Self-host your mail server

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• Hacker News
• The biggest problem with self-hosting a mail server is reliably being able to send email and have it be delivered to the recipient. Something I have been thinking about setting up is self-hosting a dovecot server so that all of my emails that I receive are on my system, but using another provider for sending email. I don't send that many emails, so there is not much privacy loss in regards to a third-party being able to see my sent emails, but I still get the benefit of noone but me having access to my received emails.
  by MattTheRealOne
• I've been self-hosting for 20 years now - a few years ago I switched to using Mail-in-a-Box (https://mailinabox.email/) which makes management a lot easier than configuring each service manually.

  It definitely requires some effort but once you've got it up and running it's pretty hands off. The only issues I've ever had are expiring certs but I've fixed that by configuring auto-renewals and it's all good now.

  Ensuring your source IP isn't blacklisted is probably the single most important factor. I had to request a new IP from Linode where my server runs as the one it was originally assigned had a bad reputation.

  by eljimmy
• I 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.

  by jedberg
• I know an old-school Linux admin who has been successfully running his own email servers for 30+ years - from small private ones to larger corporate setups. For spam detection he uses his own system, and it works surprisingly well even without any LLM (though an LLM could surely make it even better). So the "you can't self-host email" meme was never quite true - it is about willingness and ability to configure everything right.
  by Mike-Kelner
• Even in the face of all the advice on reddit and HN that says never to host your own mail server, I have been doing so successfully for at least 15 years. It helps that I have had the same spam-free IP address for most of that time. All I ever do is run `apt upgrade` approximately once a week. Costs all of $5 a month and there's just enough RAM leftover that I can also use it for wireguard tunnels or whatever if I need to.

  I have decided that if my VPS provider shuts down, I can just send my outgoing mail through a cloud provider's SMTP gateway. My volume is low enough that it will be free or cost a few cents a month.

  Deliverability is not a problem for me, but incoming spam does not have a great solution. Even with rspamd, a lot of crap gets through if you start spamming your email address everywhere. This is why I use a lot of throwaway and company-specific email address.

  If you only have one email address, yeah Fastmail or whatever is cheap. But as soon as you want multiple users (family) and throwaway email addresses, it gets expensive in a hurry. But those are free if you self-host.

  by bityard
• I do. It's nowhere as hard as everyone on here makes it out to be. And I don't even use an easy solution like Mailcow. Spam is a solved problem with rspamd, and it's not even an llm
  by muppetman
• Before self-hosting your own, first get a domain and just point it at a mail provider that allows custom domains. It will cost, but so will a VPS. I suspect a lot of DIY homelab types would have most of their needs met with just that setup:

  - you get the vanity email address

  - you can switch email providers (including self-hosting later on)

  - you can have ~unlimited aliases (depends on the provider)

  Most of the setup consists of steps you will have to take anyway when self-hosting (getting a domain, changing DNS records), except for a major amount of headaches that will be taken care of for you.

  by dandersch
• I 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+<other random crap>

  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 solutions that do all that for you. But still. Being a full-time email administrator is a job I will never do again unless I'm getting paid for it.

  You know what really sucked? Deliverability. Frequently, emails I would send would just ... vanish ... no warnings, no errors, no failures. From my end, everything was perfect. Until days later, people would follow up with me and say, "Are you going to send that email?" ...

  I had a business IP (Comcast Business). The IP address was clean, not black listed anywhere, not on SORBS or other lists. Still, successfully delivering an email was like 50/50, with no way to confirm the other party actually got it.

  by mmh0000