Selfhosted

Hello, I'm selfhosting mailserver with mailcow in docker container. Its easy to setup. I have static IPv4 and domain. Thats all.

I run my own Mailserver on a vps with mailcow dockerized. Was a real pain to set up, even through it mostly works right now.

DNS stuff isn't just some A or AAAA records, also txt stuff reverse DNS and much more. As the others said, that's completely impossible with a regular ISP.

I'm on some dumb blacklist because my IP is obviously in the IP range of my hosting provider, and some lists generally block all vps ranges.

Now imagine the following: your bank wants to contact you and your primary mail is selfhosted, for some reason they block your IP (yes outgoing blocks, those idiots) and you don't get some real important mail. Or your server is down for maintenance, certificate issues, so on.

The best solution is most probably letting a professional email holster take care of your domain, for email at least. Protonmail offers that but the problem I have with them is that they don't allow a regular login through thunderbird, restricted to their own software.

I used to but all the tweaking with DKIM etc rules took a bit too much of my time. Now I'm using Zoho Mail to host email on my own domain.

I've thought about rolling my own email service, but I'm hesitant given the risk of it inadvertently nuking the rest of my network. There's a lot of work needed to keep the thing secure, and even if you do everything right there's a good chance you get SMTP traffic blocked because other services are worried about unknown accidentally hosting spammer networks.

Plus given my prior track record, there is a $1000% chance I screw up the DNS entries for any mail servers I set up.

E-mail was the first "thing" that got me off of Google (to Proton & then currently Tutanota) but is really the last remaining service I not have self hosted.

I have always read about how difficult and time consuimg it was to run your own mail server, but I felt like I needed to experience it myself. So I purchased another domain and followed the instructions on https://mailinabox.email/.

I am using a small VPS on Hetzner and I have to say the experience has been almost flawless so far. I did need to have my new domain taken off the Domain Block List, but Hetzner gave me a clean IP and defaults to blocking port 25 outbound to prevent spam (simple ticket to open, once account is 30 days old and paid).

I know I'm still early into this journey so far, but it has been really simple and I plan to test this secondary domain for a few months before moving onto it full time.

As an avid self hosted of literally everything else, I can say it has been a lot of fun learning so far!

Well i kinda did that when i started selfhosting way too much a number of years ago... it can be quite annoying trying to get your server out of blocklists (if you need to change servers, because of ip reusing from hosters) and unless you use something like Servercow, it is easy to break things and it kinda hard to find proper tooling for selfservice and stuff.. nowadays i mostly keep it like it is because i don't want to deal with trying to migrate people to a different setup. It's okey and most of the time it just does it job, but it doesn't give too much joy :P

I use https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver with sendgrid.com as an SMTP relay (recieving emails is easy, sending them successfully is a pain)

@DidacticDumbass I use hosted email from Polaris Email, $25/yr, and my domain from Porkbun at $5 for the first year, and access the mail through Thunderbird on phone and computer.

I run a complete ISP style setup with multiple domains. I run it from a rented server at Hetzner, so i don't have problems with being black listed for sending from a consumer IP.

I do. Run about a half dozen email servers for various organizations. Been doing it for almost a decade for some. Other than initial setup pain, I've had zero problems others describe. I have used (and still run) docker-mailserver, mailcow, mail-in-a-box and mailu. All are lovely in their own way and fit various use cases better than others.

Nope. It can’t really be self hosted anymore, as having a residential IP is a straight track to the spam folder. It can be done if you also pay for a mail relay service, but then what’s the point of self hosting when you need to rely on a cloud service anyways.

I did but I stopped. My server had everything set up (DKIM, DMARC, SPF, Spam filtering) but I gave up after some providers wanted me to jump through hoops to get my mail delivered. Also I never had enough outgoing mail to build some reputation.

I used to run my own using Modoboa. I've since switched to mxroute for my email.

I run my own email server using Mailcow. It works well.

However, I do not even attempt to directly send outbound email. It's very difficult to get your server trusted by the major providers, especially Microsoft (who are very picky about email servers). I have an account with MXRoute (which is an email provider) but only use it for outbound relaying. Inbound emails go directly to my server.

For what it's worth, MXRoute is a great provider to consider if you want to move away from the large ones (Google, Microsoft, etc) but don't want to self-host.

I have run my own email server, and have worked in the commercial web hosting sector.

Honestly, I wouldn't run your own email except as a side project.

It's certainly possible and all the tools are available and easy enough to use, but email in general is a rough combo of super old, and a "big target".

The super old part means that a lot of things that we might consider standard for a modern federated system just aren't there for email. Security is profoundly lacking, and if something gets dropped because of an update, or your computer crashed, there's no guarantee that the system will find a way to get it to you, and the sender might not even know it didn't get to you.

Security wise, you basically have to set everything up correctly all at once, or some system somewhere between you and the recipient will just throw the messages away, and they may or may not tell you.
They do this because all the tools are old, crufty and there's a lot of good exploits that misconfiguration leaves open that automated tools can use to send spam.

Be sure to keep your computer fully patched, and install a malware scanner, even on Linux.

Ultimately, I wouldn't bother running one because the ratio of reward to work is just off for me. I would recommend setting something up for an afternoon though, just so you can see how the pieces work, and get to send yourself an email and know what steps it took.

I don't. But I do have my domain and use a hosted solution, so I'm kind of independent and own my data.