8 ms·

Self-host your mail server

130 points by geek_at 2mo ago

muppetman 2mo ago
I do. It's nowhere as hard as everyone on here makes it out to be. And I don't even use an easy solution like Mailcow. Spam is a solved problem with rspamd, and it's not even an llm
- selectodude 2mo ago
  It’s not hard to receive or filter mail - knowing that somebody will receive your email after you send it is another thing entirely.
  - muppetman 2mo ago
    Thankfully not a problem we've encountered yet. All my mail is DKIM signed, SPF aligned etc. I also registered on dnswl.org which is a signal quite a few people seem to use.
  - 9dev 2mo ago
    That is the exact problem that got me to abandon my splendidly working, self-hosted email stack. I had so many instances of mail just not getting delivered, despite doing absolutely everything correctly, that I gave up.
  - jazzyjackson 2mo ago
    I’m wondering what the most fool proof way to get a message delivered to someone else is. I found out today some SMS messages I sent were silently dropped. Email doesn’t always get delivered. I would hope the closed ecosystems like Signal and Whatsapp are better at this and in any case you need both parties to agree on a channel. I just like email because my identity is maintained even when I switch providers, and nothing else quite like that exists.
- john_strinlai 2mo ago
  out of curiosity, are you talking about personal, small business, or corporate? "spam is solved" looks a lot different at each of those
  - muppetman 2mo ago
    Personal mailserver sorry. rspamd stops all the sent-using-my-from-address "i hacked you" emails (DMARC drops them) and all the other random spam stuff. I can imagine though a large business with thousands of email accounts it wouldn't be as easy though.
- aspbee555 2mo ago
  I still handle email for multiple small businesses (for over 20 years) and recently switched from the mailscanner+spamassasin to rspamd and the scanning is so much better/easier now my backend is still dovecot+postfix, still works beautifully. I am able to run rspamd+dovecot proxy on a small vps and the storage is handled by a backend office server with dovecot. If VPS has an issue can spinup another easily/anywhere and backend is also virtualized (libvirt) so easily restored (with multiple backups in multiple places) biggest thing to worry about with deliverability is ensuring your SPF and DKIM (opendkim) are correct, which is not too difficult and rspamd is able to handle the dkim signing/verification which is nice
  - muppetman 2mo ago
    Yup rspamd being able to do the DKIM signing was what made me move from spamassassian+opendkim to just this single solution. The web GUI and its speed were just really nice extras it brought with it. It's one of my favourite pieces of open source software.
throw0101d 2mo ago
Waiting for a submission of "You should run your own NNTP server" (lots of 'nostalgia' for web forums to come back, so why not this too?).
carlosjobim 2mo ago
I disagree with the author. If you have your own domain for e-mail, then you've already dealt with all risks and vulnerabilities. Of course you have your e-mail stored locally as well by using an e-mail client, which you would anyway.
- chappie7 2mo ago
  Using a cloud provider with your own domain means going through a lot of the “hard” parts, yes (setting DNS records for DMARC/DKIM/SPF/MX mostly). But self hosting does provide benefits on top of that. Hosting your own MX (the receive side) means a lot of private emails go straight to you: purchase receipts, utility bills, travel itineraries. You can have as many users/mailboxes/aliases as you like without having to pay more. You also get confidence that emails sent to you didn’t get silently treated as spam (cloud providers have disappeared enough 2FA code emails that I really care about this). Sending emails directly also provides some benefits. You can guarantee that the email is sent with TLS, for example. Having logs to prove that my server sent a message and it was received and acknowledged by the receiving server has been useful to me a couple of times too.
- carlosjobim 2mo ago
  I wonder why the comment replying to mine was banned? It was a well written response.
  - chappie7 2mo ago
    Seems to have been some auto-moderation mistake. I emailed hn@ycombinator.com (from my self-hosted mail server) and they restored my comments.
geek_at 2mo ago
Sorry the title should have been "You should self-host your mail server" but it seems HN removes the "You should" in the beginning of a title. I wanted to start this discussion because I think we are prime for more self hosted mail servers in 2026 and in the post I explain how to use a locally hosted LLM to nudge the spam detector rspamd to whether or not an incoming mail is spam. Also in times where the EU can order your mail providers to scan for unwanted content [1] (currently limited to CSAM, later probably more) it does feel better to have your data at your hand. [1] https://en.philenews.com/international/privacy-to-end-in-the-eu-with-chat-control-laws-being-introduced-live/ https://en.philenews.com/international/privacy-to-end-in-the...
throw0101d 2mo ago
> But there are other solutions out there like: Stalwart; Mailcow ;Or if you're a purist you can set up your whole server yourself Another good guide that uses Debian and its standard packages: * https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie (Updated with every release, and upgrade/migration instructions.)
- dangerboysteve 2mo ago
  Some out of the box solutions. https://www.iredmail.org https://www.iredmail.org https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
  - ValdikSS 2mo ago
    Free iredmail version is very basic, barely useful unfortunately. I'd recommend mailcow for regular usage, or mailinabox if you're low on RAM or configuring email for server (not for people).
LoganDark 2mo ago
I've tried self-hosting my mail server, but that means all my outgoing mail will go to Spam on all providers that use reputation-based filtering. In all cases I had SPF, DKIM and DMARC working perfectly, PTR records, etc. but it just doesn't matter. Even a Fastmail domain goes right to spam on my personal account, and they are very very established. It's just not worth it.
- dwedge 2mo ago
  I use a dedicated server and a vps for this, so I get around the residential IP reputation issue. The rest of the problems with deliverability are overblown. In 15 years of doing it on multiple servers, I've had one 2 month period where Gmail was spamming me and one month where Yahoo spammed me. In both cases it stopped without me changing anything, I've always suspected it's brief periods of anti-competition attempts which don't last forever
  - LoganDark 2mo ago
    I never used residential IPs. Most ISPs don't even let you set PTR records on those. My problem was that any server at practically any provider would reuse an IP that previous customers have used to send spam in the past. For example you can't hope to send mail from a DigitalOcean IPv4 address without going to spam. Nor from Kamatera. There are probably a few more providers that are basically blackholed because they're so often used for spam. (I don't have experience with providers that don't offer IPv4.) I believe some providers even attempt to block outgoing mail.
ubermonkey 2mo ago
Counterpoint: No.
dangerboysteve 2mo ago
What hosting / VPS companies do you recommend? Finding one which allows you to run a mail server is some work.
- hkt 2mo ago
  Mythic beasts. Their IP ranges are pretty clean and well managed. My deliverability has been fine there for years.
  - graemep 2mo ago
    They are quite expensive for some ranges of storage which you might need for IMAP if you need a lot less than where the HDD pricing starts. On the other hand HDD is fine for a mail server and you can get 400Gb for not much more than some email providers will charge you for three 10Gb mailboxes.
- dwedge 2mo ago
  A lot of them will let you if you ask, for instance even ionos or ovh. Digital ocean have a blanket ban on port 25 ipv6 but I haven't seen a reason to use them for a decade now. +1 for mythic beasts
- 2000UltraDeluxe 2mo ago
  "The expensive ones"
comrade1234 2mo ago
Ive self-hosted my email server since 1999. It started in a closet at home in San Francisco. As things got more restrictive (residential ips being black holes) I moved to a Colo. but now I'm back to hosting it on my server in my cellar. I have a fixed ip from my provider init7 (Switzerland) that has never been blacklisted. Reverse dns is set up. All the acronyms like spf, dkim, dmarc are set up. I have no problems sending to Microsoft and Google email addresses. So I'm doing it now but I'm ready to switch back to one of my Colo servers at any time and I won't be surprised if I have to at some point.
