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Self-hosting email like it's 1984

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Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#31

Post by pseudalopex »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #14
iwontberude wrote: post #2

[flagged]

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 e…

> Neither my government nor my Prime Minister nor even my Ministry of Interior or Foreign Ministry can host their own email.

Can or wish to?

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#32

Post by billfor »

Assuming this is not hosted on your home system, since ISPs may block the ports and also most of the dynamic ips allocated are blacklisted, the issue with postfix is that its difficult to have a single set and forget config if you intend to use it on multiple internal machines, like for getting your root email on each system to one mailbox. Ideally you want a single main.cf for all your internal machines and for the outgoing/incoming mailhost to be determined solely by your mx or internal dns alias, but this is next to impossible with a single postfix config without getting mail loops on the system that is the mailhost. Exim and sendmail at least separate out the submit config from the rest of the configuration. Also you would be insane to try this without fail2ban or something similar. Postfix does a reasonable job of handling attackers but it does so quietly -- so you may not see the activity.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#33

Post by mfsch »

watermelon0 wrote: post #29
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #7

Here is my advice to anyone wanting to test out self-hosting email. Start by using your self-hosted email to sign-up for accounts. You don't have to use the email address for your personal correspondence Use Mail-in-a-box to get started [1]. You can literally set it up in a couple of hours by following the instructions and everything should just work. After a few years, you can think about switching your personal cor…

I can recommend Stalwart [1] which is a complete mail service contained in a single binary, that doesn't really have any external dependencies, and is really easy to install and update. I've looked (and tried) a few other projects in the past, but Stalwart was the easiest to setup, and I haven't had any issues with it so far. [1] https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart

It’s also what Thunderbird is using to build their paid email hosting. Seems like a very ambitious project mostly done by a single person – impressive!

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#34

Post by hmng »

iwontberude wrote: post #2

[flagged]

My first email usage was at University, pre-WWW. After that I briefly used some ISP email service, but that was on a time of very limited storage and POP only accounts, so I started hosting my own email even before having an always-on internet connection, using a relay and dynamic DNS to receive email when online. Now a days, I use a small VPS to route and receive email, but final destination and storage is on my home server. Over the years, I had, like others here, to ask Outlook and other providers to unblock my IP or domain, but it has been rare.

I really don’t want to live in a world where only two or three companies run email for the entire world, and this is my little act of resistance.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#35

Post by xmx98 »

hmng wrote: post #30
hk1337 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long are you going to keep the cat in the box?

Spoiler alert, it’s Postfix. So not really 1984 software. But then again, neither is Linux…

But the experience of using mailx is close to that time, hence the title. Even though I’m too young to know for sure :)

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#36

Post by man8alexd »

hmng wrote: post #30
hk1337 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long are you going to keep the cat in the box?

Spoiler alert, it’s Postfix. So not really 1984 software. But then again, neither is Linux…

Almost everything described in the article didn't exist in 1984. Postfix, OpenDKIM, TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Only very basic SMTP and DNS, but even MX records didn't exist.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#39

Post by pembrook »

boplicity wrote: post #13

Modern email providers, especially ones offered by ISPs often have the same problems that people criticize self-hosted providers for. Even Google has problems. For example, I regularly order via companies that use Shopify. Now, all of the shopify emails are going straight to spam in Gmail, despite constantly marking them as not spam. (These even pass dmarc/spf/dkim etc, so who knows what's going on here.) Email deliv…

Bizarrely, I also find Gmail's spam algo is actually oversensitive to marketing emails from companies these days, which I never thought was something I would complain about. But like you said its super annoying when I actually want the emails.

Seems like we had the opposite problem 10ish years ago. But now the pendulum has swung a bit too far in the other direction.

Ultimately most of the spam I get these days is actually from individuals doing low volume cold outreach from personal email addresses...not companies sending bulk. The new gmail unsubscribe feature works great for marketing emails but is worthless against cold email spam -- which somehow rarely ever lands in spam.

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