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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)

#31

Post by deadbunny »

> Before we dive in, an important caveat: You will become a sysadmin of your own mail server.

This for me is the deal breaker. I say this as a sysadmin.

It's all well and good running a single server but if that shits the bed then you have to deal with it immediately.

So to run something that doesn't require 24/7 support I now have to run a cluster of servers.

I'll also need something to manage those servers like salt/ansible/puppet

I also need to deal with being my IP blacklisted because of a previous owner, or just entire domains now delivering my email because they don't like the fact i'm not using $email provider

Then there is spam filtering and the constant battle that is.

Or I could just pay someone a couple of bucks a month to worry about all that shit and not worry about it.

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

#33

Post by freen »

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.

Seconding https://mailinabox.email

It's fantastic.

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

#34

Post by petre »

Is there any modern webmail client that's secure and easy to set up? I know about Squirrel Mail and there was another one using the Horde framework, but I'd rather use a uwSGI/PSGI app that preferably doesn't need a mySQL database.

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

#36

Post by 2bluesc »

xienze wrote: post #12
marsrover wrote: post #9

I ran my own mail server for a few months in 2013. I came to the conclusion I'd much rather pay Google $5 a month.

Fastmail will let you do it for $50 per year if you pay upfront. Just not sure why anyone would run an email server other than extreme paranoia. It’s hardly a set it and forget it affair.

I ran my own mail server for years because I didn't trust Google with _all_ my data. Started colocated server for a while, then VPS, then cloud. Setting up an maintaining SPAM mechanisms on a low volume mail server is a nightmare.

Switched to Fastmail and haven't looked back. Their Android and Web client are great and they've opened their JMAP[0] interface.

[0] http://jmap.io/

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

#37

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

rootsudo wrote: post #15

Also it's alot of work.

It took about three days to set up postfix and dovecot for multiple domains from a cold start, including certs and spam filtering.

Postfix supports a selection of block lists for spam, and I get no spam at all - although unfortunately my gf sends me email from a Yahoo account, and certain Y! servers get blocked, so that mail bounces.

She doesn't do it often enough for me to spend more time getting whitelisting to work. (Currently it doesn't - I don't know why.)

The hard part is getting a working config file for postfix, but there are tuts and examples online.

Like a lot of older FOSS code, postfix is basically an insane collection of every possible switch for every possible feature, dumped with no particular thought or care into a single config file, and written up - ditto - in a single help file.

You only need about 10% of it, but you won't know which 10% until you try.

The server gets regular hack/relay attacks from all over, but those get killed by Fail2Ban. I'm not exactly a high profile target, but unlike an old WP site I used to run - it was hacked in weeks - the servers seem to have survived for more than five years now.

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

#38

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

lucb1e wrote: post #25

> on FreeBSD using Postfix, Dovecot, Rspamd, and LDAP. That seems like an awful amount of work / overkill. This is not a good introduction for a normal geek, and die-hard open source fans will figure it out without too much trouble anyway. Postfix is not the best choice for novices, FreeBSD is not the most well-supported/documented system just because it's not as popular as some others, and a directory service should…

FreeBSD isn't that bad, but it is different than Linux and the community is smaller. There are some things that the Linux world does better (installing updates), but there are also some things that FreeBSD does better (ZFS, I prefer the split between base and 3rd-party software, etc).

The documentation for the base system, however, is very good. The man pages are complete and well-written, and the handbook[0] is a great source of documentation as well.

[0] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/

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

#39

Post by linsomniac »

How to run your own mail server: Don't.

How to run your own mail server (for experts): Don't.

I say this as someone who has run my own mail server for 20+ years.

Now, if you absolutely have to get off Google, and the other available hosted options don't work for you, then this article looks like a good start. I'd add roundcube for web access and letsencrypt for SSL.

One thing you'll never really get, in my experience, is good spam handling. The big providers just have so much more data to work with to prevent spam.

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

#40

Post by icebraining »

deadbunny wrote: post #31

> Before we dive in, an important caveat: You will become a sysadmin of your own mail server. This for me is the deal breaker. I say this as a sysadmin. It's all well and good running a single server but if that shits the bed then you have to deal with it immediately. So to run something that doesn't require 24/7 support I now have to run a cluster of servers. I'll also need something to manage those servers like sal…

It's all well and good running a single server but if that shits the bed then you have to deal with it immediately.

Well, that depends on your needs. SMTP will keep retrying, so you won't lose any emails, you just might not be able to access them immediately. For my personal email, this is perfectly OK. Not that it ever happened, in my six years of running Exim + Dovecot, but that may have just been luck.

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