Email hosting isn't too bad. IP reputation management is a pain. Everything works perfectly until one day it doesn't.
SMTP relays are cheap--worth a few pennies a month to not deal with IP rep.
Self-host your mail server
91–100 of 143 posts
Re: Self-host your mail server
#92I 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…
Same story. Ran a set of about 20 postfix mail servers for my company. Prided myself on being proactive, setting everything up correctly. Using things like DANE even before they were mandatory but the trouble was always random blocking which was outlook.com 90% of the time and occasionally yahoo and Deutsch telekom. At least the latter provided contact details and were helpful getting things unblocked but Microsoft h…
There used to be some web form for msn/Hotmail/outlook you could submit your IP to and 1-6 months later it would magically start working _most of the time_
Not sure if that's still the case
Re: Self-host your mail server
#93I 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'm running 4 email servers, the oldest is from 2011 or so, to this day. 4 different countries, different AS. I'm always puzzled by all the issues described by others. I had about 4 issues during these 15 years, all 4 were solved by reading the bounce message and doing what was asked in the message (contacting support of the destination).
A lot of the people who complain that their emails were treated as spam when they tried self-hosting leave out that they were really sending unsolicited commercial mail.
For personal email, self-hosting is much more manageable. Typically GMail will send those messages to spam at first, but after a few different mailboxes have clicked “not spam” GMail learns the lesson.
Re: Self-host your mail server
#94I ran my own mail server from 1999-2008, starting when I worked at Sendmail. I helped create SPF and DKIM.
I would never run my own mail server today. Deliverability is a nightmare, despite what this article says. Gmail/Hotmail (and all the domains they host for people, which is quite a lot) will pretty much block or silently drop any email that isn't from a large, known provider who has actually talked directly to them.
If you don't have time to be a full-time mail deliverability engineer/product manager, just pay someone to do it for you.
Re: Self-host your mail server
#95I 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…
Fastmail is not cheap...
Re: Self-host your mail server
#96I disagree with the author. If you have your own domain for e-mail, then you've already dealt with all risks and vulnerabilities. Of course you have your e-mail stored locally as well by using an e-mail client, which you would anyway.
Using a cloud provider with your own domain means going through a lot of the “hard” parts, yes (setting DNS records for DMARC/DKIM/SPF/MX mostly). But self hosting does provide benefits on top of that.
Hosting your own MX (the receive side) means a lot of private emails go straight to you: purchase receipts, utility bills, travel itineraries. You can have as many users/mailboxes/aliases as you like without having to pay more. You also get confidence that emails sent to you didn’t get silently treated as spam (cloud providers have disappeared enough 2FA code emails that I really care about this).
Sending emails directly also provides some benefits. You can guarantee that the email is sent with TLS, for example. Having logs to prove that my server sent a message and it was received and acknowledged by the receiving server has been useful to me a couple of times too.
Re: Self-host your mail server
#97If you are self-hosting because you care about privacy, I'm not sure why. Email requires two parties. Unless both parties are self hosting, some company has a copy of that email. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon probably see 99% of all email on the internet (ok maybe not that much but probably pretty close).
I'm not sure what privacy you gain by self hosting these days, since no one else is.
Re: Self-host your mail server
#98I ran my own mail server from 1999-2008, starting when I worked at Sendmail. I helped create SPF and DKIM. I would never run my own mail server today. Deliverability is a nightmare, despite what this article says. Gmail/Hotmail (and all the domains they host for people, which is quite a lot) will pretty much block or silently drop any email that isn't from a large, known provider who has actually talked directly to t…
To be clear, you’re talking about an outgoing mail server. An incoming mail server is pretty trivial to self-host and provides most of the benefits of self-hosting mail. The distinction is often lost in these discussions, which scares off a lot of people who in reality would have no trouble running their own MX.
Re: Self-host your mail server
#99I 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…
Fastmail is not cheap...
Fastmail is like $150 for 3 years.
That's cheaper than I can rent any mail-capable VPS for, and it's cheaper than the electricity I'd pay (80W @ $0.15/kWh = $316 over 3 years) to self-host.
And that doesn't include my personal-time hourly cost.
Re: Self-host your mail server
#100If you are self-hosting because you care about privacy, I'm not sure why. Email requires two parties. Unless both parties are self hosting, some company has a copy of that email. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon probably see 99% of all email on the internet (ok maybe not that much but probably pretty close). I'm not sure what privacy you gain by self hosting these days, since no one else is.
You’d be surprised how many corporations send their own emails directly or use one of the smaller providers. I’ve checked the headers, and the majority of my utility bills, purchase receipts, itineraries, medical emails, and so on don’t go through Google or Microsoft, and these are the personal profile–building emails I care about keeping private the most.