this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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All this new excitement with Lemmy and federation has got me thinking that maybe I should learn to run my own instance. What always comes up though is how email is the orginal federated technology.

I am looking at proxmox and see that is has a built in email server, so now I am wondering if it is time to role my own.

I stopped using gmail a long time ago, and right now I use ProtonMail, but I am super frustrated with the dumb limitation of only having a single account for the app. I get why they do it, and I am willing to pay, but it is pricey and I don't know if that is my best option. I guess it is worth it since ProtonVPN is included. It looks like they are expanding their suite.

Is it worth it? Can I make it secure? Is it stupid to run it off a local computer on my home network?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Hah. Not the fun DIY project I hoped it would be. Oh well. Yeah, don't want to get to the point of being responsible for other people's data.

[–] nick_99 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I will add it to the list of solutions.

Hah, I wonder how badly I will dissapoint everyone if I just pay for the basic tier of my email provider.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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.

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

@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.

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

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That sucks. I don't even know what to think anymore. It is crazy that anyone with our email address essentially has access to when they use giant corporate services like google of microsoft, but every independent server is a bad actor until proven reputable.

I can't be asking everyone I want to email to put me on a whitelist. They'll just tell me to lose their address.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Tempiz 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Some dreams are born dead.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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)

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

I just decommissioned the mail server I was running, because I didn't have the capacity with the rest of life to keep on top of it. Mailu was my choice of suite, and it was really great once I figured out how to get it behaving nicely behind my reverse proxy. For the most part it was low maintenance, but I would occasionally have issues with cert renewal and subsequently my email clients would stop connecting. I didn't have issues with non-delivery once I set up the various DNS records and did a lot of test emails that I could mark as not junk to various providers. I ended up switching to using icloud+, which includes email with a custom domain. Would I host my own email again? Possibly if I really need more than 6 addresses. But icloud+ costs less per month than the power consumption of the tiny server I was running mailu on over 3 days. Which is... Not insignificant in the current financial climate.

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

Yeah. I need to stop pretending. I am not that tech savvy, just aware of tech from sites like Lobste.rs and the fediverse of course.

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

I will say that I initially started hosting mine as a learning exercise, so from that point of view I think it's totally worth trying out, even if you don't keep it long term. :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

For sure, there is value in learning how something you use all the time likely take for granted actually works.

A bit of a tangent, but the amount of emails my mother gets because she is always signing up for shit and giving out her address to anyone who asks is mind numbing.

Systemic implementation of security can only go so far, people really need to be more critical of the information they give away.

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

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

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