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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)

#91

Post by dmm »

viperscape wrote: post #29
dmm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I've run my own mail server for 10 years and I hardly ever receive spam, maybe 1-2 a week. And I give out my email everywhere. The only spam mitigation I use is greylisting and blacklisting.

What do you use for the mail server? Do you do any sort of backups or failover? Just curious

I run exim on Debian stable. I use greylistd for greylisting and dovecot for imap. I backup emails daily by taking a btrfs snapshot and rsyncing it to my home server, which I have a regular backup cycle for. If you were really worried you could setup exim to forward every email to a backup server.

Failover is manual. I would create a new vm, install debian stable and run a script I've prepared a script that installs packages, copies config files and creates users. Downtime with email is not a big deal, servers will retrying sending for a few days. If you have users complaining to you it's obviously a bigger deal.

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

#92

Post by Jaruzel »

perlgod wrote: post #84
Jaruzel wrote: post #61

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.

I believe it would work fine, configure rspamd as a milter on the first hop and relayhost everything to "Real MTA".

So Rspamd+PostFix ?

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

#93

Post by c0l0 »

perlgod wrote: post #28
zuck9 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need ECC certificates?

I don't need them, I just prefer them. They are arguably more secure and require much lower CPU usage.

Any reasonably modern x86_64 CPU can do more than 1000 RSA2048 signs (~ TLS handshakes) a second, per core. Performance considerations really aren't a good reason to not use RSA for TLS KEX.

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

#94

Post by icelancer »

I use iRedMail and set up my own mail server for my small business. I am beginning to wish I hadn't, even though I've had literally 0 problems outside of a single reboot to fix an issue.

https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/ubuntu-16-04-iredmail-...

I dunno. I feel like I'm sitting on a timebomb. It's hosted on DigitalOcean and while it works great with RoundCube and gmail... eh. I dunno why I even did it in the first place.

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

#95

Post by xienze »

floren wrote: post #90
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time a thread about running your own email server comes up I think "Oh yeah, I was going to set up FastMail for my domain" The current pricing[0] seems to let you have 100 domains plus 600 aliases[1] for $5/mo. I've got this thought that I will create aliases for every different thing I sign up for and use them to track who's selling my email address to who. I think that a domain plus aliases will do the trick…

So I can't quite parse it out from the page, maybe one of the Fastmail users can tell me. I can set up 100 domains and 600 aliases, but if I want my wife to have access to hername@mydomain.com, does she need her own $5/mo account?

Nope. You can go nuts with domains, they just route to distinct folders.

That said, it’s one logical account, so your wife would have access to all folders/domains.

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

#96

Post by lifty »

lucb1e wrote: post #25

> on FreeBSD using Postfix, Dovecot, Rspamd, and LDAP. That seems like an awful amount of work / overkill. This is not a good introduction for a normal geek, and die-hard open source fans will figure it out without too much trouble anyway. Postfix is not the best choice for novices, FreeBSD is not the most well-supported/documented system just because it's not as popular as some others, and a directory service should…

Sounds like you did the SNE master. Is it so?

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

#97

Post by ryandrake »

agentultra wrote: post #41

I run my own mail infrastructure. To say the least I wouldn't recommend it even to my worst enemies. It's horrible. Actually it's fine until it's not. Then your email doesn't work and you could be missing out on important communications. And then you're scrambling to figure out how the spammers managed to exploit your setup this time. And you have to learn a tonne of crap in order to manage it... and the text files!…

I recently moved off of Gmail and now run my own personal/family E-mail server, and I have to say so far it has been pretty pain free. I probably just haven't been doing it for long enough to run into trouble yet. Bog standard Debian install, Exim4 + dovecot + SpamAssassin. TLS, SPF, DKIM, and other acronyms all set up and working. The initial setup was a few days config file tweaking (why don't these things come working and secured out of the box?), but since then no issues--knock on wood. My only complaint is the spam filtering so far is not as good as Gmail's was, but I probably just need to better configure things. Bookmarking this guide for later!

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

#98

Post by corobo »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #56
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.

Every time a thread about running your own email server comes up I think "Oh yeah, I was going to set up FastMail for my domain" The current pricing[0] seems to let you have 100 domains plus 600 aliases[1] for $5/mo. I've got this thought that I will create aliases for every different thing I sign up for and use them to track who's selling my email address to who. I think that a domain plus aliases will do the trick…

You can also set up catch-all addresses rather than manually setting up an alias per thing you sign up for

https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html

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

#99

Post by skrause »

xienze wrote: post #76
ryanlol wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail is great until their support hands your account over to some random person that just happened to ask.

https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html They have a very strong privacy policy, they’re not just going to hand your email over to a “random” person.

They already have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15855081

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

#100

Post by daanavitch »

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 have been running a Zimbra mail server for years and it's been great. Everything is included, configuration is quick and easy and there's lots of documentation online. The only negatives are that upgrading is a pain (I have to spin up a whole new server and migrate everything with Zextras Migration Suite) and the whole thing takes up quite some resources.
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