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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)

#61

Post by Jaruzel »

Slightly tangential, but is there something for RSpamd, where it can be run as just a blind mail relay?

I.E. like this:

  Internet Email (SMTP) -> [MTA + Rspamd] -> [Real MTA + Inboxes]
I ask because I've got a mail server system I'm happy with, but just want to bolt a better anti-spam filtering system on in front of it.

Thanks.

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

#62

Post by j45 »

This is an insightful guide on how email works.

Instead of running each component individually, I would recommend looking at something like Zimbra or another OSS mail package that handles a lot of this.

I hosted my own email for over 10 years and maintaining the bits are as painful if you don't have a plan in place.

A decent comparable for do-it-yourself hosting is the kind of luck a product like MDaemon provides - it decent job on windows of rolling all the features into a reasonably manageable server, as well as being quite affordable. I don't work for MDaemon, but tools like this make hosting email relatively trivial.

http://www.altn.com/Products/MDaemon-Email-Server-Windows/

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

#63

Post by xienze »

apple4ever wrote: post #48

This isn't bad. I ended up creating an Ansible role to do it for me, and it works great. I thought about Fastmail, but its too expensive when you want to do more than one email address or domain. I run mine on a $5 server from DigitalOcean.

> I thought about Fastmail, but its too expensive when you want to do more than one email address or domain.

Not true, I run multiple email addresses and domains on my $5 account. Each address is routed to a different folder.

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

#64

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

marpstar wrote: post #52
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started to go down the running my own mail server road and started to worry about every one of these issues. I decided that my time is worth more than the cost of something like FastMail.

Not to mention, regardless of time there's little chance you could do it as good as FastMail.

Yeah - that's a very important point. Part of what you're paying for is expertise in a fairly complex and changing field, and with that in mind the price FastMail charges seems to be a bargain.

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

#65

Post by icebraining »

uhhhhhhh wrote: post #50
icebraining wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

smtp will eventually give up retrying, and if you're not willing to "always" respond within a few hours, you're going to lose emails.

Is there any server with such a short default? The RFC recommends at least 4-5 days.

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

#66

Post by yosamino »

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…

You need to know your DNS well, you need to know your OS basics well (when's the last time you understood what S.M.A.R.T statistics really mean?), you need to know your monitoring well, you need to know your backups are up to date and functioning. Do you have some sort of alerting set up so you will even know if anything went wrong? Oh your are the collateral damage of a DDOS to the datacenter and the datacenter has disconnected your server, and they sent you a mail about it ? To your mailserver ? You have a few other users, and now they would like to use a webmail system? Let's get to it! Whoa, viruses, let's install amavisd to filter those, let's see where is the documentation? Ah. Just the sourcecode ? Very well!

It's really more of a second job.

But it's ever so much fun once you have a decent grasp on all these things

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

#67

Post by throwawayeo5 »

Email is always a nightmare. My ex runs a BSD mail server that seems to work alright (and he has a cloud service that will handle mail in the event of a server failure). Me? I pay Fastmail like $50/year to do that for me, and they’re wonderful. I tried to sign up for a trial with my own domain, and when I got a strange error that didn’t let me log in, I put in a ticket (as a non-customer) and the issue was rectified quickly.

I swear, I don’t work for Fastmail, but I’d much rather use them (or any email provider that is halfway decent) than fiddle with my own mail server.

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

#68

Post by lisper »

workthrowaway27 wrote: post #54

I've done this before. It's a pain in the ass. You have to run several different programs each with hundreds of configuration options, make sure the different programs can communicate with each other properly, make sure your email doesn't get flagged as spam, and be your own sysadmin. All for marginal benefit. It would be great if someone wrote a program handling all of this that could be deployed as a single binary…

I started working on this a while back and got as far as writing a collection of scripts that spins up a mail server from scratch and does all the configuration. It's not complete (doesn't include spam filtering or search) and it uses Common Lisp to drive the process, which is the main reason I haven't published it. I didn't think there would be much interest in something that obscure. But if there is interest I'd be happy to clean up the code and put it on github.

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

#69

Post by jenkstom »

uhhhhhhh wrote: post #50
icebraining wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

smtp will eventually give up retrying, and if you're not willing to "always" respond within a few hours, you're going to lose emails.

The default is 72 hours. Not to say that all SMTP servers everywhere use it, but it's the norm.

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

#70

Post by yosamino »

icebraining wrote: post #65
uhhhhhhh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

smtp will eventually give up retrying, and if you're not willing to "always" respond within a few hours, you're going to lose emails.

Is there any server with such a short default? The RFC recommends at least 4-5 days.

Well, yeah... but if you have any people actually using the server, they will start calling you around day One asking about their mail.

At least if the the mail get's bounced after a few hours only, they get some sort of feedback, instead of being left wondering.

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