mmh0000 2mo ago
I ran my own self-hosted email server from 2008-ish to 2018, and I would highly recommend against doing it! Especially when Fastmail and Proton are so cheap. I was running Postfix+Dovecot+Seive+SpamAssassin+Fail2ban+certbot+spf+dkim+reverse-ip+<other random crap> It worked! Receiving email was overall pretty easy. I know I also did things the "hard way" by ad-hoccing all that together, and today there are a lot more out-of-the-box solutions that do all that for you. But still. Being a full-time email administrator is a job I will never do again unless I'm getting paid for it. You know what really sucked? Deliverability. Frequently, emails I would send would just ... vanish ... no warnings, no errors, no failures. From my end, everything was perfect. Until days later, people would follow up with me and say, "Are you going to send that email?" ... I had a business IP (Comcast Business). The IP address was clean, not black listed anywhere, not on SORBS or other lists. Still, successfully delivering an email was like 50/50, with no way to confirm the other party actually got it.
- Krei-se 2mo ago
  you can check your delivery rate with services there are lots that are free to check and they also offer to "warm" your reputation. I have not done that yet (money!) and outside this: - Outlook.com consumer mail addresses you can still get >99% delivery rate if you have spf, dkim and all the new cool stuff. So no, please DO NOT recommend against doing it because ONLY if mail stays a decentralized service providers will stay forced to not blacklist everything but other large providers.
  - ktm5j 2mo ago
    I used to run mail servers for a university and I also suggest that no one should do this. It's hard enough to get right when it's your full time job. No one wants that kind of headache just for an email address. Do what I do and pay for Proton and stick your domain on it.
    - Krei-se 2mo ago
      "Hacker"news: Don't actually do it yourself man, just pay someone!
noncoml 2mo ago
Good luck having your emails hitting any inbox instead of ending up in spam.
- bad_username 2mo ago
  Ending up in spam is not that bad, compared to emails simply dropped silently, without either party having any idea.
- dwedge 2mo ago
  Thanks. 15 years of good luck so far
  - noncoml 2mo ago
    Awesome. Don’t ever let go of the domain name and IP!
    - dwedge 2mo ago
      Multiple domains, multiple servers, multiple IPs. Newest server and domain combo is 2 years old and it had no issues from day 1. Given your advice on mailservers in a public thread would you also care to share your real world practical experience with selfhosting email?
      - noncoml 2mo ago
        I tried a couple of times moving to self hosted. Configuration was pretty easy. Setup SPF, DMARC, DKIM. Chose a reputable provider, checked the IP is not blacklisted anywhere(had to try a few IPs). Verified that all configuration was right. Then when I started replying to emails, I would never hear back from the recipients. I created a Gmail account and sent an email to myself and lo and behold my reply went straight straight to spam. Despite the mail headers saying everything was checked and was fine. I’d love to hear ideas of what I did wrong. I tripled checked SPF and DKIM. Verified IP with McToolbox, Spamhaus, etc.. Also my domain is 10+ years old and has been hosted by google and fastmail in the past and only for very low volume private emails.
vouaobrasil 2mo ago
Man these days it's nearly impossible. Even my web host has trouble hosting email, even though I use it and they do a decent job. Only medium-sized specialist companies and large ones like Gmail do it well. It's just those spammers - we could have nice things like self-hosted email if everyone were nice, but we can't.
hkt 2mo ago
I've been self hosting since 2012 or so and it is a mixed bag. Deliverability is fine provided you're on a clean IP range, which generally only reputable hosts have. There was a moment when my son was born and he was in NICU that my mail broke. I just went without for a while. Not ideal. Since then I've thought: self hosting is nice but hosting cooperatively is probably the best way forward. Democratic control might beat technical control. I'll do it soon, I think: I'd be fascinated to know what people think.
- selfsimilar 2mo ago
  I’m very interested in this approach. I’ve hosted friends’ websites for decades but I’ve been the single-point of failure, so “cooperative” is very enticing. I’m currently working on a cooperative “lights-on” solution which might be complementary.
kimovski 2mo ago
Blast from the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...
dandersch 2mo ago
Before self-hosting your own, first get a domain and just point it at a mail provider that allows custom domains. It will cost, but so will a VPS. I suspect a lot of DIY homelab types would have most of their needs met with just that setup: - you get the vanity email address - you can switch email providers (including self-hosting later on) - you can have ~unlimited aliases (depends on the provider) Most of the setup consists of steps you will have to take anyway when self-hosting (getting a domain, changing DNS records), except for a major amount of headaches that will be taken care of for you.
- JoshTriplett 2mo ago
  Agreed. Never use a provider-specific email domain, when for a tiny amount per year you can have an email at your own domain that stays the same no matter who your email provider is.
  - calvinmorrison 2mo ago
    how else can you get a cool PO Box.com email address without using fastmail though?
- fisian 2mo ago
  Agreed. Also being able to use as many aliases as you like (or a catch-all) is very nice.
- EMAIL36245 2mo ago
  Some providers use the reputation of the mail servers (smtp.domain.com) and not the actually domain (your-domain.com).
tossitawayplz 2mo ago
Michael W Lucas has a book[0] on the subject too: https://mwl.io/static/books/run-your-own-mail-server.html https://mwl.io/static/books/run-your-own-mail-server.html
Krei-se 2mo ago
I self-host with telekom business, 2 fixed ip lines fiber and vdsl at home everything from auth ns to mail and web. Its around 85€ for me. it's still doable and you get the best feeling there is: Living in the internet. Can recommend 100%.
EMAIL36245 2mo ago
I beg to differ on: > but if your home internet checks these boxes, you can 100% host your own mailserver at home: Static IPv4 address (make sure it's not blacklisted) Not behind a CGNAT Ability to change the PTR record of your IP (usually though the support of your ISP) Ability to open common mailserver Ports (25,143,465,587,993) Because above is only needed if you want to communicate with people using Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Fastmail, Proton etc (The monopoly). For normal folks, they are better off using an alternate less privileged email service like email.riamu.io.
MattTheRealOne 2mo ago
The biggest problem with self-hosting a mail server is reliably being able to send email and have it be delivered to the recipient. Something I have been thinking about setting up is self-hosting a dovecot server so that all of my emails that I receive are on my system, but using another provider for sending email. I don't send that many emails, so there is not much privacy loss in regards to a third-party being able to see my sent emails, but I still get the benefit of noone but me having access to my received emails.
- 1_1xdev1 2mo ago
  > but I still get the benefit of noone but me having access to my received emails. Other than every smtp relay hop and any network tap along the way that could keep a copy. Hope you're encrypting and not worried about the envelope. Email is fundamentally not private. Self-hosting doesn't help all that much (though it may keep it out of certain companies' hands, aside from the emails copied to or sent from that provider)
eljimmy 2mo ago
I've been self-hosting for 20 years now - a few years ago I switched to using Mail-in-a-Box (https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/) which makes management a lot easier than configuring each service manually. It definitely requires some effort but once you've got it up and running it's pretty hands off. The only issues I've ever had are expiring certs but I've fixed that by configuring auto-renewals and it's all good now. Ensuring your source IP isn't blacklisted is probably the single most important factor. I had to request a new IP from Linode where my server runs as the one it was originally assigned had a bad reputation.
