Privacy

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Isn't it better* to host a mail server at home than to use Proton or Tuta? (lemmy.cat)

submitted 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

*With ‘better’ I mean that an encrypted solution is adequate in these cases because the mails are on other servers, and the companies/servers depend on the jurisdiction where they are located. But by hosting a mail server at home, even unencrypted, we are 100% in control of our data.

PS: is there a self-hosting mail server solution that stores everything encrypted? I already self-host almost everything I use, but not email.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 20 hours ago (4 children)

Hosting email is hard. Getting your reputation up to a point where emails will even be delivered is challenging, and then you have to worry about the absolute non-stop attacks on your server. Patch, patch, patch...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

https://poolp.org/posts/2019-08-30/you-should-not-run-your-mail-server-because-mail-is-hard/

It's not super easy, but it isn't impossible either, especially nowadays with email deployment suites

mailu.io
iredmail.org
mailcow.email

(I'm talking about the email part, hosting at home would also bring other issues e.g. availability, you would need a VPN to route it from a non-residential IP, etc)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

What if is like to receive emails? I don't really send emails at all lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I mean... your email client can already do that, so I'm not sure what the point would be.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

Cause then you could self host email without worrying about the complicated side of it. Since you have no need to send emails.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

The fact you are asking scares me a little. If you are seriously thinking about this, please don't - you will very likely become an open relay, which is bad for everyone. It won't even help with your privacy concerns. Seriously. Running a mail server is a full time job.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

Yeah running your own email server is basically just broadcasting who you are to everyone you give it to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Is it really THAT difficult? Hillary Clinton did it...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

Honestly? No. It takes a bit of reading into SPF, DMARC, DKIM etc., and you will need to set up an authentication method (using PAM means you need to cache your unix users credentials in mail clients), which is easy via the dovecot passwd driver. The problem is that some blocklists will block any residential connection per default, but mxtoolbox will search through those, and I basically only needed to fill out spamhouses unblock form, which is easy. Even my employer (major bank) seamlessly accepts any emails from my domain.
Bruteforce attacks can be caught with fail2ban and reported to abuseIPDB

[–] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

It takes a bit of reading into SPF, DMARC, DKIM etc.,

That alone is often (usually?) not enough. Since many IP addresses are already blackholed before you even set up a mail server on one, there is also the slow and sometimes painful process of:

Figuring out by trial-and-error which recipients are not receiving mail from you (or are receiving it directly into their spam folders).
Figuring out which email filtering services are used by those recipients' mail providers.
Figuring out how to contact those filtering services.
Figuring out what process each filtering service uses for requesting removal from their blacklists (or adding to their whitelists).
Navigating each of those processes.
Submitting documentation of having done so.
Waiting and hoping for the filtering services accept your request and start allowing mail from you.

...and then starting all over again every so often, whenever a filtering service changes their configs or a new one appears.

It can be done, and you might get lucky, but it often requires tenacity and a lot of patience.