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I've been hosting my personal email on a $5/month DigitalOcean server, running Postfix + Dovecot, for almost two years. I think it's reasonably secure. I run up
by chrismartin 10y ago
I've been hosting my personal email on a $5/month DigitalOcean server, running Postfix + Dovecot, for almost two years. I think it's reasonably secure. I run updates regularly and trust the distro maintainers to release timely fixes for new vulns. Aside from that, I mostly ignore it because it works. I should probably look at the logs, but eh.
After the typical host hardening stuff (which isn't much work with modern OS defaults), I have configured SPF, DKIM, DMARC policy, opportunistic TLS for server-to-server, and mandatory TLS for IMAP client connections.
From a data privacy perspective, I know that nobody is mining the contents of my mailbox (except the messages I send to Gmail, etc. users!), and my server is not a high-value target for compromise. (Yes, DigitalOcean could snoop on my non-GPG-encrypted messages if they wanted. I guess I could migrate the server back to my own hardware.) I also encourage friends to use GPG, though this is orthogonal to one's choice of email host.
For clients I use Thunderbird on desktop and K-9 Mail on Android. Mobile push via IMAP IDLE works out of the box. (I also run a CalDAV/CardDAV server to sync contacts/calendar/todo across devices, but that is technically separate.)
Overall I'm really happy with the arrangement. The only annoyance was having my messages to Gmail users consistently marked as spam, but after doing everything suggested by mail-tester.com, I think I'm making it through most of the time.
- Karlozkiller 10y agoThank you for that post. I've been trying some time ago, mostly for fun, to set up an email server. I did get one up and running with a setup similar to what you describe but was spam-filtered by Gmail as you describe. And because of this I kind of gave up. But now I might try it again some time.
- pja 10y agoYou can expect a fresh IP from one of the cloud hosting services to be spam filtered out of the box by Google et al these days. If you’re lucky, the IP in question hasn’t previously been used to spam & by very slowly ramping up your email rate Google will eventually decide that you’re probably OK. Getting this right appears to be something of a black art however :(
- j_s 10y agoA discussion from long ago about Gmail deliverability: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855030
- JupiterMoon 10y agoWhat CalDAV/CardDAV server do you run?
- mike-cardwell 10y agoNot the parent, but I use Nextcloud for this (previously ownCloud). There are carddav and caldav sync applications for Android. I assume other operating systems have them too. https://nextcloud.com https://nextcloud.com
- foepys 10y agoI can recommend radicale [1]. It's very simple and doesn't need a lot of resources. It also supports authentication via an IMAP server so you don't have to keep a separate user database. 1: http://radicale.org/ http://radicale.org/
- thallian 10y agoI have the same experience. It works perfectly for me with ldap authentication (which I also use for my mailserver) over multiple devices (macOS, Windows, Android, Linux). Started using it after Owncloud/Nextcloud broke their ldap auth.
- chrismartin 10y agoI also use Radicale. My only annoyance is that when you use its built-in HTTP server, the process eventually stops working if one of your clients has an intermittent connection (e.g. phone with a poor signal). https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/issues/266 https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/issues/266 https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/issues/388 https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/issues/388 I'm told that using a dedicated HTTP + WSGI server solves this, just haven't done the work yet.
- JupiterMoon 10y agoWould it be easier to just have a cron job that checks every five minutes if Radicale is running and if it has fallen over restart it?
- vbezhenar 10y agoInability to reliably send messages to gmail is huge. I'm using my own server, I own my domain for years, I asked a lot of people to remove "Spam" label from my messages, I did everything (reverse DNS, DKIM, SPF, checked that Gmail likes it all) I could, yet for new recipients gmail might mark my e-mail as spam. Gmail is worse e-mail provider, I liked it before, but I really don't like it, because it seems to punish people for decentralization. And I don't have this problem with other e-mail providers that I checked, they are happy to receive my e-mails.
- Santosh83 10y ago> it (GMail) seems to punish people for decentralization. I wonder why.
- fauigerzigerk 10y agoMy guess is that the ratio of false positives is extremely small and hence this may be a very low hanging fruit when it comes to spam filtering. Having an honest reason to belong to a minority that is on average very dishonest is one of the worst things that can happen to you. This is a real dilemma, not just with spam filtering.
- loup-vaillant 10y agoShame on the big providers to force this dilemma on us. I bet that's not the whole story. There was a reason they were lazy in the first place, but I bet there's another reason why they stay lazy. Punishing decentralization is a great way to get more users, after all: sent from gmail? works. Sent from little provider? Doesn't work. The only way out of this I see right now is the generalization of the Freedom Box. Though even then, one would need to run protests to be able to send email from home. Between ISP wide firewalls, interdictions on home servers (by contract with some ISP), or the blacklisting of all residential IPs (Hotmail), it will take a lot of collective action before we can send mail from home again.
- 10y ago
- insertnickname 10y agoDid you register with https://www.dnswl.org/ https://www.dnswl.org/? That should help with deliverability (in general, don't know about Gmail).