tenacious_tuna 2mo ago
I'd love to self-host a mailing list, or that protonmail or fastmail offered listserv like functionality. It feels fairly intimidating to hoist my own mail server and listserv on top of that. It feels like there's too much domain-specific knowledge one needs to have to reliably debug and maintain it: DKIM, spam management, certbot, fail2ban, blah blah blah.
JoshTriplett 2mo ago
Every single person I know who has run their own email server has, at one point or another, either outright lost mails or had important mails delayed for days. It's not worth it.
- opengrass 2mo ago
  mbsync + 3-2-1
tylerjl 2mo ago
I've hosted and actively used my own email server for > 10 years and there are two things that are true at the same time: It is absolutely possible to host, use, and achieve decent deliverability with your own server. It takes work and is a different beast than running a webserver, but that frontier is not dead (yet). At the same time: it is an ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE IDEA to suggest that folks operate an email server out of residential IP through your ISP. The spam prevention ecosystem is so draconian now that email traffic flowing out of address ranges belonging to residential owners is yeeted into the sun. If you've operated email infrastructure at decently large scales, you know that SPF/DKIM/DMARC are just one part of how spam is identified, and mixing in the source of email traffic into the detection heuristics is a significant part of that identification process. Achieving decent delivery can often involve "warming up" an IP over time to establish its reputation, and consumer address ranges are a hodge-podge of activity that incur very little trust about what they're doing. I agree with some commenters that exhort the exercise of self-hosting email to prevent the venerable protocol becoming a homogeneous GMail and Outlook-only world, but there are reliable ways to do this: using a VPS, relying on a company for the sending/SMTP part, or something similar. But footguns abound, and disgorging SMTP packets from your LAN edge is one of them.
tamimio 2mo ago
The problem isn’t spam, the problem is you becoming the spam. I did test email selfhosting before and there’s a substantial amount of times my emails were never seen by the recipient, sometimes it did cost me good jobs/deals. So now I use paid email while I control the domain and everything else, so I have the portability feature if I wanted to switch providers without any efforts, but I know now my emails will be delivered whenever I hit sent. That being said, I self host everything else in my digital life, and I believe everyone should.
cjs_ac 2mo ago
I started self-hosting my email server earlier this year. I use maddy[0] as my email server and route outgoing mail through MailPace[1] to avoid being memory-holed (despite having SPF and DKIM set up correctly). My reason for self-hosting is control, not privacy: the fact that the cleartext of my outbound emails is visible in the MailPace UI is not a concern; the problem I'm solving is that email providers can delete your account. [0] https://maddy.email/ https://maddy.email/ [1] https://mailpace.com/ https://mailpace.com/
Mike-Kelner 2mo ago
I know an old-school Linux admin who has been successfully running his own email servers for 30+ years - from small private ones to larger corporate setups. For spam detection he uses his own system, and it works surprisingly well even without any LLM (though an LLM could surely make it even better). So the "you can't self-host email" meme was never quite true - it is about willingness and ability to configure everything right.
fisian 2mo ago
I started hosting my email at home some months ago and it works great. However, my ISP blocks some ports necessary for running a mailserver (incoming SMTP), so I have to use an SMTP relay (which is on a VPS and does port 25 to some other port that is not blocked). Additionally, to not worry about deliverability, I let my mailserver send all outgoing mail through another service. The additional costs for this are about 2€/month. I use Stalwart as a mail server and it was not too hard to setup (with some caveats to get it working with my SSL certs behind a reverse proxy. But nothing a bit of LLM chatting couldn't solve). All in all, it's not 100% self hosted, but works well. However, I don't agree with the suggestion in the article to use a self hosted LLM. My mailserver needs a few hundred MBs of RAM at max, but with the spam filter this would increase like 10x-100x.
6c696e7578 2mo ago
Been self-hosting my own mail since '99. Delivery isn't the problem, just people don't use mail as much as they used to. Most people reach for signal or whatsapp to communicate. Most mail is order confirmations. So don't really care if people can't get mail, it isn't the primary communication tool for most people like it used to me.
UltraSane 2mo ago
Running your own mail server is easy for receiving mail, but it is very hard to keep your IP from getting on some random blacklist that is impossible to get off.
efields 2mo ago
Absolutely not.
- doublerabbit 2mo ago
  Why not? I have been hosting colocated email for years just fine. I pay for a perceptual license of Zimbra.
bityard 2mo ago
Even in the face of all the advice on reddit and HN that says never to host your own mail server, I have been doing so successfully for at least 15 years. It helps that I have had the same spam-free IP address for most of that time. All I ever do is run `apt upgrade` approximately once a week. Costs all of $5 a month and there's just enough RAM leftover that I can also use it for wireguard tunnels or whatever if I need to. I have decided that if my VPS provider shuts down, I can just send my outgoing mail through a cloud provider's SMTP gateway. My volume is low enough that it will be free or cost a few cents a month. Deliverability is not a problem for me, but incoming spam does not have a great solution. Even with rspamd, a lot of crap gets through if you start spamming your email address everywhere. This is why I use a lot of throwaway and company-specific email address. If you only have one email address, yeah Fastmail or whatever is cheap. But as soon as you want multiple users (family) and throwaway email addresses, it gets expensive in a hurry. But those are free if you self-host.
cdrnsf 2mo ago
I stood Stalwart up recently and it's going well so far. I opted to use an SMTP relay instead of delivering from the VPS directly.
greengreengrass 2mo ago
I’ve self-hosted for 21 years. I also run mail servers for others, mostly non-profit adjacent groups who don’t have the capital to be extorted by cloud service providers. Sure, there are some things to learn, but like anything – if you do it properly, it’s not hard and can work properly. Never had any deliverability issues over that time (yes, even to the big providers). I also almost never touch the boxes (I do about one architectural overhaul a decade and am working on the next right now). If you’re willing to invest the time and resources to do it properly, I agree, it works fine.
opengrass 2mo ago
Then when you die I'll buy your domain, setup a catch all and scoop up your accounts.
- chappie7 2mo ago
  Have fun waiting. My domain registration doesn’t expire for ten years, and every year I top up the registration to ten years again.
- comrade1234 2mo ago
  I created a foundation to manage my email domain in perpetuity
Velocifyer 2mo ago
I was going to self host my email server, but somehow my email provider (Migadu) is cheaper than a VPS ($19 USD per year) and offers custom domains, catch-all, and unlimited addresses.
levl289 2mo ago
I'd run my own email server since the early 2000's - in several forms over time. A VA Linux 2U rack server that I got from work (noisy, overkill), a personal Mac Mini (Frankenstein macport upgrade-resistant), and now a single-node k8s instance with everything neatly managed (an excuse to really dive into k8s from the ground up). I use dyndns to handle IP changes (incredibly rare with Frontier FIOS, actually). I use mailhop.org to handle secondary MX records in case my machine is down (as well as mail filtering) Everything else is postfix, spamassassin, dovecot imap It's not a trivial system, and it took a while to get everything working how I wanted. It's a terrific learning opportunity, but it's by no means simple to mentally model the process of all that happens inside.
- vkaku 2mo ago
  Just document this for all, simplify the setup but keep the learning :)
  - levl289 2mo ago
    I've got a private github repo where all of this is documented. I intentionally kept everything that's secret out of there. Will turn it public, now that I think about it. Thanks, friend!
