this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
58 points (95.3% liked)

Selfhosted

40668 readers
357 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
58
Simple mail server (self.selfhosted)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by Humorless4483 to c/selfhosted
 

Hello,

I want to deploy a simple mail server so that it can be used for users to register themselves or reset passwords, etc.

Is there an easy one to deploy (in docker if possible) ?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I agree with everyone here that self-hosting email is never easy, but if you still decide to go down this route then here are two tips that I personally found very helpful, especially when you decide to host it at home:

The first is to get an SMTP relay server. That's just another mail server that yours can log into to actually send its mail, just like an email client would. That way you don't have to worry about your IP's sending reputation, because everyone will only see the relay's reputable IP.

Second is to configure a Backup MX. That's an additional MX DNS entry with lower priority than the primary, and it points to a special mail server that accepts any mail for you and tries to deliver it to the primary server forever (or something like an entire week). So when your primary server is unreachable other sending servers will deliver mail to the backup, and it delivers the mail to the primary as soon as that's back online.

You can get these as separate services, but some DNS providers (like Strato for example) offer both with the base domain package. It makes self-hosting an email server much simpler and more reliable in my experience.