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Ask HN: Why is it still so hard to host your own email/calendar that just works?
It seems to me that email and calendar data are so personal that you shouldn't have to trust someone else to store and handle it for you. Yet when I try to find a way to host it for myself I get scared of the trickiness of the setup or the amount of maintenance required. Am I just looking for all the wrong things or is it in this day and age not possible, even for a reasonably tech savvy person, to host your own email and calendar securely? With securely I mean secure from all adversaries except for maybe nation-state adversaries.
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Like many people have pointed out in the comments an even bigger problem is being blacklisted by other ISPs. Any ideas how to deal with this while still maintaining control of where your emails are stored?
- anewhnaccount 10y agoSandstorm is quite a simple (at least relatively) and secure way to get set up with this.
- educar 10y agoafaict, there is no mail server in sandstorm. Where did you read this information?
- explorigin 10y agoGo download Zimbra (I'm not affliated with Zimbra, just have used it in the past), it's easy to setup and full featured. The real trouble is keeping your domain off blacklists and managing security updates.
- danieltillett 10y agoThe real trouble is getting your emails delivered. The big companies have basically outsourced the spam filtering problem to the email service companies - an email from outside the club has a x% chance of being randomly marked as spam (x is some number between 1 and 5%). After 15 years of hosting my own email server without issue I had to make the business decision a bit over a year ago that I can't afford to have 5% of my emails go missing and so now use an external service.
- girishso 10y agoAny one using Mail-in-a-Box (https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/)? Seems good to me.
- mrmondo 10y agoI would support this if it wasn't based on Ubuntu, especially 14.04. That is the last disto I'd trust as a secure mail server.
- blfr 10y agoWhy do you think Ubuntu is dead last among Linux distros in security? From my experience, they patch things quickly and inform about security issues promptly. http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/ http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/
- fridsun 10y agoSecurity is not only dealing with aftermath, although that is an important part of it. A security-first distro such as http://www.alpinelinux.org/ http://www.alpinelinux.org/ or OpenBSD, although harder to setup, would serve better long term.
- mrmondo 10y ago1. They often run out of date package versions. 2. Their packaging team screws up packages regularly. 3. They have insane defaults of many package configurations. 4. They tend to do things their way rather than the standard way and come up with their own tools rather than using standard, well tested tooling / packages. I could go on and on, but it's not a distro I'd ever let run on one of our servers, we used to run 100% Debian until CentOS 7 came out and in our eyes left it for dead when paired with the correct yum repos.
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoIt is especially difficult to stop others from just blackholing your email. This serverfault question helps to illustrate the problem http://serverfault.com/questions/434703/why-does-hotmail-still-reject-my-emails http://serverfault.com/questions/434703/why-does-hotmail-sti... The problem? Not enough traffic causing a low sender score. Hotmail isn't the only one; large and small ISPs across the world do it.
- danieltillett 10y agoHotmail is the worst though. I hate the engineers at Microsoft who designed their email filter.
- kardos 10y agoThis post [1,2] from last October discusses a major problem with hosting your own email, which is that the big email providers pretty much reject your messages until your "reputation" is good. The reputation concept is purportedly a spam fighting effort, but a more cynical view is to see it as an effort by the big providers to sabotage self-hosted email. More discussion here [3] and here [4]. [1] Original post, now defunct: http://liminality.xyz/the-hostile-email-landscape/ http://liminality.xyz/the-hostile-email-landscape/ [2] Thank you archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20151121132739/http://liminality.xyz/the-hostile-email-landscape/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151121132739/http://liminality...? [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10405681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10405681 [4] https://lobste.rs/s/ckfyqd/the_hostile_email_landscape https://lobste.rs/s/ckfyqd/the_hostile_email_landscape
- danieltillett 10y agoSelf-hosting is dead unless you are massive business.
- moray 10y agoI have a very small (on the side) hosting business that has been running for almost 6 years now and growing little by little. I have direct contact with my clients and they have it with me in case of need (if they need technical advice or support not necessarily directly related to the services). And this is exactly the kind of service they were looking for, very difficult to have with a massive business company (have you ever opened a ticket with OVH?) Then of course, the technical challenges to setup and maintain such services are high and a control-panel all-included package or a docker with everything in it is just a very small part of the work required.
- pestaa 10y agoSelf-hosting email or self-hosting in general?
- danieltillett 10y agoEmail, but I would not be surprised if self-hosting in general become in practice impossible - self-host and your site only shows up on page 100 in Google.
- askee 10y agoSelf-hosted owncloud works for me except for the gruesome woes every single time I try to update it.
- giancarlostoro 10y agoDoes OwnCloud support email too? I wasn't aware of this.
- askee 10y agoNo it doesn't, unfortunately. I misunderstood OP's questions at first. You can connect owncloud to a mail server (a la Roundcube) but nothing more.
- giancarlostoro 10y agoMaybe one day they'll make a plugin that does the same that Roundcube and other PHP email clients are capable of doing, that would at least make it a little smoother to have as an all in one email client.