angrybuddha 2mo ago
yeah don't do this
angrybuddha 2mo ago
Yeah, do not do this
KronisLV 2mo ago
> A good starting point would be docker-mailserver which is a full mailserver suite deployable via Docker with sane defaults. I am running Docker Mailserver because it's one of the very few options that were actually easy to administer: https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest/examples/tutorials/basic-installation/ https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest... But the last release was like a year ago: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver/releases https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver/relea... and same with the container that was published: https://hub.docker.com/r/mailserver/docker-mailserver/tags https://hub.docker.com/r/mailserver/docker-mailserver/tags I guess there is the edge version and more recent commits, and overall it should be stable, but you'd think there'd be more small patch releases to decrease the eventual risk of CVEs. Either way, cool that it exists.
- comrade1234 2mo ago
  Why would docker be a good solution for an email server? Why would you run it in a pseudo-vm?
  - KronisLV 2mo ago
    Because I already run everything else, including databases and web servers alongside apps in containers. I don’t want to have to install packages on the host system or pollute it with configs in case I need to get rid of something or migrate the OS separately from the software. I don’t want a complex backup story, just a /data mount for all of my stuff. I also sure as hell don’t want to copy random configs or add other config management systems into the mix. I also don’t want to have to configure cgroups or resource limits per thing I’m running. I also want to be able to version the config and deploy it easily wherever needed, and sure as hell don’t want to set it up manually; Ansible is passable but less convenient than just a Docker Compose or Swarm stack. Generally, I keep the apps separate from the more bare host system. Especially useful when you can easily tell what is transient data vs actual data you need to store longer term per-app, alongside custom port setup across all apps and not needing to care much about individual config formats, in addition to being able to run different versions alongside one another. Nix or other methods would probably also work for folks, but Docker (OCI) containers just get out of my way and do the thing.
nijave 2mo ago
Email hosting isn't too bad. IP reputation management is a pain. Everything works perfectly until one day it doesn't. SMTP relays are cheap--worth a few pennies a month to not deal with IP rep.
jedberg 2mo ago
I ran my own mail server from 1999-2008, starting when I worked at Sendmail. I helped create SPF and DKIM. I would never run my own mail server today. Deliverability is a nightmare, despite what this article says. Gmail/Hotmail (and all the domains they host for people, which is quite a lot) will pretty much block or silently drop any email that isn't from a large, known provider who has actually talked directly to them. If you don't have time to be a full-time mail deliverability engineer/product manager, just pay someone to do it for you.
- chappie7 2mo ago
  To be clear, you’re talking about an outgoing mail server. An incoming mail server is pretty trivial to self-host and provides most of the benefits of self-hosting mail. The distinction is often lost in these discussions, which scares off a lot of people who in reality would have no trouble running their own MX.
jedberg 2mo ago
If you are self-hosting because you care about privacy, I'm not sure why. Email requires two parties. Unless both parties are self hosting, some company has a copy of that email. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon probably see 99% of all email on the internet (ok maybe not that much but probably pretty close). I'm not sure what privacy you gain by self hosting these days, since no one else is.
- chappie7 2mo ago
  You’d be surprised how many corporations send their own emails directly or use one of the smaller providers. I’ve checked the headers, and the majority of my utility bills, purchase receipts, itineraries, medical emails, and so on don’t go through Google or Microsoft, and these are the personal profile–building emails I care about keeping private the most.
- comrade1234 2mo ago
  My wife and I are both in our own self-hosted server. We send sensitive emails back and forth all the time. Well, she does, not me so much. Since we're on the same server it never passes through a third party. Plus there's people in Europe talking to each other that don't want the USA to read their emails. I mean there tons of situations wheee emails don't go through Google or Microsoft.
  - jedberg 2mo ago
    From this[0] report from proton mail, 74% of European email is routed through USA servers. So even if you care, the person you are sending to or receiving from probably does not. So the US companies are still seeing it. For the use case of you and your wife, you don't really need to self host a mail server, you just need a file server, unless you're forwarding each other emails you got externally, in which case, someone probably already read it. My overall point is that email requires at least two parties to have access to the content, oftentimes more than two, and chances are one of those parties is not privacy conscious, which breaks any privacy you think you might have. [0] https://proton.me/business/europe-tech-watch https://proton.me/business/europe-tech-watch
_-_-__-_-_- 2mo ago
I've been using Purelymail for a year. It's simple and useful.
drnick1 2mo ago
I also self-host, and it's not nearly as difficult as know-it-all people on the Internet make it out to be. I rolled things out from scratch using Postfix and Dovecot on Debian as I dislike bloated and opaque containers that hide important decisions from the sysadmin. The main requirements are a clean, fixed IPv4 and an aged domain. Absolutely zero maintenance has been required since I set it up (unattended upgrades), until recently when Dovecot updated the configuration syntax. Claude ported the config script to the new syntax in about 2min.
vinay_ys 2mo ago
Long time ago I used to run qmail for my school (about 2000 users). It was a lot of fun to do as a student sysadmin. Today, I'm tempted to build a minimal mail system for 1-10 users using agentic coding and use it for less critical use-cases like email for shopping/restaurants etc account registration. I wonder if I can get a safe and secure minimal build done completely agnatically without having to directly look at a single line of code.
- subscribed 2mo ago
  If you want to do it as a learning experience, do it, but if you just want a domain with catch-all addresses, don't. You can get a solution like SimpleLogin (don't get actual SimpleLogin, they don't do SRS) in minutes without the headache of having to configure, administer, secure and patch all that.
4fterd4rk 2mo ago
This is years (decades?) old but I self hosted my email until everyone suddenly stopped accepting my mail. Has this phenomenon changed? Everyone on my domain was asking me what the hell happened why is my mail not being delivered and I had to do a panicked midnight migration to Google.
- FlyingBobcat 2mo ago
  This hasn't changed, it git worse. Incoming spam was never the problem. Getting your mail delivered is. The article is not talking about that. If you only want to self host your mails and use an external smtp gateway for outgoing mail, then everything is fine
ariamailclient 2mo ago
If you are worried about outbound reputation, simply use some outbound relay like MailChannels. Also check out https://jmap.io https://jmap.io - great stuff coming to the world of open source e-mail!
smakt 2mo ago
[dead]
subscribed 2mo ago
Nah, thanks. I've been doing it since late 90s for several domains, servers run in DCs. Deliverablity wasn't a problem once I set everything well (and I forwarded most, including received phishing/spam, to my big provider account), but constant fight with incoming spam and effort to keep the servers safe, secure, updated, monitored and finally paid for, weren't really worth it. For unlimited aliases I bought the service that lets me use my domains, for smtp for servers I was using sendgrid and ses anyway. The effort is not worth that, especially not with the powerful LLMs looking for vulnerabilities. I can spend the time I was sinking into keeping it afloat on something more creative.
preisschild 2mo ago
Are you using telematica/fonira as your ISP too? Have been hosting an email server for years now.

