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Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

coinerella.com

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Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

#61

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…

Sounds like most packages in the Debian ecosystem in my experience.

Just do yourself a favor and run Slackware.

Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

#62
> Now imagine doing this with your own server

I can imagine it would be very similar because in both cases you’ve got your own Dedicated IP, which is only your responsibility in terms of reputation and problem solving.

If you instead used a shared IP service (such as SES shared) then i imagine it would be very different.

Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

#63

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…

> I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway. I also self-host my email. It would be very nice if there was some sort of notification system that alerted you if your email got bounced by the receiving server. A notification that fed through into Thunderbi…

Well I don't know if you wrote this in a sarcastic way or not, but when you write a new message in Thunderbird just turn on `Options -> Delivery Status Notification` and your mail server will email you back with a delivery status message (success or failure, although failure can take some days if the receiving server doesn't outright reject your message)

Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

#64
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway. I also self-host my email. It would be very nice if there was some sort of notification system that alerted you if your email got bounced by the receiving server. A notification that fed through into Thunderbi…

Well I don't know if you wrote this in a sarcastic way or not, but when you write a new message in Thunderbird just turn on `Options -> Delivery Status Notification` and your mail server will email you back with a delivery status message (success or failure, although failure can take some days if the receiving server doesn't outright reject your message)

I was not sarcastic. I just tried this by sending from my gmail account to one of my other accounts. Didn't get any email back even though the email was immediately delivered.

Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

#65
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I don't know if you wrote this in a sarcastic way or not, but when you write a new message in Thunderbird just turn on `Options -> Delivery Status Notification` and your mail server will email you back with a delivery status message (success or failure, although failure can take some days if the receiving server doesn't outright reject your message)

I was not sarcastic. I just tried this by sending from my gmail account to one of my other accounts. Didn't get any email back even though the email was immediately delivered.

ah sorry, I thought you wanted a delivery notification when you are sending an email via your own SMTP server (i.e. when thunderbird is configured to use your own outbound SMTP gateway)

Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

#66
I've started self-hosting email in ~2021. It took about 6 months (of mostly waiting) to clean up reputation of IP I've gotten (was in a few spam lists). After that - it was incredibly easy to maintain. It's literally just running mailcow update every now and then and that's it. So, if you are willing to fight for a bit in that initial stretch - no, it's not hard; yes, you can self-host your email.
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