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Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#221

Post by Kadin »

You can do this, and I do this (although not for my personal email, currently, although I have in the past -- I do it for a club though and it works fine).

If you are not being blacklisted (check the common ones plus AOL, they run their own), and are using SPF and DKIM, you shouldn't be having problems with messages getting blocked. That's pretty unusual.

What could be happening is that you might be in an IP range that's residential; there are some operators who blackhole all messages originating from "residential" IPs, even if they are not specifically being blacklisted for bad conduct, and even if they have valid SPF/DKIM records. I think this is a pretty bullshitty thing to do, and completely out of the spirit of Postel's Law, to the point where I think anyone who configures a server this way ought to be forced into a lifetime of Windows XP helpdesk duty. But it's a thing that happens.

One solution that's worked for me is to get a cheap VPS and run my mailserver there. It's in an IP block that traces back to a big datacenter, and it seems to be much more acceptable to various overzealous spam filters than my home IP.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#222

Post by __david__ »

sippeangelo wrote: post #149
jjnoakes wrote: post #134

PSA: If you run your own mail server and use that email address for password resets, please use a reputable hosting provider and dns provider, and turn on 2FA. Don't let that often overlooked weak point be the way every one of your accounts gets compromised. Once they have your email, they have everything that resets via that email domain.

Any recommendations for a reputable name server that has 2FA?

I used to just run bind (and then later tinydns) on the same machine that had the SMTP server, but finding secondaries got really hard (the last really good one got bought and shut down by dyndns). A couple years ago I switched my DNS to Amazon AWS's route53 which has been working great, and AWS has 2 factor authentication (at least for the web console).

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#224

Post by huskyr »

nokya wrote: post #121
mrb wrote: post #88

One little trick that I rarely see mentioned for working around the negative or neutral reputation your MTA's IP might have is that you can route your outgoing emails through another MTA that has a higher reputation. For example route them through smtp.gmail.com (or for other options see https://support.google.com/a/answer/176600?hl=en ). It does not mean you have to use Gmail. It does not mean you have to change you…

This completely defeats the original purpose of this HN. Why would anyone invest effort in hosting an independent email server to have all its content routed clear-text through Google's servers/databases?

Because your mail will end up at Google anyway? Even if you don't use Gmail, all your friends do.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#225

Post by superswordfish »

ctrlc-root wrote: post #69
tezza wrote: post #47

Linode + Postfix successfully for years. Reverse DNS very important and the SPF Linode have excellent setup documentation ( https://www.linode.com/docs/email/postfix/email-with-postfix... )

I have been running this setup for a few years now and it's great. I used to have a problem with GMail rejecting a lot of forwarded emails as spam but I set up graylisting ( http://postgrey.schweikert.ch/ ) and since then I haven't had a single email rejected. It probably also matters how long you've been running your server so I would expect (assuming you're not actually sending or forwarding spam) to see the number…

I ran a setup like this for several years but rejected/spam foldered emails were always a pain, plus a well-appointed mail host uses a fair bit of memory. I use Google mail now. It's not very expensive, and instant unconditional delivery to other Google mail users is a pretty nice perk. The nicest thing is not having the worry in the back of your head that just maybe something has gone awry with your setup and you are losing mail right now.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#226

Post by XorNot »

mozumder wrote: post #204
falcolas wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem there is most of the hard work the OP mentions has nothing to do with the mail server itself, but instead it's around DNS, networking, certificates, and monitoring 3rd party services. Some of this may be able to be automated, but that's the hard part; not installing and configuring a few software packages.

This is definitely an issue. The emails server is easy. The tedious part is the infrastructure setup.

The real problem is that the unencrypted nature of email makes most solutions non-starters. If end-to-end were the default, then you could imagine having a process whereby you ran a P2P service which kept your MX records pointed to a cluster of network members, all of whom agreed to act as your MX fallback if you went down and which collectively handled monitoring and distributing blacklist notifications.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#228

Post by cookiecaper »

lucb1e wrote: post #78
cookiecaper wrote: post #20

No, not really. It's a constant battle to get delisted from spam blacklists and your site keeps popping back up. Even most companies don't bother with it anymore.

> Even most companies don't bother with it anymore. This is a little bit like "correlation is not causation". Companies are moving a lot of stuff to the 'cloud', and email is just one of the services that goes with it. It's simply cost-saving to not have dedicated IT personnel. Even if hosting your own mail server is easy, you need someone who takes care of it every now and then (disk full, adding users, blacklist in…

Your company is amazingly lucky if it only gets a blacklist incident once a year, and if that incident is easily resolved.

The internet seems to have decided that if your mail doesn't come from one of the major commercial mail brokers, it's as good as spam. I ran several private mail servers for several years before giving up. I'm generally suspicious of moving to cloud/services, but outgoing email is the one thing that I can safely say 99% of companies would be better off moving to a service.

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#229

Post by [deleted] »

Nux wrote: post #59

It's absolutely possible to run an email server in 2016 and I encourage anyone capable to do so! Email is one of the bastions of the decentralised Internet and we should hang on to it. Every day more and more people are moving to Gmail/Hotmail/Outlook and while I do understand the reasons, it also puts more and more power into the hands of these providers and the little guy (us) gets more screwed (like marked as junk…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is it possible to run your own mail server for personal use?

#230

Post by dtmmax33 »

efesak wrote: post #91

Sure! I run several servers (and developing them, see https://poste.io ). Watch DMARC reports and give it little time, most of time it will solve itself. You can also register to feedback loop...

Definitely recommend FBL for anyone running a newsletter. That way if you do get a spam complaint you will be notified. Take a look at the list here: https://www.port25.com/list-of-current-feedback-loops-offere...
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