130 points by geek_at 2mo ago

I do. It's nowhere as hard as everyone on here makes it out to be. And I don't even use an easy solution like Mailcow. Spam is a solved problem with rspamd, and it's not even an llm

selectodude 2mo ago
It’s not hard to receive or filter mail - knowing that somebody will receive your email after you send it is another thing entirely.
- muppetman 2mo ago
  Thankfully not a problem we've encountered yet. All my mail is DKIM signed, SPF aligned etc. I also registered on dnswl.org which is a signal quite a few people seem to use.
- 9dev 2mo ago
  That is the exact problem that got me to abandon my splendidly working, self-hosted email stack. I had so many instances of mail just not getting delivered, despite doing absolutely everything correctly, that I gave up.
- jazzyjackson 2mo ago
  I’m wondering what the most fool proof way to get a message delivered to someone else is. I found out today some SMS messages I sent were silently dropped. Email doesn’t always get delivered. I would hope the closed ecosystems like Signal and Whatsapp are better at this and in any case you need both parties to agree on a channel. I just like email because my identity is maintained even when I switch providers, and nothing else quite like that exists.
john_strinlai 2mo ago
out of curiosity, are you talking about personal, small business, or corporate? "spam is solved" looks a lot different at each of those
- muppetman 2mo ago
  Personal mailserver sorry. rspamd stops all the sent-using-my-from-address "i hacked you" emails (DMARC drops them) and all the other random spam stuff. I can imagine though a large business with thousands of email accounts it wouldn't be as easy though.
aspbee555 2mo ago
I still handle email for multiple small businesses (for over 20 years) and recently switched from the mailscanner+spamassasin to rspamd and the scanning is so much better/easier now my backend is still dovecot+postfix, still works beautifully. I am able to run rspamd+dovecot proxy on a small vps and the storage is handled by a backend office server with dovecot. If VPS has an issue can spinup another easily/anywhere and backend is also virtualized (libvirt) so easily restored (with multiple backups in multiple places) biggest thing to worry about with deliverability is ensuring your SPF and DKIM (opendkim) are correct, which is not too difficult and rspamd is able to handle the dkim signing/verification which is nice
- muppetman 2mo ago
  Yup rspamd being able to do the DKIM signing was what made me move from spamassassian+opendkim to just this single solution. The web GUI and its speed were just really nice extras it brought with it. It's one of my favourite pieces of open source software.

throw0101d 2mo ago

Waiting for a submission of "You should run your own NNTP server" (lots of 'nostalgia' for web forums to come back, so why not this too?).

carlosjobim 2mo ago

I disagree with the author. If you have your own domain for e-mail, then you've already dealt with all risks and vulnerabilities. Of course you have your e-mail stored locally as well by using an e-mail client, which you would anyway.

chappie7 2mo ago
Using a cloud provider with your own domain means going through a lot of the “hard” parts, yes (setting DNS records for DMARC/DKIM/SPF/MX mostly). But self hosting does provide benefits on top of that. Hosting your own MX (the receive side) means a lot of private emails go straight to you: purchase receipts, utility bills, travel itineraries. You can have as many users/mailboxes/aliases as you like without having to pay more. You also get confidence that emails sent to you didn’t get silently treated as spam (cloud providers have disappeared enough 2FA code emails that I really care about this). Sending emails directly also provides some benefits. You can guarantee that the email is sent with TLS, for example. Having logs to prove that my server sent a message and it was received and acknowledged by the receiving server has been useful to me a couple of times too.
carlosjobim 2mo ago
I wonder why the comment replying to mine was banned? It was a well written response.
- chappie7 2mo ago
  Seems to have been some auto-moderation mistake. I emailed hn@ycombinator.com (from my self-hosted mail server) and they restored my comments.

geek_at 2mo ago

Sorry the title should have been "You should self-host your mail server" but it seems HN removes the "You should" in the beginning of a title. I wanted to start this discussion because I think we are prime for more self hosted mail servers in 2026 and in the post I explain how to use a locally hosted LLM to nudge the spam detector rspamd to whether or not an incoming mail is spam. Also in times where the EU can order your mail providers to scan for unwanted content [1] (currently limited to CSAM, later probably more) it does feel better to have your data at your hand. [1] https://en.philenews.com/international/privacy-to-end-in-the-eu-with-chat-control-laws-being-introduced-live/ https://en.philenews.com/international/privacy-to-end-in-the...

throw0101d 2mo ago

> But there are other solutions out there like: Stalwart; Mailcow ;Or if you're a purist you can set up your whole server yourself Another good guide that uses Debian and its standard packages: * https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie (Updated with every release, and upgrade/migration instructions.)

dangerboysteve 2mo ago
Some out of the box solutions. https://www.iredmail.org https://www.iredmail.org https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
- ValdikSS 2mo ago
  Free iredmail version is very basic, barely useful unfortunately. I'd recommend mailcow for regular usage, or mailinabox if you're low on RAM or configuring email for server (not for people).

LoganDark 2mo ago

I've tried self-hosting my mail server, but that means all my outgoing mail will go to Spam on all providers that use reputation-based filtering. In all cases I had SPF, DKIM and DMARC working perfectly, PTR records, etc. but it just doesn't matter. Even a Fastmail domain goes right to spam on my personal account, and they are very very established. It's just not worth it.

dwedge 2mo ago
I use a dedicated server and a vps for this, so I get around the residential IP reputation issue. The rest of the problems with deliverability are overblown. In 15 years of doing it on multiple servers, I've had one 2 month period where Gmail was spamming me and one month where Yahoo spammed me. In both cases it stopped without me changing anything, I've always suspected it's brief periods of anti-competition attempts which don't last forever
- LoganDark 2mo ago
  I never used residential IPs. Most ISPs don't even let you set PTR records on those. My problem was that any server at practically any provider would reuse an IP that previous customers have used to send spam in the past. For example you can't hope to send mail from a DigitalOcean IPv4 address without going to spam. Nor from Kamatera. There are probably a few more providers that are basically blackholed because they're so often used for spam. (I don't have experience with providers that don't offer IPv4.) I believe some providers even attempt to block outgoing mail.

ubermonkey 2mo ago

Counterpoint: No.

dangerboysteve 2mo ago

What hosting / VPS companies do you recommend? Finding one which allows you to run a mail server is some work.

hkt 2mo ago
Mythic beasts. Their IP ranges are pretty clean and well managed. My deliverability has been fine there for years.
- graemep 2mo ago
  They are quite expensive for some ranges of storage which you might need for IMAP if you need a lot less than where the HDD pricing starts. On the other hand HDD is fine for a mail server and you can get 400Gb for not much more than some email providers will charge you for three 10Gb mailboxes.
dwedge 2mo ago
A lot of them will let you if you ask, for instance even ionos or ovh. Digital ocean have a blanket ban on port 25 ipv6 but I haven't seen a reason to use them for a decade now. +1 for mythic beasts
2000UltraDeluxe 2mo ago
"The expensive ones"

comrade1234 2mo ago

Ive self-hosted my email server since 1999. It started in a closet at home in San Francisco. As things got more restrictive (residential ips being black holes) I moved to a Colo. but now I'm back to hosting it on my server in my cellar. I have a fixed ip from my provider init7 (Switzerland) that has never been blacklisted. Reverse dns is set up. All the acronyms like spf, dkim, dmarc are set up. I have no problems sending to Microsoft and Google email addresses. So I'm doing it now but I'm ready to switch back to one of my Colo servers at any time and I won't be surprised if I have to at some point.

