I don’t buy into the myth that running your own mail server is “hard”.
For a server with only a few users, the hard part is outgoing mail, ensuring your mails get delivered. I did what I can here, and simply use a paid service on another domain for important things where delivery must be “guaranteed”.
It’s an interesting post, but saying it’s “not hard” and then “welllllll it’s not hard if you don’t bother with a spam filter & pay a professional company for ‘important’ email” is pretty misleading.
It’s also not true. I ran an own mail server for a few years. If you’re strict with the protocols it actually isn’t a hard thing. Even setting up spam filtering isn’t really complicated. Everything has to be done once. Maintenance really isn’t problematic. Just keep an eye on the monitoring if something crazy is happening and regularly do updates and check your certificates.
Author here. Let me clarify.
For a server with only a few users, the hard part is outgoing mail, ensuring your mails get delivered.
It is not particularly difficult from a technical point of view.
But if you get blocked by big tech even when doing everything right (reverse DNS, SPF, DMARC, DKIM, RFC compliant MTA), you have to beg them to unblock you. This part is time consuming.
I’ve read horror stories where it went well for years until suddenly Gmail started flagging well-behaved servers as spam without any clear reason. Sometimes mail got through, sometimes it didn’t, without any clear pattern or explanation.
I simply don’t have that kind of time and nerves to deal with this. “hard” may be the wrong word, but it is nerve-wrecking.
That’s why I finally gave up after nearly 3 decades of running my own email server. It’s just stamping out fire after fire and my time became way more valuable as I got older.
I finally ended up going to a larger mail service (paid, but free) that just provides an outgoing smtp relay for me. Even on a busy month I send far below the 1k emails they require before they start charging, and their servers IP ranges aren’t blanket blocked by the Google’s of the world.
Doing it is not hard.
Doing it well is hard.
mail is the one thing I refuse to self host for the simple reason that despite not being particularly hard to get up and running initially, when it doesn’t work for whatever reason it can be and often is a gigantic pain in the ass to deal with, especially when it’s something out of your control. For personal there’s very good free options, for enterprise those same free options have paid options.
Whether it be gmail having a bad day and blocking you or whatever cloud provider or on prem infrastructure crapping out for long periods of time causing you to be cut off from email for a while and potentially missing incoming mail permanently if the retries time out. Or anything in between. It’s one of those things where I’m glad it isn’t my problem to deal with.
My only involvement with email is ensuring I have a local copy of my inbox synced up every week so if my provider were to ever die I still have all my content.
On the other hand you can lose your email address at any time if you don’t own the domain. So if Google decides they don’t like something you wrote your @gmail.com address could be gone tomorrow. And with it all your accounts you set up (as you need email usually to login or do changes).
The whole e-mail ecosystem sucks :-/
My self-hosted mail server works fine for now, but that could change at any moment.
Dealing with arbitrary black lists is annoying as fuck, contacting the admin or the automated tools to get your ip removed is hard as fuck, you will get put on there for no discernable reason and burden of proof of innocence is on you.
I aplaud the write up and recognise that the OP has developed a solution that suits their use case.
Personally I started running my own mail around the same time, but host for several family members at the same time.
I went a slightly different route and pay for a mail filtering service for inbound filtering and outbound relay. All up costs me $90USD per year for inbound and $4 a month for outbound
This has solved most blacklist and outbound mail server reputation issues.
I used to run zarafa till they went commercial. I’ve since migrated to Mailinabox as a platform. Its pretty resilient. (I’ve just disabled greylisying and spam detection as I’ve got upstream MX filtering already) I’ve also recently been through a MiaB major upgrade - it was pretty simple once I actually read the instructions properly!
Would you mind sharing what outbound relay you use? Also been running MiaB for a while and have lately been getting fed up with reliability issues.
Caught a typo, it’s “honeypot” not “honeypod”
Article is not great, but I share the general sentiment that running your own email is not difficult. Setup takes some time, but once done - it’s just a regular linux server, nothing fancy about it. Letsencrypt takes care of the certs, cron takes care of rebooting when necessary.
Reboot? Since when does Linux need a reboot? I’ve been thinking about migrating from FreeBSD to Linux, but now I am confused.
It has always needed a reboot when it comes to kernel or init. Same applies to BSDs.
Thank you for sharing. Self hosted email server does not sound so bad after all.
