Selfhosted
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.
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Mail hosting is not that simple anymore. Your understanding of how it works is missing an entire world of complex issues that you need to solve outside of just hosting a mail server with an open SMTP port.
The biggest certainty is that just having an open port for an SMTP server dangling out there means you will 100% be attacked. Not just sometimes, non-stop. So you don't want to host on a machine with anything else on it, cuz security. So you need a dedicated host for that portion, and a very capable and restrictive intrusion detection system (let's say crowdsec), which is going to take some amount of resources to run, and stop your machine from toppling over.
Next, you need all your secondary record systems (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) pointing at a defined and unchanging record for your SMTP server, so you'll need a static IP. If you don't have that already, you're kind of SOL.
Next, you'll need to be running your own peer authentication system, then a spam filtering system (of which none of them work well without massive amounts of sample data, but you can use public lists to help block known bad actors), decent file threat scanning...you see where I'm going with this. It all takes a fair amount of resources, and even more if/when you get bad actors spamming the machine all the time.
Finally, you'll probably want this machine completely segmented from the rest of your network, which isn't really complicated, just costs a bit more money.
There's a reason why mail hosts and forwarding services cost money, and still exist. It takes a large amount of effort to be somewhat secure, or at least to best of your efforts. With the added costs associated with hosting your own mail servers, most people just avoid the hell out of it. I certainly wouldn't recommend it.
I hear you. However I'm a practical person. I understand that spam has made it difficult for everyone to use email. How can I put this. Basically I got a ton of emails trapped in Google servers. I like the idea that someone proposed of using paperless since I already use that. But also I guess email is worthless so I shouldn't keep trying? Maybe you're right. It's time for email to not be used. Any suggestions for what I should use instead of email which are a few clicks and done?
I need to call BS on this. No one cares. I’ve been running a small go-smtp based server that would do some processing on forwarded mail for 2 years now and I don’t see much of “attacks”. Yeah, sometimes I get passersbys trying to figure if this is a mail relay, which it’s not.
You absolutely don’t need a dedicated machine and an IDS. And you definitely need crowdsec.
Yeah, sending mail is somewhat hard lately, but DKIM and DMARC can be figured out. Receiving mail is just straightforward.
As is your want to do. I've run thousands of different combinations and type of SMTP related services at all stages of processing, and I've seen the above 100% of the time.
You are talking about receiving mail from another forwarded entity. It's not the same thing. You're also proving my point, because you're already getting your intake handled upstream, so there you go. What I said is accurate. 👍
I won’t quote the bit of your post again, but no, if you have an open smtp port then you won’t get constantly attacked. Again, I have a fully qualified smtp server and it receives about 40 connections per hour (mostly the spam ones). That's trivial to process.
It doesn’t matter that I forward emails from another server, because, in the end, mine is still public on the internet.
If you are trying to make a point that it's tricky to run a corporate-scale smtp and make sure that end users are protected, then it's clearly not what the OP was looking for.
Super cool story though.
True.
True
I don’t think "cuz security" is a proper argument or no one would be ever listening on public internet. Are there risks? Yes.
Bullshit. You do not need a dedicated host for smtp ingress. It won’t be attacked that much.
That's not part of the mail pipeline the OP asked for.
Here, I brought receipts. There are two spikes of attempted connections in the last month, but it's all negligible traffic.
Self-hosting mail servers is tricky, same as self-hosting ssh, http, or whatever else. But it's totally doable even on an aging RPi. No, you don’t need to train expensive spam detection because it's enough to have very strict rules on where you get mail from and drop 99% of the traffic because it will be compliant. No, you don’t need to run crowdstrike for a server that accepts bytes and stores them for another server (IMAP) to offer them to you. You don’t even need an antivirus, it's not part of mail hosting, really.
Instead of bickering and posturing, you could have spent your time better educating OP on the best practices, e.g. like this.
It's an easy fix, if I and everyone else can't setup our own servers safely, then why use email at all? Just stop using email and let Gmail add a few thousand more hoops...portggf, sspf, dkjg, Chddth, Chat-GPT. Whatever they want so it is super super "safe". The rest of us, are we stupid? What about this message? How come this is easy? Setup my own instance and bam I can talk to other people with very little spam I literally have to work to get any attention at all on the fediverse. Why isn't there a file/text sending app for the fediverse yet? Or maybe there's one and I just haven't seen it yet?