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Self-hosting email like it's 1984

maxadamski.com

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Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#61

Post by Xenoamorphous »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #57

(had to dug my comment from under a flagged parent) 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 w…

> I decided to finally replace my aging Debian jessie setup by Arch Linux, and I rewrote all cron jobs as systemd timers.

Man, I wish I had 1% of the motivation I had 20 years ago to do something like this, before all the full time job, wife and child.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#62

Post by rascul »

xmx98 wrote: post #52
munchlax wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. You better not self-host like it's 1984 because that would also mean you're an open relay. And vulnerable for pretty much anything you can think of.

This config doesn’t make an open relay.

This config wasn't available in 1984.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#64

Post by zrm »

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…

> 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.)

There's a pretty good chance this is because Shopify is sending a lot of email users mark as spam, or is using the same mail server as someone who does. Then you marking them as not spam gives them a better score but the sender's reputation is still so bad that it can't break the threshold to stay out of the spam folder.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#68

Post by dizhn »

627467 wrote: post #22

Say I want to test the waters for selfhosting email, and I already have my how domains setup with SaaS like Google workspace and equivalent. Is there a way to setup mx records so that both google and my own server gets email for a while? This would be useful to test the waters over a few months before fully migrating

Not with MX but, look at google's split domain documentation. You can either have them handle the domain and forward you a copy, or you can have your own domain be the primary and forward to google. I have been using the latter for a few years now since not all of the users in the domain are using Google Workspace. They have a special address for forwarding to so you don't get into a loop. It has been working flawlessly for us.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#70

Post by donio »

pjmlp wrote: post #60

More like 1994 thereabouts, in 1984 most of us would be very lucky to have a dial up connection to the local BBS, under local phone call price rates.

Not even that, Postfix didn't exist in 1994. This is a 2025 mail server setup and about as vanilla as it gets.
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