mmh0000 2mo ago

I ran my own self-hosted email server from 2008-ish to 2018, and I would highly recommend against doing it! Especially when Fastmail and Proton are so cheap. I was running Postfix+Dovecot+Seive+SpamAssassin+Fail2ban+certbot+spf+dkim+reverse-ip+<other random crap> It worked! Receiving email was overall pretty easy. I know I also did things the "hard way" by ad-hoccing all that together, and today there are a lot more out-of-the-box solutions that do all that for you. But still. Being a full-time email administrator is a job I will never do again unless I'm getting paid for it. You know what really sucked? Deliverability. Frequently, emails I would send would just ... vanish ... no warnings, no errors, no failures. From my end, everything was perfect. Until days later, people would follow up with me and say, "Are you going to send that email?" ... I had a business IP (Comcast Business). The IP address was clean, not black listed anywhere, not on SORBS or other lists. Still, successfully delivering an email was like 50/50, with no way to confirm the other party actually got it.

Krei-se 2mo ago
you can check your delivery rate with services there are lots that are free to check and they also offer to "warm" your reputation. I have not done that yet (money!) and outside this: - Outlook.com consumer mail addresses you can still get >99% delivery rate if you have spf, dkim and all the new cool stuff. So no, please DO NOT recommend against doing it because ONLY if mail stays a decentralized service providers will stay forced to not blacklist everything but other large providers.
- ktm5j 2mo ago
  I used to run mail servers for a university and I also suggest that no one should do this. It's hard enough to get right when it's your full time job. No one wants that kind of headache just for an email address. Do what I do and pay for Proton and stick your domain on it.
  - Krei-se 2mo ago
    "Hacker"news: Don't actually do it yourself man, just pay someone!

noncoml 2mo ago

Good luck having your emails hitting any inbox instead of ending up in spam.

bad_username 2mo ago
Ending up in spam is not that bad, compared to emails simply dropped silently, without either party having any idea.
dwedge 2mo ago
Thanks. 15 years of good luck so far
- noncoml 2mo ago
  Awesome. Don’t ever let go of the domain name and IP!
  - dwedge 2mo ago
    Multiple domains, multiple servers, multiple IPs. Newest server and domain combo is 2 years old and it had no issues from day 1. Given your advice on mailservers in a public thread would you also care to share your real world practical experience with selfhosting email?
    - noncoml 2mo ago
      I tried a couple of times moving to self hosted. Configuration was pretty easy. Setup SPF, DMARC, DKIM. Chose a reputable provider, checked the IP is not blacklisted anywhere(had to try a few IPs). Verified that all configuration was right. Then when I started replying to emails, I would never hear back from the recipients. I created a Gmail account and sent an email to myself and lo and behold my reply went straight straight to spam. Despite the mail headers saying everything was checked and was fine. I’d love to hear ideas of what I did wrong. I tripled checked SPF and DKIM. Verified IP with McToolbox, Spamhaus, etc.. Also my domain is 10+ years old and has been hosted by google and fastmail in the past and only for very low volume private emails.

vouaobrasil 2mo ago

Man these days it's nearly impossible. Even my web host has trouble hosting email, even though I use it and they do a decent job. Only medium-sized specialist companies and large ones like Gmail do it well. It's just those spammers - we could have nice things like self-hosted email if everyone were nice, but we can't.

hkt 2mo ago

I've been self hosting since 2012 or so and it is a mixed bag. Deliverability is fine provided you're on a clean IP range, which generally only reputable hosts have. There was a moment when my son was born and he was in NICU that my mail broke. I just went without for a while. Not ideal. Since then I've thought: self hosting is nice but hosting cooperatively is probably the best way forward. Democratic control might beat technical control. I'll do it soon, I think: I'd be fascinated to know what people think.

selfsimilar 2mo ago
I’m very interested in this approach. I’ve hosted friends’ websites for decades but I’ve been the single-point of failure, so “cooperative” is very enticing. I’m currently working on a cooperative “lights-on” solution which might be complementary.

kimovski 2mo ago

Blast from the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...

dandersch 2mo ago

Before self-hosting your own, first get a domain and just point it at a mail provider that allows custom domains. It will cost, but so will a VPS. I suspect a lot of DIY homelab types would have most of their needs met with just that setup: - you get the vanity email address - you can switch email providers (including self-hosting later on) - you can have ~unlimited aliases (depends on the provider) Most of the setup consists of steps you will have to take anyway when self-hosting (getting a domain, changing DNS records), except for a major amount of headaches that will be taken care of for you.

JoshTriplett 2mo ago
Agreed. Never use a provider-specific email domain, when for a tiny amount per year you can have an email at your own domain that stays the same no matter who your email provider is.
- calvinmorrison 2mo ago
  how else can you get a cool PO Box.com email address without using fastmail though?
fisian 2mo ago
Agreed. Also being able to use as many aliases as you like (or a catch-all) is very nice.
EMAIL36245 2mo ago
Some providers use the reputation of the mail servers (smtp.domain.com) and not the actually domain (your-domain.com).

tossitawayplz 2mo ago

Michael W Lucas has a book[0] on the subject too: https://mwl.io/static/books/run-your-own-mail-server.html https://mwl.io/static/books/run-your-own-mail-server.html

Krei-se 2mo ago

I self-host with telekom business, 2 fixed ip lines fiber and vdsl at home everything from auth ns to mail and web. Its around 85€ for me. it's still doable and you get the best feeling there is: Living in the internet. Can recommend 100%.

EMAIL36245 2mo ago

I beg to differ on: > but if your home internet checks these boxes, you can 100% host your own mailserver at home: Static IPv4 address (make sure it's not blacklisted) Not behind a CGNAT Ability to change the PTR record of your IP (usually though the support of your ISP) Ability to open common mailserver Ports (25,143,465,587,993) Because above is only needed if you want to communicate with people using Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Fastmail, Proton etc (The monopoly). For normal folks, they are better off using an alternate less privileged email service like email.riamu.io.

MattTheRealOne 2mo ago

The biggest problem with self-hosting a mail server is reliably being able to send email and have it be delivered to the recipient. Something I have been thinking about setting up is self-hosting a dovecot server so that all of my emails that I receive are on my system, but using another provider for sending email. I don't send that many emails, so there is not much privacy loss in regards to a third-party being able to see my sent emails, but I still get the benefit of noone but me having access to my received emails.

