I run my own email server as well and the problem I see with it is that Google has all my email anyway -- probably 90% of the people I communicate with use gmail, so even if I don't, most of my sent mail is already in their system anyway.
How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
251–260 of 339 posts
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#252I 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!…
OpenBSD's smtpd has worked well for me. It's also available in a portable version. https://www.opensmtpd.org/ Configuration is one file, very simple. It won't do everything a sendmail does, but it's never had me pulling my hair out.
Of course, no MTA is as easy as creating a GMail account, but OpenBSD's smtpd is a lot clearer than any of the alternatives.
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you be able to share some stats, like how much disk space these accounts take up and such? For larger scale e-mail sending I built my own MTA ( https://github.com/zone-eu/zone-mta ), our main instance sends about 750k emails a day (mostly normal ISP traffic, maybe 25% marketing emails) and its most valuable feature is juggling with IP addresses and blacklist detection, so if some mailbox gets hacked, starts sen…
Sure, the mail storage currently takes up 1.01TB, using dovecot's mdbox. This mail store started in January 2016, after the service got raided twice by german authorities[0] (at request of u.s. gov), otherwise it would be larger. I'm not going to run like per-user stats but I know historically there's been about 11kb per E-mail on average, so that's about 90 million mails stored. The MTA itself sends and receives a b…
Hey man, off topic, but did you ever get your electronics back?
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#254I 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!…
My experience was quite the opposite (granted I'm an ops guy these days anyhow). I've been self-hosting mail for ages with a postfix + dovecot + cyrus + spamassassin + opendkim + dkimproxy + lets encrypt stack. Everything just works, although I'm going to move it into a jail sooner than later so I can rebuild it more easily. The biggest pain is no longer having a static IP or reverse DNS (thanks Sonic!). Having rever…
'since ages' with Let's Encrypt?
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience was quite the opposite (granted I'm an ops guy these days anyhow). I've been self-hosting mail for ages with a postfix + dovecot + cyrus + spamassassin + opendkim + dkimproxy + lets encrypt stack. Everything just works, although I'm going to move it into a jail sooner than later so I can rebuild it more easily. The biggest pain is no longer having a static IP or reverse DNS (thanks Sonic!). Having rever…
Do you really use both Dovecot and Cyrus? Which one do you use for what?
Not Cyrus IMAP, but their SASL library. Actually, I just looked. Cyrus-sasl was pulled in as a dependency for mutt. I'm using Dovecot for postfix's SASL backend these days. This allows relaying mail for authenticated users only.
Dovecot uses PAM for authentication, and so any user with an account can log in and access their own mailbox and send mail out. The biggest downside is that because I'm deviating from the default FreeBSD configuration for postfix I'm on my own in terms of updates.
I should also clarify the above statement about moving it all into a jail -- I mean a jail managed by (in this case) ansible. Yes, if you just slap something together it will be brittle no matter what stack you choose. Ansible + Jenkins + Jails make it much easier to manage changes.
Edit: Oh yeah, and I've thrown procmail in there for good measure.
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience was quite the opposite (granted I'm an ops guy these days anyhow). I've been self-hosting mail for ages with a postfix + dovecot + cyrus + spamassassin + opendkim + dkimproxy + lets encrypt stack. Everything just works, although I'm going to move it into a jail sooner than later so I can rebuild it more easily. The biggest pain is no longer having a static IP or reverse DNS (thanks Sonic!). Having rever…
'since ages' with Let's Encrypt?
No. Let's Encrypt was a fairly new addition. Previously I was using self-signed certs that I'd install manually in the client.
But I've been self-hosting mail services for over a decade at this point. It's seen a variety of permutations including some with Sendmail, some with postgres backed lookup tables for virtual hosting, and so-on.
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Backup MX is usually not necessary, especially for home setups. Anything RFC-compliant will retry sending its email to you for days after being rejected.
It's also generally not a wise idea unless you also have your anti-spam/anti-virus setup running on it as well, since things like graylisting can only be done BEFORE the MTA accepts the message. Spammers WILL know how to search your mx records for things like mailbagging servers and try to exploit them to bypass your security, just don't do it - the sending party will retry.
You can chain SMTP like this: SMTP (backup) -> SMTP (spam filter) -> MTA.
Checking white-lists can take a while and some SMTP servers will give up if they're stuck for over a second, sometimes less (eg when your server checks the spam-lists). Some SMTP servers or DNS server (cought Google caugh) will not try secondary though, so if you can afford it - have just one powerful front server with good uptime and network, or load balance / proxy to internal farm.
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#258Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
According to Wikipedia DKIM was conceived in 2004 and SPF was standardized in 2005 (although designs date a few years before that). I wouldn't call them particularly new (it's almost 14 years now). Even DMARC was here in 2010, that's 8 years.
One recent thing is MTA STS but the progress is slow on this front (from my POV).
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#260I run my own mail server that I coded myself (https://github.com/sfilargi/puremail).
It's basically a single binary that has an SMTP server and webmail server. It works absolutely fine for me without much stress. I do hit a couple of bugs here and there, mainly on the mail parsing, but it's not big deal.