this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
18 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

39980 readers
407 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 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I know the adage that self-hosting email is hard. I use a third party smtp server to send emails for my Lemmy instance in order to guarantee delivery, for example.

However, other than potential uptime, what are the disadvantages to setting up self-hosted incoming email?

Incoming email is like 99% of my email usage. I'm happy to use a third party mail provider for outgoing email, but don't see why I shouldn't simply host incoming email myself.

Thank you <3

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I have tried for years to self host my email, but finding an upstream SMTP server that will accept your custom domain is pretty much impossible these days. Plus a lot of mainstream servers (Gmail, Hotmail etc.) block pretty much everything except mail sent from another mainstream account.

Every time I have tried, I get back SMTP responses that my domain isn't trusted, my IP is not trusted enough or they just blackhole my traffic.

This article sums it up well:
https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html