7 ms·
What do you estimate has been your total investment of time in running your own mail server?
by brandon272 9y ago
What do you estimate has been your total investment of time in running your own mail server?
- pwg 9y agoNot the OP, but I've been running my own email server since about the same time-frame (and it started life on a dual CPU Pentium 100Mhz box). Total time investment since circa 1998: estimated maybe 100-200 hours total (note, over an approximately 20 year span), and most of that was spent during the inevitable of reinstall new OS on current or newer box, then move config over portions of the process. I've also always been on Postfix, which has always been way more secure than sendmail ever was at the time. And Postfix is also much easier to configure for the basic case of "send/receive email for a personal domain".
- Yetanfou 9y agoInitial setup took a few days of experimenting, that was back in the days of Sendmail. After that is ran fine for a while until spam starting becoming a problem. I eventually implemented a spam filter with Spamassasim with a nightly cron job to train it with spam which made it past the filter. After a few years I added greylisting to the mix which ended up complicating matters a bit due to some common mail hosts (Google and Microsoft being the biggest culprits) breaking the concept of greylisting by using different mail hosts for resend attempts. I made a script to add all SPF-allowed IP ranges for a domain to the whitelist which solved that problem. Total time spent on the mail infrastructure over these 22 years is negligible, probably ~8 hours per year.