- NKCSS 10y agoI'm sure it's not a popular view here, but why would you want to? I moved mail, etc. to Google; gmail is by far the nicest mail client I've ever used. I use it for my business and private e-mails, I move other businesses to Google because it's just so convenient. Why would you want to do all that yourself for €4 a month? I really don't think anyone at Google would want to read my e-mails but even if someone would, do I really care? I'm all for a bit of privacy, but I've seen no evidence of data abuse at these large mail providers.
- thalev 10y agoIt's not for the money, I can think of more effective ways I can spend my time to save money. My reason is that I don't like the feeling of having these very personal conversations being stored on the harddisks of google. I might trust google right now with my email but when I no longer do they will still have those files and there will be nothing I can do to completely make sure they delete them.
- yrro 10y agoThe odds are that the other correspondent in your personal conversations is storing all their messages on Google's hard disks.
- thalev 10y agofair enough, but I'd rather not be one that is responsible for that
- nathanb 10y agoThis is an excellent point. Your communication is only as secure as the weakest endpoint (in the same vein, perhaps your correspondents might be of the opposing viewpoint and might feel weird about their personal mails being stored by someone who's rolling his own IT and security).
- Ao7bei3s 10y agoAlso, I don't want to store personal data on servers of a US company.
- corv 10y agoI can recommend iredmail. It's been around for a long time and supports several major OS. There is also paid support should you need it. http://iredmail.com/ http://iredmail.com/
- glasz 10y agothank you so much for mentioning. didn't know this. anybody has xp with one of these? http://mailinabox.email http://mailinabox.email https://poste.io https://poste.io edit: "awesome list" of things: https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#complete-solutions https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#complete-solu...
- fridsun 10y agoWow qmail! Instant confidence.
- charlieegan3 10y agoWould it be possible to set something of a webmail client up with Mailchimp/sendgrid APIs? Get the flexibility and control of how your email works without the flagged as spam issue?
- simon_acca 10y agoI run my mail server using docker, specifically the following images: * mailserver: https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver * webmail: https://github.com/jprjr/docker-rainloop Combined in docker-compose: version: '2' services: mail: image: tvial/docker-mailserver:latest hostname: your_hostname domainname: your_domain environment: SSL_TYPE: letsencrypt ports: - "25:25" - "587:587" - "993:993" volumes: - ./data/mail:/var/mail - ./data/config/:/tmp/docker-mailserver/ - /etc/letsencrypt/:/etc/letsencrypt rainloop: image: jprjr/rainloop environment: NGINX: 1 ports: - 80:80 volumes: - "./data/rainloop:/var/lib/rainloop/data" The docker-compose.yml and postfix-accounts.cf files are the only configs you need for a basic setup. See the projects on github, especially docker-mailserver for further info on complete features of this setup.
- nathanb 10y agoThat seems pretty cool. How long have you been doing this? For your primary email? How has it been working for you?
- simon_acca 10y agoI've had this setup for about a month on my primary email, and it is working flawlessly. Even when I had to reboot the server, I was able to bring everything back online quickly. I am keeping a lower priority MX dns entry pointed to an independent provider as a failover, but this is standard practice, I believe. What I really like about the docker-mailserver image is that it has no database and that it is designed for simple updates (that is, docker pull && docker-compose restart). Rainloop is also new to me (I previously used roundcube) and again I am very positively surprised: it works over imaps, so multiple accounts can be combined under a single login, it supports 2FA, manages both plaintext and html, manages your contacts, it supports openPGP (still in beta, I've not tried it yet).
- MrDresden 10y agoJust since no one has pointed it out, have you considered ProtonMail? Swiss based, fully encrypted, hosted email service. Should give it a look.
- darkhorn 10y agoIf you store your emails in a hosting provider then the hosting provider can read your emails. If you store your emails at your server at home then police can break your door plug in to your server and read your emails. Even if the disk is encripted they can read the encription key from the memory. Now I trust more Google than Microsoft, if you are non USA citizen of course. And I trust a foregn authority more than a local. This can change in for your case.
- thalev 10y agoWell I live in The Netherlands and somehow I trust the Dutch police to only enter my house for a valid reason, unfortunately I can't say the same for Google/NSA reading my emails.
- Canada 10y agoAt least you know if the police have come for your mail. In practice hosting your own mail provides some control over how to respond to a subpoena. If someone sues you the bar for getting the data by physical force is much higher than it is for having a third party turn it over. On the other hand the bar for compromising your server is usually much lower than it is for gmail.
- gtlondon 10y agoI've run my own email for about 4 years now -- I'm fairly tech savvy, but don't know much about email -- so was pleased that my "quick" solution has worked well. I use Apple Server to host the email via SSL on a dedicated server, really easy to configure. The key thing is deliverability - initially I had some problems with my email going into junk folders. To get around this I send all email via a service called PostMarkApp (http://www.postmarkapp.com http://www.postmarkapp.com) which allows you to setup SPF and DKIM records on your domain and therefore ensure emails are authenticated. I get pretty close to 100% deliverability. PostMarkApp also shows you open / browser stats, so it's quite useful when I wonder if someone has read a particular email. Not sure if this would be secure enough, but has worked well for me with almost zero maintenance after setup.
