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It's stories like these that reinforce my own justification for running my own email server. I would recommend you run your own email server - it's both fun (y
by zatkin 8y ago
It's stories like these that reinforce my own justification for running my own email server.
I would recommend you run your own email server - it's both fun (you get to set it up yourself, add any features you want), and rewarding (you don't have to worry about the "rug being swept from under your feet"). The only caveat is time - time for SMTP servers around the world to know that your mail server's IP is not sending spam - and filling out some forms to unblock the server's IP address.
Since moving in 2014, I have had no hassles at all, and I continue to tweak things to my liking.
- memset 8y agoGenuine question: one reason everyone moved to Gmail is because it was so damn good at spam filtering. What do you use today? Spamassasin out of the box? Or plugins or modifications? Or something else entirely?
- dpedu 8y agoNot OP, but I use both Spamassassin and DSPAM. It catches most spam but I do see a couple every week.
- biktor_gj 8y agoAt work we used Ironports for years until Cisco, as usual,started making a mess. Nowadays we use Mailcleaner with a little bit of tweaking in a VM. It's a little worse than IronPort when Ironport was good, but so much better than what Cisco's systems were doing for us when we shut the old system down. On a side note, I really don't understand why people say it's hard to run a mail server, it really isn't. It can be hard if you go full postfix+spamassasin on plain config files and configure everything without any help. Since 2005, we've been running: Exchange 2003 Exchange 2010 Exchange 2016 Watchguard smtp Proxies and antispam External provider's antispam services Cisco Ironports (first a dual node cluster with some older machines, then Cisco came and forced us to upgrade to some C170 which were slow as hell) We've run through countless updates on the exchange servers, we have mailboxes with more than 50Gb of content, about 1Tb of database sizes, the biggest problem we had, came when we had a two node DAG in Exchange 2010 and the RPC Client Access Server didn't correctly change when Outlook 2007 was open leaving some clients trying to connect to the server that was rebooting. We've also changed IP addresses a few times, but if you change your SPF records correctly, and pay for a good IP range you won't have any problems. Sure, you can't have your mail server on an IP range flagged as spam, but you also wouldn't buy a 100.000 dollar car and put 50 dollar wheels on it!
- azinman2 8y agoHow do you get a “good IP range?”
- biktor_gj 8y agoIn Spain at least, from a good ISP, and buying as a Business. Here you get two segments, mostly. Residential, which will leave you with banned SMTP and public IPs marked as spam everywhere. If you buy as a business, and from a trusted ISP, and tell them your use case, they will give you clean IPs. In our case, we're paying about a thousand euros a month for two optic fiber links with 100mbps up/download and two blocks of 8 public IPs, all of them completely clean.
- catdog 8y agoMostly spamassasin, more or less out of the box. Also postscreen (only the pregreet test) [1] to keep out the dumbest kind of spambots. Works really great and not worse than my gmail account. I don't agree that gmail is damn good at spam filtering, it's quite average. [1] http://www.postfix.org/POSTSCREEN_README.html http://www.postfix.org/POSTSCREEN_README.html
- steelframe 8y agoSpamassassin almost cost me my career. A manager at a big company over a team doing my "dream job" emailed me, and Spamassassin threw it straight in to the bit bucket for whatever arbitrary reason it did. Fortunately a recruiter at said company was more persistent and managed to get through to me by phone. That job ended up catapulting me onto a career "hockey stick," and if it weren't for that, I'd likely still be languishing in some sad corner of IBM.
- mjw1007 8y agoclamav with Google's safebrowsing filter enabled blocks a great deal of junk. It eats RAM, though. Looking in my logs, it looks like that plus a hard block on zen.spamhaus.org would be enough to remove almost all spam, though I'm not sure what the false positive rate would be like on the latter.
- GnarfGnarf 8y agoI've been using SpamArrest for 15+ years. SpamArrest filters out 99% of spam. I have to whitelist all domains or email addresses the first time I correspond. It gives legitimate users an opportunity to get through. Worth every penny.
- teddyh 8y agoThe best nowadays seems to be rspamd (https://rspamd.com/ https://rspamd.com/).
- binomialxenon 8y agoFilling out some forms with whom?
- tempestn 8y agoThere are various groups that run blacklists, which are checked by various spam filters and email providers. If you went up on one of their blacklists, in theory you can fill out a form with them to be taken off. (This has happened to me in the past I think due to being assigned an IP address that was previously used for spam, and I wasn't able to get off the list; I eventually had to get a new IP instead.)
- atmosx 8y agoOr pay for a service that shouldn’t be free, as in free beer, because running a server costs money and companies have to keep the lights on.
- bamboozled 8y agoSpot on ! Running a mail server, correctly, isn’t “easy” either.
- balladeer 8y agoFor many people, including me, it indeed isn't. That is the reason, after trying for months to run my own mail server, I gave up and settled on mailbox.org and slowly will move all my email to my email-id@my-own-domain including bank mails which is hosted by mailbox. To be honest my biggest hesitation has been settling on a domain name :) I have ".in" (my country) and ".net" of my first name (9 chars) and and ".im" of my nick name (first 4 chars of my first name) I have not been able to decide on which one to move to. May sound silly but I would like to know if there are studies on email address length and TLD choices.
