this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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[Question] Does anyone run their own email server? (lemmy.one)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted
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All this new excitement with Lemmy and federation has got me thinking that maybe I should learn to run my own instance. What always comes up though is how email is the orginal federated technology.

I am looking at proxmox and see that is has a built in email server, so now I am wondering if it is time to role my own.

I stopped using gmail a long time ago, and right now I use ProtonMail, but I am super frustrated with the dumb limitation of only having a single account for the app. I get why they do it, and I am willing to pay, but it is pricey and I don't know if that is my best option. I guess it is worth it since ProtonVPN is included. It looks like they are expanding their suite.

Is it worth it? Can I make it secure? Is it stupid to run it off a local computer on my home network?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Your own email server requires near 100% uptime or you risk not receiving critical emails.

I disagree. You can take some amount of downtime without issue.

https://wpmailsmtp.com/docs/how-to-automatically-resend-a-failed-email/ as an example for some services.

Many services (including postfix by default) will attempt a number of resend operations before it gives up.

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).

What? All email is federated. What are you talking about here? SPF/DKIM/DMARC are on top of email... and have nothing to do with the federated property of email. Federation does not mean that you login or use another server. But that you have your instance, and the servers hash out the cross communication amongst themselves. That's EXACTLY what email servers do using SMTP.

I would definitely set it up securely and not as a federated server otherwise it would be practically unusable for day to day emails.

If your email wasn't federated then you would get emails from anyone outside of your own instance. That would make email useless for 99% of the world.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago

I take "federated email" to refer to a juxtaposition with normal email implementation which harkens back to how it was in the 90s or early 00s where you didn't need to be registered on many SMTP servers in order to use it and it's stripped of server-side validation. There's some discussion on this topic in the fediverse.

You're right that the default current implementation is already federated.