this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
30 points (96.9% liked)

Selfhosted

40728 readers
482 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
ruud
Loki
CannaVet
devve
HybridSarcasm
[email protected]
30
Not another email self-hosting question (self.selfhosted)
submitted 2 months ago by r0ertel to c/selfhosted
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Does anybody here self-host a mail-by-proxy solution? If so, I'm interested to hear about your setup, experiences and any drawbacks. I have a custom domain and a hosted email service with a very small amount of storage. I'd like to host something locally so that I can keep all my email without stressing about the space. I also want to be able to use email on my phone and computer and a web interface for tablets or while traveling. Finally, I'd like emails that I send to be stored locally so I can search it. Does anybody else already do something like this? I can forge my own path, but oftentimes, somebody else is already doing it better.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] r0ertel 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I think this is exactly what I'm looking to do. Thanks for such a detailed writeup!

I did some reading last night and think it lines up with what you're saying. I found docker-mailserver with some configuration. The only thing I need to add is mail filtering to folders and I think that's included.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

you're welcome.

what i'ld suggest... a general rule that i like to always follow is to use a test system for everything new. but that does not need to be a full separate system every time.

lets say you have your mailbox and want to try getting new mails from it using fetchmail. first you can use uidl mechanisms to only fefch every mail once and besides that leave them all on the server, but i like it a bit more secure: create a second email adress/account at your mail providers service only for testing. thus you can do whatever you like to to test the mechanisms only without even touching your real inbox (maybe even fill it up with large emails and look how the system reacts, i once had an email account with a cheap provider that deadlocked the inboxes when full..). then when everything is as you want it, switch the account and password (or create another config file for fetchmail) and your're done. every change (not only fetchmail things) could go tested this way before going live with the changes. filtering could be done with procmail for example, but when the mda that is called by procmail somehow exits with success when the email really isn't delivered, then the email might get lost forever depending on the settings of course. so fiddling with new stuff always carries the risk of not fiddling correctly ;-)

have fun !

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Few weeks late to pitch in now but I can +1 docker-mailserver.

It has almost everything included and the configuration files are quite straightforward and flexible enough that you can drop little edits into the individual services if you need to tweak something.

My setup is very close to what you want: I use fetchmail to pull in from my old gmail and yahoo inboxes, I also have my own domain so I configured the MX records so that emails go straight to my server, with a fallback to my email provider (any mail that doesn't make it directly to my mailserver will still get pulled into my inbox with fetchmail when it comes back online).

Docker-mailserver allows you to set the SMTP of your instance to use your provider. This is important because it means that they do all the reputation stuff so that your emails work properly (and both my home ISP and my VPS provider don't do sending over pot 25 anyway).

So when I need to connect a new client (like Thunderbird) to my email I don't need to manually config anything as docker-mailserver has all the auto config messages so its really seamless. At the same time my risk is low because even if my sever is off my provider will still receive anything on my behalf. I can only send using the username I have paid for from my provider and switching between gmail and yahoo is not possible without rewriting configs and restarting services but its not something I want anyway. On the receiving side I can have any number of aliased usernames that will all be received by my server (but only when its on so i use them rarely and for disposable addresses).

Big downsides are:

  • backups are now my problem as I don't keep duplicates.
  • I route my traffic via a VPS+VPN to get a static public IP address - this was a headache to get all the little details just right but its stable now
  • I have to host separately my own webmail, although I'm mostly using my phone with k-9 Mail and Thunderbird (I use roundcube)
  • Getting server side filtering rules working was also annoying and so far I still have to add new rules through roundcube (there was a plugin for Thunderbird but I don't want to open the additional ports required)
  • !!! Spam !!! Docker-mailserver has a great Rspamd default settings out the box so its actually fine but now I have to manage all the additional rules and its not super intuitive especially because I am doing all this just for myself (yay!) but the tools are clearly meant for managing a fleet of inboxes so everything takes me longer to figure out
  • integrating contacts is not included and might be important for your experience (again I was able to add this as a plugin to roundcube ..... eventually)

Most of my complaints stem from the fact that I'm not very good at this but in the end it has been very satisfying to drop the occasional: "I host my own email BTW"

Good luck! Let us know how you get along!