Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Mail self hosting is not an easy process to maintain.. If you do manage to get whitelisted you need to ensure you're on top of maintaining it, let alone some larger provider like Google just deciding they don't like you. I do empathise with wanting to self host, I just always found the cost of effort to do so really didn't offer enough benefits versus a good provider like proton for example. It sucks but maybe a fight that's too far gone to win.by bilekas
- It’s not that bad, but it does require some effort. I self-host. I spend far more time using and enjoying email than I do maintaining the infrastructure.
However you do have to live with the occasional blacklist when you host on a VPS like I do. Some idiot in your IP range may get blacklisted for spam and then you get caught in it. It’s generally temporary.
And there are some corporate policies that will flat out reject emails from you which is fun.
I’ve probably spent less than 10 hours over the last 5 or 6 years on maintenance.
by agentultra - The hardest thing in setting up your emails server is to keep your messages out of spam folders. Even if you are completely legit company that sends out ONLY human-written personal emails, you will get tagged as spam first.
I've self-hosted for about 2 months, and promptly switched to iCloud. Just because I've been spending too much time calling people and telling them to check their spam folders.
Recently our business moved to another domain. We had a guy who has spent over a month "warming up" traffic, so our new domain won't be tagged as spam by default.
by IFC_LLC - At this point, self-hosting email is as much a practical convenience as it is a political statement. Or maybe I'm just stubborn.by liotier
- Ditto. It is practical and I am stubborn. Though I no longer run sendmail :-)by poetaster
- 20 years of running the classic postfix + dovecot stack for about 10 business domains. I’ve recently been testing out stalwart, with just one company domain, which is nice but seems quite fragile, 4 times now it’s killed itself doing some self updates. If it wasn’t for Claude assistance I probably would have given up on it by now. It is quite feature rich though, but its spam detection is not great, too much ham flagged as spam, not enough spam flagged as spam. 2FA is a nice bonus but for some unknown reason it breaks itself every few weeks and I gotta turn it back off again. If I could get stalwart stable I would migrate all my domains to it.
- Why switch then? Need more excitement in your life?
I have been running Postfix for 22 years, from a big corporate installation to my own on a Raspberry Pi Zero. It just does its job.
by raddan - And on the other side, projects like stalwart email ( http://stalw.art/ ) and mox ( http://xmox.nl/ ) makes it so much easier to build an e-mailsystem on your server.by DogRunner
- I have deployed stalwart as my replacement for mailu and iv never had such an easy time setting up mail, i love it.by Scarjit
- I've been using GMail roughly since it existed I think, and have thought on and off over the years about self-hosting. The notion scares me every time because with it comes thoughts of what would happen if I were to lose the domain name or server, or even if there was an outage at the "wrong time". And then there's also the idea of updating the 1 million+1 services, etc that I used it to sign up for. As much as I'm not a fan of a decent amount of what they've been doing, they're however a stable entity which offers a very reliable service for essentially free. Very likely that many others also think along those lines.
The only thing I think can compete with that is some kind of decentralized solution, also something I've thought about a bit. Like a Keyoxide-based[0] - or similar - setup that makes it virtually impossible for one to lose their online identity (since lost keys can be rotated out once one has - access to - enough proofs), and then that identity can be used - without fear - to route associated data, etc. Of course adoption of what could become an adjacent or new standard would be the next hurdle to overcome...
by skeledrew - > what would happen if I were to lose the domain name or server
On the other side of the coin, what would happen if google bans you? That's certainly not unheard of.
by IsTom - > DMARC: adopted everywhere, enforced nowhere in particular
Unfortunately this only talks about what DMARC policies are published by domains. I was hoping they will go into some analysis of how many mailboxes actually hard-enforce DMARC rules on ingress (as in, respect the DMARC policy as published by the sender's domain, p=reject or whatever else it might be)
I have been hesitant to enforce DMARC rules on my server. Partly because maintaining it was a pain (see opendmarc - maybe better with rspamd now), but also because on my test runs I saw plenty of legitimate incoming mail that simply would get rejected if I were to enforce DMARC on ingress.
