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Self-host your mail server

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Re: Self-host your mail server

#41

Post by tylerjl »

I've hosted and actively used my own email server for > 10 years and there are two things that are true at the same time:

It is absolutely possible to host, use, and achieve decent deliverability with your own server. It takes work and is a different beast than running a webserver, but that frontier is not dead (yet).

At the same time: it is an ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE IDEA to suggest that folks operate an email server out of residential IP through your ISP. The spam prevention ecosystem is so draconian now that email traffic flowing out of address ranges belonging to residential owners is yeeted into the sun. If you've operated email infrastructure at decently large scales, you know that SPF/DKIM/DMARC are just one part of how spam is identified, and mixing in the source of email traffic into the detection heuristics is a significant part of that identification process. Achieving decent delivery can often involve "warming up" an IP over time to establish its reputation, and consumer address ranges are a hodge-podge of activity that incur very little trust about what they're doing.

I agree with some commenters that exhort the exercise of self-hosting email to prevent the venerable protocol becoming a homogeneous GMail and Outlook-only world, but there are reliable ways to do this: using a VPS, relying on a company for the sending/SMTP part, or something similar. But footguns abound, and disgorging SMTP packets from your LAN edge is one of them.

Re: Self-host your mail server

#42

Post by tamimio »

The problem isn’t spam, the problem is you becoming the spam.

I did test email selfhosting before and there’s a substantial amount of times my emails were never seen by the recipient, sometimes it did cost me good jobs/deals.

So now I use paid email while I control the domain and everything else, so I have the portability feature if I wanted to switch providers without any efforts, but I know now my emails will be delivered whenever I hit sent.

That being said, I self host everything else in my digital life, and I believe everyone should.

Re: Self-host your mail server

#43

Post by cjs_ac »

I started self-hosting my email server earlier this year. I use maddy[0] as my email server and route outgoing mail through MailPace[1] to avoid being memory-holed (despite having SPF and DKIM set up correctly).

My reason for self-hosting is control, not privacy: the fact that the cleartext of my outbound emails is visible in the MailPace UI is not a concern; the problem I'm solving is that email providers can delete your account.

[0] https://maddy.email/

[1] https://mailpace.com/

Re: Self-host your mail server

#44

Post by Mike-Kelner »

I know an old-school Linux admin who has been successfully running his own email servers for 30+ years - from small private ones to larger corporate setups. For spam detection he uses his own system, and it works surprisingly well even without any LLM (though an LLM could surely make it even better). So the "you can't self-host email" meme was never quite true - it is about willingness and ability to configure everything right.

Re: Self-host your mail server

#45

Post by fisian »

I started hosting my email at home some months ago and it works great. However, my ISP blocks some ports necessary for running a mailserver (incoming SMTP), so I have to use an SMTP relay (which is on a VPS and does port 25 to some other port that is not blocked). Additionally, to not worry about deliverability, I let my mailserver send all outgoing mail through another service. The additional costs for this are about 2€/month.

I use Stalwart as a mail server and it was not too hard to setup (with some caveats to get it working with my SSL certs behind a reverse proxy. But nothing a bit of LLM chatting couldn't solve). All in all, it's not 100% self hosted, but works well.

However, I don't agree with the suggestion in the article to use a self hosted LLM. My mailserver needs a few hundred MBs of RAM at max, but with the spam filter this would increase like 10x-100x.

Re: Self-host your mail server

#46

Post by fisian »

dandersch wrote: post #26

Before self-hosting your own, first get a domain and just point it at a mail provider that allows custom domains. It will cost, but so will a VPS. I suspect a lot of DIY homelab types would have most of their needs met with just that setup: - you get the vanity email address - you can switch email providers (including self-hosting later on) - you can have ~unlimited aliases (depends on the provider) Most of the setup…

Agreed. Also being able to use as many aliases as you like (or a catch-all) is very nice.

Re: Self-host your mail server

#47

Post by calvinmorrison »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #38
dandersch wrote: post #26

Before self-hosting your own, first get a domain and just point it at a mail provider that allows custom domains. It will cost, but so will a VPS. I suspect a lot of DIY homelab types would have most of their needs met with just that setup: - you get the vanity email address - you can switch email providers (including self-hosting later on) - you can have ~unlimited aliases (depends on the provider) Most of the setup…

Agreed. Never use a provider-specific email domain, when for a tiny amount per year you can have an email at your own domain that stays the same no matter who your email provider is.

how else can you get a cool PO Box.com email address without using fastmail though?

Re: Self-host your mail server

#48

Post by sandeepkd »

mmh0000 wrote: post #16

I ran my own self-hosted email server from 2008-ish to 2018, and I would highly recommend against doing it! Especially when Fastmail and Proton are so cheap. I was running Postfix+Dovecot+Seive+SpamAssassin+Fail2ban+certbot+spf+dkim+reverse-ip+ It worked! Receiving email was overall pretty easy. I know I also did things the "hard way" by ad-hoccing all that together, and today there are a lot more out-of-the-box solu…

I think the timeline is critical here and should be highlighted. Self hosting email server was something that worked out just fine in the past (used to host until 2014), however things have changed a lot with the scale of abuse. its not worth it unless you are doing it as a business. Sending a email from your home IP to big email providers with reliability is next to impossible. Even if we discount the spam management,

1. IP reputation is a big deal, its not just about not being on some blocklist, call it a cartel at this point, its about being on the allow list for other mail providers

2. Keeping it reputable is a continuous effort

Re: Self-host your mail server

#49

Post by 6c696e7578 »

Been self-hosting my own mail since '99.

Delivery isn't the problem, just people don't use mail as much as they used to. Most people reach for signal or whatsapp to communicate. Most mail is order confirmations. So don't really care if people can't get mail, it isn't the primary communication tool for most people like it used to me.

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