I run a complete ISP style setup with multiple domains. I run it from a rented server at Hetzner, so i don't have problems with being black listed for sending from a consumer IP.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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As much as I enjoy self hosting my own services, email just seems like more trouble than it's worth. I let Protonmail take care of that for me.
Yeah. I am getting great suggestions, but also a lot of hard truths. I think a basic paid email is probably less than I would ever pay to get the setup right.
Yes, with mailcow.email and a catchall and random email system with Anonaddy.
Out of curiosity, what is anonaddy used for? I looked briefly on their site and it appears to setup email aliases. You can do that in mailcow though.
Is there anything else that it allows you to do?
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@[email protected] I do, it is a pain and I understand why it is not worth for some people.
This is way out of my comfort zone and I am firmly in the research phase, almost ready to make some decisions, but I need to carve out time to set it all up.
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Nope. It can’t really be self hosted anymore, as having a residential IP is a straight track to the spam folder. It can be done if you also pay for a mail relay service, but then what’s the point of self hosting when you need to rely on a cloud service anyways.
“No. No, man. Hell no. No, i imagine someone would get their ass kicker if they said something like that”
I've thought about rolling my own email service, but I'm hesitant given the risk of it inadvertently nuking the rest of my network. There's a lot of work needed to keep the thing secure, and even if you do everything right there's a good chance you get SMTP traffic blocked because other services are worried about unknown accidentally hosting spammer networks.
Plus given my prior track record, there is a $1000% chance I screw up the DNS entries for any mail servers I set up.
A lot of people on here are way more technically minded than I will ever be, so if they are having trouble, I AM IN TROUBLE! AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!
I think I will be fine. I am keeping the emails I already set up. If I get fluent and comfortable running my own email server, I may migrate, but I am not shooting myself in the foot anytime soon.
I stopped running my own a while ago. Its no longer really decentralized and the big players (google/microsoft) will often just blacklist you for little reason.
That said I DO maintain my own domain and backups. So i can take my email to whatever hosting provider I want.
I also noticed, during the migration, that if you simply register your domain with one of the big players (ie: Google Workspace or M365) you will often get whitelisted and email will flow easier. This was easier when they had a free tier though.
Got the same issue. Everything was setup properly. SPF, dkim, dmarc was all good. Server IP wasn't in any blocklists. But my messages would still fall in spam with Gmail.
Ended up setting sendgrid as a relay and all is good now.
Your own email server requires near 100% uptime or you risk not receiving critical emails. If a remote email server is trying to contact your email server and it can't it's only going to retry a few times and then give up. Hosting this yourself sounds great until you realize high uptime is not cheap and requires constant attention.
Setting it up securely can be difficult depending on your understanding of server infrastructure as well as protocols like DNS. You need to set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc in order to prevent someone from faking an email from your server.
Of course, federated email does not use SPF/DKIM/DMARC because the whole point is that someone from another server could use your server to send an email (hence the federation). Open email servers were common 20 years ago but very rare today. That makes setup easier, but the main caveat is that most known non-federated email servers will reject email from servers that don't have SPF/DKIM/DMARC because they generally end up being havens for bots and spam since there is no verification or authenticity of the sender.
As someone who self hosts a lot of things, I would never self host my email. If i did I would be paying for two boxes in different parts of the world on different ISPs to provide that uptime. I would definitely set it up securely and not as a federated server otherwise it would be practically unusable for day to day emails.
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