I suspect big players like gmail have some kind of soft enforcement/reputation/machine learning approach to DMARC, but this is way too much work for a small time admin like me.
by avian - I've been running my own email server with exim and dovecot for 20ish years, I like the freedom it gives me but I have to say it's a significant investment. Not so much keeping things up to date but instead making sure that my emails are actually delivered. I've eventually switched to using fastmail just for sending emails and even with that, I don't get perfect delivery.by gommm
- Last year I started self hosting my email. I found that once you setup the “usual suspects” (DMARC, DKIM, SPF…) outgoing mail works without issues. In fact it works now better than the (small) provider I was using before.
And setting them up properly is not even that difficult nowadays
by mrighele - If someone can solve the spam problem in email without just manually whitelisting specific providers that heavily monitor their users, then they can completely reverse the direction of this problem. Unfortunately it doesn't seem likely someone could do that.by sharperguy
- Seems like AI is in a pretty good position to do that tbh.
- It's not in the current providers' interest to help people avoid the current providers' advertisement or avoid paying the providers to host the customers' email.by abirch
- Trivial with spam heuristics and a cheap llm today.by conception
- A combination of DNSRBL, SpamAssassin, and using different localparts for each service is working very well for me. Some spam is still getting through, but not enough to feel (heh) spammed, and amazingly I haven’t had any false positives from SpamAssassin in years.by layer8
- I agree Spam is the hardest. Setting up a mailserver is pretty easy today, e.g. with NixOS-simple-mailserver you can do it with a few lines and a few minutes of config in your DNS provider, and maintenance is minimal.
But I self-host email for ~20 years, and I have not managed to get rid of Spam without not also getting false positives.
I first used SpamAssistant, in later years Rspamd, but I feel like they are just not good enough. Also I find Rspamd config pretty incomprehensible.
Hosted email like also does not solve this, e.g. GMail filters way much (e.g. important company correspondence leading to orders almost being lost because they landed in our GMail spam, so I had to turn off the spam filter entirely).
by nh2 - I self host email and surprisingly do not receive any Spam (apart from the occasional cold calling support@ contact@ etc)by vachina
- Spam probably isn't as bad as you think it is. It's not the dark old days where 99% of emails are spam.
You should self-host, so you can do the experiment for yourself. You might be surprised. You can always stop self-hosting if you don't like it.
by inigyou - That would work if most spam wasn't from the cartel. I receive single digit percentage of "spam" from randoms, 95%+ is from Gmail/Google, o365 or mailgun/whatever. Not one of them can either filter their users or actually action abuse reports.
- I wish there were a way to self-host without my emails constantly getting stuck in other people's spam folders. And it made me really paranoid about email, too -- like I'd send emails, and I'd never know if the other end received them or not, unless they replied. Without a reply, I would always wonder whether the message got a look, or disappeared without a trace.
The only way around this seems to be hosting with Google, Microsoft, or maybe Proton. Any other ideas?
by A_D_E_P_T - I started self-hosting my email last year, but I use MailPace (other email sending services are available) to avoid being memory-holed.by cjs_ac
- I use fastmail which is very good. Like “oh this is how it should feel!” good.by frizlab
- I haven’t had this issue. It might be due to the long-standing reputation of my email domain(s) or of the mail server’s IP address, I don’t know. But I know other self-hosters who don’t have that issue either.by layer8
- Ran into this issue when self-hosting, so I just bumped my existing ProtonMail subscription to a business one which allows for mail forwarding. It's quite easy to set up and I've been pretty happy about deliverability for a year+ nowby cephi
- Use DKIM on a long lived domain, and check that your sending IP is stable and comes from a block with good reputation. This has always worked for me.by iamnothere
- One way to tell whether an email has been opened or not is to include a 1x1 transparent pixel that is hosted on a server you control. If the email client the recipient is using automatically loads images, you will get a hit to your webserver for the transparent pixel. This only works if display of images is enabled, so it's not 100% reliable. Some email clients turn off automatic loading of any external content by default for privacy, but it still has value and will help you track opens.
Also, set up seed accounts on different email providers and subscribe them to all of your lists, this helps you get an idea for what other people are seeing when they get the emails. If it's going to a seed account at gmail, and getting sent to the spam folder, you can try tweaking the email and work around the issue with some A/B testing.
by spl757