- gtlondon 10y agoI've run my own email for about 4 years now -- I'm fairly tech savvy, but don't know much about email -- so was pleased that my "quick" solution has worked well. I use Apple Server to host the email via SSL on a dedicated server, really easy to configure. The key thing is deliverability - initially I had some problems with my email going into junk folders. To get around this I send all email via a service called PostMarkApp (http://www.postmarkapp.com http://www.postmarkapp.com) which allows you to setup SPF and DKIM records on your domain and therefore ensure emails are authenticated. I get pretty close to 100% deliverability. PostMarkApp also shows you open / browser stats, so it's quite useful when I wonder if someone has read a particular email. Not sure if this would be secure enough, but has worked well for me with almost zero maintenance after setup.
- bartbes 10y agoI see a lot of replies on the mail side of things, but I don't really see anything detailing solutions for calendars. Any recommendations on "the rest": calendar, notes, contacts? I've looked at owncloud before, but that's a fairly large-footprint php project, are there any decent self-hosted alternatives, either as a suite or as separate programs?
- Muges 10y agoAs far as self hosting calendars and contacts are concerned, I'd recommend using a caldav/carddav server, I personally like Baikal [1], and Radicale [2] seems to be another good lightweight option. Contrary to Owncloud these two servers do not provide a web interface to check your calendar/contacts, but there are clients available for most platforms, including web clients if you need one. [1] http://sabre.io/baikal/ http://sabre.io/baikal/ [2] http://radicale.org/ http://radicale.org/
- girzel 10y agoI've been using radicale, and it's been a huge pain in the ass. It took me days just to get the permissions right (behind Apache), and its interaction with DavDroid and the iOS calendars/addressbooks has been totally baffling. It doesn't help that the radicale mailing list seems to be no more. Probably I'm blaming radicale for some of webdav's weirdness, but the whole process has been one of the most frustrating computing things I've done in years.
- bartbes 10y agoThanks, I'll give those a go!
- toomanythings2 10y agoThe first time I hosted my own email, on sendmail, it just worked. So I don't understand the question about setting it up. Configuring it for security took some study but it wasn't difficult. No more difficult than any other serious program I use. Calendars are similar to forms on the web. Again, no more issues than normal so I don't get it.
- ajoy39 10y agoSetting up an email server isn't hard. Setting up an email server that won't get blacklisted by the major providers within a week of you setting up is difficult, time consuming, and often expensive.
- toomanythings2 10y agoYou are saying that what I am doing will get me blacklisted, etc., but I am here to tell you it is not any of the things you say.
- padde 10y agopostfix (SMTP), dovecot (IMAP), davical (CardDAV for addresses, CalDAV for calendars) have been working well for me for more than five years. I experienced blacklisting when I switched to a newer dedicated server hardware recently, which meant new IP addresses. The only mail server that didn't accept mails from my new addresses was Hotmail / Outlook.com though. It was fixed after filling in their form and waiting a day. Never had trouble with Gmail.
- fridsun 10y agoEven if you host your own email server, your emails are still handled by routers and the destination server unencrypted. You are not trusting others much less than not hosting your own email. If you have your own domain and you don't trust others with your conversations with others, I think you are better off hosting a chat server over an encrypted protocol, such as XMPP or IRC or https://blog.okturtles.com/2015/11/five-open-source-slack-alternatives/ https://blog.okturtles.com/2015/11/five-open-source-slack-al... . Persuading your contacts to use it is a problem though. Calendar is a different thing though. As long as you have a CalDAV server and a CalDAV client you should be good to go. Also related to selfhosting stuff: https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ is a project I've discovered some time ago and haven't been paying attention to, but it seems to have thrived pretty well.
- brabram 10y agoIt's not perfect, but YunoHost is a very big step forward in that direction and it's making progress https://yunohost.org https://yunohost.org And to fix the "ISP sucks" we have started to package an "just work out of the box" solution in the FFDN, a federation of local associative ISPs https://internetcu.be/ https://internetcu.be/ The trick is to use a "internet cleaning" VPN that gave you a static ip address and that this VPN is handled by an association in which you are a member and that you can trust.
- girzel 10y agoSix months ago I followed the Arstechnica guide[1] to setting up your own email server. The guide is old, and some adjustments were needed, but the essential advice was good. I did SPF, DKIM, TLS certificates, basically everything I could possibly do to keep on everyone's good side. In the first month or so, I only opened up to a few users, and told them to be careful about how they used the service right in the beginning. Never had a single issue with blacklisting or non-delivery. [1]: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-to-run-your-own-e-mail-server-with-your-own-domain-part-1/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-to...
- avmich 10y agoA problem seems to be losing common media for message exchange. After experience with a bunch of instant messaging tools, invariably having to abandon them after focus shifts elsewhere, it's tempting to rely on something more of "common denominator". Email was that... and if it stops, then - what? phone? This is an interesting problem of lack of standard. Hope http://seif.place http://seif.place will help with that :) .
- VOYD 10y agoBecause there is no money in that model.