this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Linux email server for a small business (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I have a small business that needed a self hosted mail server.

I've already planned for this server to be hosted on a VPS, and I already have a domain name. Now I just need a mail server that do what I need.

I need it to have:

- A web interface

- Be able to easily create new accounts/users from the web interface

- Be able to create account/user without having to create a user on the server itself (optional)

I've been looking into PostFix, Mailcow and Mail-in-a-box, but I'm not quite sure about them.

Thanks a bunch.

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[–] lemmux 1 points 1 year ago

Mail-in-a-box is pretty good. I deployed it at a previous company and it's working fine.

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

Do you want to spend all your time managing your email server? 'Cause this is how you get to that point.

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

You bought a domain and website? Use the cheapo email service that come with one of those vendors ….

There is pretty much no reason to roll your own these days.

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

Directadmin + crossbox is a nice combo I use neither are free tho

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

Mailcow is pretty good. They install fail2ban to protect all endpoints against attacks. And it’s pretty easy to setup and the documentation is pretty good.

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

Why is gmail not an option?

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

Beyond the shorthand advice of "don't" - here's some reasons (from somene who ran a mail server) why you might not want to:

  • If your server goes down for any reason, you'll probably loose mail - and potential business - with nobody to blame but yourself.
  • You'll probably find that randomly your users can't send email to some domains for no apparent reason - even if your DNS and SPF records are perfectly in line. Fixing this is often non-trivial.
  • Gmail and the like has made people forget how much of an issue Spam (and Phishing) is. Run your own mailserver and you'll find out very quickly it's still a huge issue and mitigating it is non-trivial.
  • A mail server is a tasty target for attackers, with potentially lots of confidential information in it and the ability to impersonate your users or their contacts - and unless you're doing a full time job keeping it secure, and trust that all the software on it is being patched regularly - it is an easy one to breach.
  • At some point your users will complain that it's slow, and you will spend days trying to figure out why.
  • Either you'll enforce strict quotas on your users (which they will complain about), or you don't and need to continually feed it disk at ever increasing costs.
  • Resetting passwords / 2FA will be another workload on top of all of the above.

All of this may be worthwhile if having your own mail server is the only way to achieve your goals. But, 99% of the time, a managed service (any managed service really) is more than adaquite.