1_1xdev1 2mo ago
> but I still get the benefit of noone but me having access to my received emails. Other than every smtp relay hop and any network tap along the way that could keep a copy. Hope you're encrypting and not worried about the envelope. Email is fundamentally not private. Self-hosting doesn't help all that much (though it may keep it out of certain companies' hands, aside from the emails copied to or sent from that provider)

eljimmy 2mo ago

I've been self-hosting for 20 years now - a few years ago I switched to using Mail-in-a-Box (https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/) which makes management a lot easier than configuring each service manually. It definitely requires some effort but once you've got it up and running it's pretty hands off. The only issues I've ever had are expiring certs but I've fixed that by configuring auto-renewals and it's all good now. Ensuring your source IP isn't blacklisted is probably the single most important factor. I had to request a new IP from Linode where my server runs as the one it was originally assigned had a bad reputation.

tenacious_tuna 2mo ago

I'd love to self-host a mailing list, or that protonmail or fastmail offered listserv like functionality. It feels fairly intimidating to hoist my own mail server and listserv on top of that. It feels like there's too much domain-specific knowledge one needs to have to reliably debug and maintain it: DKIM, spam management, certbot, fail2ban, blah blah blah.

JoshTriplett 2mo ago

Every single person I know who has run their own email server has, at one point or another, either outright lost mails or had important mails delayed for days. It's not worth it.

opengrass 2mo ago
mbsync + 3-2-1

tylerjl 2mo ago

I've hosted and actively used my own email server for > 10 years and there are two things that are true at the same time: It is absolutely possible to host, use, and achieve decent deliverability with your own server. It takes work and is a different beast than running a webserver, but that frontier is not dead (yet). At the same time: it is an ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE IDEA to suggest that folks operate an email server out of residential IP through your ISP. The spam prevention ecosystem is so draconian now that email traffic flowing out of address ranges belonging to residential owners is yeeted into the sun. If you've operated email infrastructure at decently large scales, you know that SPF/DKIM/DMARC are just one part of how spam is identified, and mixing in the source of email traffic into the detection heuristics is a significant part of that identification process. Achieving decent delivery can often involve "warming up" an IP over time to establish its reputation, and consumer address ranges are a hodge-podge of activity that incur very little trust about what they're doing. I agree with some commenters that exhort the exercise of self-hosting email to prevent the venerable protocol becoming a homogeneous GMail and Outlook-only world, but there are reliable ways to do this: using a VPS, relying on a company for the sending/SMTP part, or something similar. But footguns abound, and disgorging SMTP packets from your LAN edge is one of them.

tamimio 2mo ago

The problem isn’t spam, the problem is you becoming the spam. I did test email selfhosting before and there’s a substantial amount of times my emails were never seen by the recipient, sometimes it did cost me good jobs/deals. So now I use paid email while I control the domain and everything else, so I have the portability feature if I wanted to switch providers without any efforts, but I know now my emails will be delivered whenever I hit sent. That being said, I self host everything else in my digital life, and I believe everyone should.

cjs_ac 2mo ago

I started self-hosting my email server earlier this year. I use maddy[0] as my email server and route outgoing mail through MailPace[1] to avoid being memory-holed (despite having SPF and DKIM set up correctly). My reason for self-hosting is control, not privacy: the fact that the cleartext of my outbound emails is visible in the MailPace UI is not a concern; the problem I'm solving is that email providers can delete your account. [0] https://maddy.email/ https://maddy.email/ [1] https://mailpace.com/ https://mailpace.com/

Mike-Kelner 2mo ago

I know an old-school Linux admin who has been successfully running his own email servers for 30+ years - from small private ones to larger corporate setups. For spam detection he uses his own system, and it works surprisingly well even without any LLM (though an LLM could surely make it even better). So the "you can't self-host email" meme was never quite true - it is about willingness and ability to configure everything right.

fisian 2mo ago

I started hosting my email at home some months ago and it works great. However, my ISP blocks some ports necessary for running a mailserver (incoming SMTP), so I have to use an SMTP relay (which is on a VPS and does port 25 to some other port that is not blocked). Additionally, to not worry about deliverability, I let my mailserver send all outgoing mail through another service. The additional costs for this are about 2€/month. I use Stalwart as a mail server and it was not too hard to setup (with some caveats to get it working with my SSL certs behind a reverse proxy. But nothing a bit of LLM chatting couldn't solve). All in all, it's not 100% self hosted, but works well. However, I don't agree with the suggestion in the article to use a self hosted LLM. My mailserver needs a few hundred MBs of RAM at max, but with the spam filter this would increase like 10x-100x.

6c696e7578 2mo ago

Been self-hosting my own mail since '99. Delivery isn't the problem, just people don't use mail as much as they used to. Most people reach for signal or whatsapp to communicate. Most mail is order confirmations. So don't really care if people can't get mail, it isn't the primary communication tool for most people like it used to me.

UltraSane 2mo ago

Running your own mail server is easy for receiving mail, but it is very hard to keep your IP from getting on some random blacklist that is impossible to get off.

efields 2mo ago

Absolutely not.

doublerabbit 2mo ago
Why not? I have been hosting colocated email for years just fine. I pay for a perceptual license of Zimbra.

bityard 2mo ago

Even in the face of all the advice on reddit and HN that says never to host your own mail server, I have been doing so successfully for at least 15 years. It helps that I have had the same spam-free IP address for most of that time. All I ever do is run `apt upgrade` approximately once a week. Costs all of $5 a month and there's just enough RAM leftover that I can also use it for wireguard tunnels or whatever if I need to. I have decided that if my VPS provider shuts down, I can just send my outgoing mail through a cloud provider's SMTP gateway. My volume is low enough that it will be free or cost a few cents a month. Deliverability is not a problem for me, but incoming spam does not have a great solution. Even with rspamd, a lot of crap gets through if you start spamming your email address everywhere. This is why I use a lot of throwaway and company-specific email address. If you only have one email address, yeah Fastmail or whatever is cheap. But as soon as you want multiple users (family) and throwaway email addresses, it gets expensive in a hurry. But those are free if you self-host.

cdrnsf 2mo ago

I stood Stalwart up recently and it's going well so far. I opted to use an SMTP relay instead of delivering from the VPS directly.

greengreengrass 2mo ago

I’ve self-hosted for 21 years. I also run mail servers for others, mostly non-profit adjacent groups who don’t have the capital to be extorted by cloud service providers. Sure, there are some things to learn, but like anything – if you do it properly, it’s not hard and can work properly. Never had any deliverability issues over that time (yes, even to the big providers). I also almost never touch the boxes (I do about one architectural overhaul a decade and am working on the next right now). If you’re willing to invest the time and resources to do it properly, I agree, it works fine.

opengrass 2mo ago

Then when you die I'll buy your domain, setup a catch all and scoop up your accounts.

chappie7 2mo ago
Have fun waiting. My domain registration doesn’t expire for ten years, and every year I top up the registration to ten years again.
comrade1234 2mo ago
I created a foundation to manage my email domain in perpetuity

Velocifyer 2mo ago

I was going to self host my email server, but somehow my email provider (Migadu) is cheaper than a VPS ($19 USD per year) and offers custom domains, catch-all, and unlimited addresses.

levl289 2mo ago

I'd run my own email server since the early 2000's - in several forms over time. A VA Linux 2U rack server that I got from work (noisy, overkill), a personal Mac Mini (Frankenstein macport upgrade-resistant), and now a single-node k8s instance with everything neatly managed (an excuse to really dive into k8s from the ground up). I use dyndns to handle IP changes (incredibly rare with Frontier FIOS, actually). I use mailhop.org to handle secondary MX records in case my machine is down (as well as mail filtering) Everything else is postfix, spamassassin, dovecot imap It's not a trivial system, and it took a while to get everything working how I wanted. It's a terrific learning opportunity, but it's by no means simple to mentally model the process of all that happens inside.

