless you're also giving them a ring.

"refuse emails" already exists, that's the "hard bounce" thing that the OP is talking about.

Phishing and malicious links exists on every kind of messaging - email, forums, whatsapp, telegram, SMS... you name it, it has spam/phishing. You'd think that at least "real name" or "pay a bit per message" might discourage this, but example of SMS (text) shows otherwise.

With any system the server operator will be able to delete messages, and/or gatekeep information - unless you have some sort of "big brother" setup where every message goes through government-operated monitoring server, and I cannot believe anyone intentionally choosing such a system.

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 was a couple years ago with Microsoft swallowing my emails and it was due to the combination of a fairly old exim and a TLS certificate verification quirk at *.protection.outlook.com. I found a fix in the form of a configuration option somewhere on SO.

In all fairness, there is very little maintenance involved, and whenever I have to do maintenance work, I take the opportunity to learn something new. Like this year, I decided to finally replace my aging Debian jessie setup by Arch Linux, and I rewrote all cron jobs as systemd timers.

I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway.

Lastly, a piece of advice: treat self-hosting like a hobby and learn to enjoy it.

Oh and the very last thing: the person who designed Exim configuration for Debian deserves a special place in hell for all the hours wasted. If you set up Exim on Debian, just figure out how to use the upstream exim config and adapt it to your needs.

Yep, Hotmail is also my only problem.

I'll be moving soon so my stuff will be offline for like 2+ weeks, I'll look at the problem with hotmail again when I figure out what to do about temporally moving my stuff to a vpc provider.