Homelab

371 readers

9 users here now

Rules

Be Civil.
Post about your homelab, discussion of your homelab, questions you may have, or general discussion about transition your skill from the homelab to the workplace.
No memes or potato images.
We love detailed homelab builds, especially network diagrams!
Report any posts that you feel should be brought to our attention.
Please no shitposting or blogspam.
No Referral Linking.
Keep piracy discussion off of this community

founded 11 months ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Is it recommended to set up an own mail server? (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

98 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Is it useful to have your own mail server as a non-business? Just a private person. Configure SMTP and IMAP for it, sync with outlook I think.

Yay or nay, waste of time? What are your thoughts?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I have been an email administrator and I run my own, personal email server for about the last 4 years. I've administrated Microsoft Exchange, on-premise and online and GNU/Linux Postfix/Dovecot/SoGo. I prefer the open source email offerings to the M$ stuff.

As others have mentioned, email is something that you would probably want hosted in a cloud somewhere and definitely NOT running locally at home (most ISPs block port 25 anyways so, running a email server at home is a crazy challenge). A free-tier cloud somewhere should be enough to get you started with an open source email server. The two cloud services that I use block port 25. I had to open a ticket with their support to open port 25. But, once that port is open, you can have a full fledged email server.

Check out https://www.iredmail.org/. It's open source, easy to get started, rock-solid, secure, and they have tech support via their web forum. ( I say 'they', but it's literally like one dude). This is what I use for my personal email server. I have custom IPS and Geo-IP filters for security. It's been running issue free for the past 3 1/2 years. I've never missed an email lol.

Use https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx for troubleshooting delivery issues. And, to learn all about the different DNS records a healthy email server needs.

Running an email server is challenging, but it's not something to be afraid of. It is labor intensive, requires active administration and not something that you would want to simply "set and forget". But, with the right administration, running your own email server can be very rewarding.