vkaku 2mo ago
Just document this for all, simplify the setup but keep the learning :)
- levl289 2mo ago
  I've got a private github repo where all of this is documented. I intentionally kept everything that's secret out of there. Will turn it public, now that I think about it. Thanks, friend!

angrybuddha 2mo ago

yeah don't do this

angrybuddha 2mo ago

Yeah, do not do this

KronisLV 2mo ago

> A good starting point would be docker-mailserver which is a full mailserver suite deployable via Docker with sane defaults. I am running Docker Mailserver because it's one of the very few options that were actually easy to administer: https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest/examples/tutorials/basic-installation/ https://docker-mailserver.github.io/docker-mailserver/latest... But the last release was like a year ago: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver/releases https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver/relea... and same with the container that was published: https://hub.docker.com/r/mailserver/docker-mailserver/tags https://hub.docker.com/r/mailserver/docker-mailserver/tags I guess there is the edge version and more recent commits, and overall it should be stable, but you'd think there'd be more small patch releases to decrease the eventual risk of CVEs. Either way, cool that it exists.

comrade1234 2mo ago
Why would docker be a good solution for an email server? Why would you run it in a pseudo-vm?
- KronisLV 2mo ago
  Because I already run everything else, including databases and web servers alongside apps in containers. I don’t want to have to install packages on the host system or pollute it with configs in case I need to get rid of something or migrate the OS separately from the software. I don’t want a complex backup story, just a /data mount for all of my stuff. I also sure as hell don’t want to copy random configs or add other config management systems into the mix. I also don’t want to have to configure cgroups or resource limits per thing I’m running. I also want to be able to version the config and deploy it easily wherever needed, and sure as hell don’t want to set it up manually; Ansible is passable but less convenient than just a Docker Compose or Swarm stack. Generally, I keep the apps separate from the more bare host system. Especially useful when you can easily tell what is transient data vs actual data you need to store longer term per-app, alongside custom port setup across all apps and not needing to care much about individual config formats, in addition to being able to run different versions alongside one another. Nix or other methods would probably also work for folks, but Docker (OCI) containers just get out of my way and do the thing.

nijave 2mo ago

Email hosting isn't too bad. IP reputation management is a pain. Everything works perfectly until one day it doesn't. SMTP relays are cheap--worth a few pennies a month to not deal with IP rep.

jedberg 2mo ago

I ran my own mail server from 1999-2008, starting when I worked at Sendmail. I helped create SPF and DKIM. I would never run my own mail server today. Deliverability is a nightmare, despite what this article says. Gmail/Hotmail (and all the domains they host for people, which is quite a lot) will pretty much block or silently drop any email that isn't from a large, known provider who has actually talked directly to them. If you don't have time to be a full-time mail deliverability engineer/product manager, just pay someone to do it for you.

chappie7 2mo ago
To be clear, you’re talking about an outgoing mail server. An incoming mail server is pretty trivial to self-host and provides most of the benefits of self-hosting mail. The distinction is often lost in these discussions, which scares off a lot of people who in reality would have no trouble running their own MX.

jedberg 2mo ago

If you are self-hosting because you care about privacy, I'm not sure why. Email requires two parties. Unless both parties are self hosting, some company has a copy of that email. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon probably see 99% of all email on the internet (ok maybe not that much but probably pretty close). I'm not sure what privacy you gain by self hosting these days, since no one else is.

chappie7 2mo ago
You’d be surprised how many corporations send their own emails directly or use one of the smaller providers. I’ve checked the headers, and the majority of my utility bills, purchase receipts, itineraries, medical emails, and so on don’t go through Google or Microsoft, and these are the personal profile–building emails I care about keeping private the most.
comrade1234 2mo ago
My wife and I are both in our own self-hosted server. We send sensitive emails back and forth all the time. Well, she does, not me so much. Since we're on the same server it never passes through a third party. Plus there's people in Europe talking to each other that don't want the USA to read their emails. I mean there tons of situations wheee emails don't go through Google or Microsoft.
- jedberg 2mo ago
  From this[0] report from proton mail, 74% of European email is routed through USA servers. So even if you care, the person you are sending to or receiving from probably does not. So the US companies are still seeing it. For the use case of you and your wife, you don't really need to self host a mail server, you just need a file server, unless you're forwarding each other emails you got externally, in which case, someone probably already read it. My overall point is that email requires at least two parties to have access to the content, oftentimes more than two, and chances are one of those parties is not privacy conscious, which breaks any privacy you think you might have. [0] https://proton.me/business/europe-tech-watch https://proton.me/business/europe-tech-watch

_-_-__-_-_- 2mo ago

I've been using Purelymail for a year. It's simple and useful.

drnick1 2mo ago

I also self-host, and it's not nearly as difficult as know-it-all people on the Internet make it out to be. I rolled things out from scratch using Postfix and Dovecot on Debian as I dislike bloated and opaque containers that hide important decisions from the sysadmin. The main requirements are a clean, fixed IPv4 and an aged domain. Absolutely zero maintenance has been required since I set it up (unattended upgrades), until recently when Dovecot updated the configuration syntax. Claude ported the config script to the new syntax in about 2min.

vinay_ys 2mo ago

Long time ago I used to run qmail for my school (about 2000 users). It was a lot of fun to do as a student sysadmin. Today, I'm tempted to build a minimal mail system for 1-10 users using agentic coding and use it for less critical use-cases like email for shopping/restaurants etc account registration. I wonder if I can get a safe and secure minimal build done completely agnatically without having to directly look at a single line of code.

subscribed 2mo ago
If you want to do it as a learning experience, do it, but if you just want a domain with catch-all addresses, don't. You can get a solution like SimpleLogin (don't get actual SimpleLogin, they don't do SRS) in minutes without the headache of having to configure, administer, secure and patch all that.

4fterd4rk 2mo ago

This is years (decades?) old but I self hosted my email until everyone suddenly stopped accepting my mail. Has this phenomenon changed? Everyone on my domain was asking me what the hell happened why is my mail not being delivered and I had to do a panicked midnight migration to Google.

FlyingBobcat 2mo ago
This hasn't changed, it git worse. Incoming spam was never the problem. Getting your mail delivered is. The article is not talking about that. If you only want to self host your mails and use an external smtp gateway for outgoing mail, then everything is fine

ariamailclient 2mo ago

If you are worried about outbound reputation, simply use some outbound relay like MailChannels. Also check out https://jmap.io https://jmap.io - great stuff coming to the world of open source e-mail!

smakt 2mo ago

[dead]

subscribed 2mo ago

Nah, thanks. I've been doing it since late 90s for several domains, servers run in DCs. Deliverablity wasn't a problem once I set everything well (and I forwarded most, including received phishing/spam, to my big provider account), but constant fight with incoming spam and effort to keep the servers safe, secure, updated, monitored and finally paid for, weren't really worth it. For unlimited aliases I bought the service that lets me use my domains, for smtp for servers I was using sendgrid and ses anyway. The effort is not worth that, especially not with the powerful LLMs looking for vulnerabilities. I can spend the time I was sinking into keeping it afloat on something more creative.

preisschild 2mo ago

Are you using telematica/fonira as your ISP too? Have been hosting an email server for years now.