- Whitestrake 8y agoDo you have to settle for just one? I have catch-alls set up across several domains I own, they all go into one inbox and replies etc. are sent from the same email the original was addressed to, automatically. I usually use one domain for casual use (like games, Twitch, anonymous services), one for semi-professional stuff (with my real name), and one for actual business.
- balladeer 8y agoNot really but if I can avoid it I would like to settle for just one primary domain that I would share everyone and ask them that my gmail addresses should be removed from their contacts for good. I would like to use it everywhere and get done with it for once and all. Otherwise I'll just keep waiting for that perfect domain (or first-name.com that a lawyer is squatting on since last 7-8 years). One problem I see with .im is it's from a different country than mine and they can change the rules to allow only residents or so, or they can hike the renewal cost to something really high. Also, I am from India where .in is common so some people might confuse .im for .in. I am inching towards <9 char>.in or <9 char>.net (my first name), but then I am not sure whether I should give up my <4 char>.im (my nick name). Also, mailbox.org supports up to just two domains in the plan I am paying for.
- john_moscow 8y agoThe downside is that you need to regularly update your server software and OS. Otherwise you will eventually get hacked via an old vulnerability.
- tres 8y agoqmail: Latest Stable release: 1.03 / June 15, 1998
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoSo, the downside is that you need to install Debian's unattended-upgrades?! Yeah, you better do release upgrades manually--but that is once every few years.
- Avamander 8y agoIn addition to debian's unattended upgrades there's Ubuntu's live kernel update mechanism that adds kernel to the list of things that are up-to-date.
- jocoda 8y agoIf you're interested in running a linux VPS for mail/web/anything use webmin for general linux admin. There is a learning curve involved in running linux, you can't get away from that, but that curve would have been substantially steeper without it. To keep your system up to date with it is trivial.. (not connected, just a fanboy)
- 8y ago
- Someone1234 8y agoI'd strongly recommend against it. In a past life I ran email services for a small business, and then a medium business, it was a full time job, just keeping us out of the spam blacklists, keeping things patched up, ecosystem changes (e.g. new DNS records every few years, new security requirements, etc) and filtering incoming spam/malware/philishing attempts. If people want to setup email for educational reasons, go ahead, but running one over a longer period isn't wise and frankly many wouldn't put enough time and effort into it to do it well. It is absolutely not set and forget, you'll need to baby it daily indefinitely. When people ask me what I recommend? I tell them outsource email to a major provider and use your limited time/effort elsewhere. Better rate of return by far.
- yani 8y agoI keep hearing the same over and over from sysadmins. Is this too difficult to automate?
- jwr 8y agoAsk an architect if it's difficult to build a house, and he'll scare you with tales of complexity. But that doesn't mean you can't build a shed yourself. It can't be completely automated, but it isn't as difficult or time-consuming as people paint it to be (especially sysadmins!). I've been doing it for nearly 18 years now, maintenance takes perhaps 30 minutes every 2 months or so. There is more to do every 8 years or so, as Linux distributions go out of date, and your providers sometimes go out of business. I have my suspicions as to all the FUD regarding running your own E-mail server. Secure personal E-mail distributed on many independent servers with automatic in-transit encryption is not in everyone's interest.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago> It is absolutely not set and forget, you'll need to baby it daily indefinitely. That sounds like you were doing something very fundamentally very wrong. I definitely don't need to touch my mail server daily, nor any of the mail servers I manage for others. It's just doing its job, security updates get installed automatically, and every few years I need to do a debian upgrade, and possibly deploy some new security/anti-spam features. In between those upgrades, it's running unattended for many months with absolutely no problems. On average, I touch my mail server maybe once a year.
- u801e 8y agoI believe most residential internet services block outgoing connections on port 25, so you would either need to upgrade to a business plan or pay for a cloud server to run your own email server.
- shirro 8y agoSome vps services block 25 as well but it is usually configurable. The monthly cost of a vps is a few coffees and you get much more robust hardware and environmental conditions for your server and much better management tools. I did the home server thing well over a decade ago with a commodity pc sitting on a small ups. The main concern was leaving it running unattended when away from the house for any time. Especially during summer heatwaves. I found it wasn't a sustainable solution if you do any amount of travelling away from home.
- cm2187 8y agoEven if they don't block 25, most smtp server will increase the spam level if they receive an email from a dynamic Ip or and Ip which reverse DNS doesn't match the server name. If you just want to receive emails then it's probably fine.
- z3t4 8y agoYou can run the Mail Transport Agent (MTA) SMTP server on a VPS, then run the Mail Delivery Agent (MDA) POP3/IMAP server at the home server.
- Qwertie 8y agoI run mine on a $2.5/month VPS with vultr. The price is so low its just not worth running at home.
- imron 8y agoBy that same logic, you might as well just use Fastmail and save yourself the hassle of running your own mailserver altogether - their cheapest plan is $3 a month (or $2.5 a month if you pay for a year at a time).
- mkirschner 8y agoMind if I ask what software you're using? I'm planning to do this soon, using qmail, just for the ability to have email integration with some personal project sites, and for the learning. I don't foresee discontinuing use of Fastmail for my personal email, but who knows.
- cm2187 8y agoIf you don't mind windows, I can recommend smatermail. It does everything in a single package (smtp, imap, webmail). There is a free tier. There are also additional paid features, I pay for ActiveSync, mostly for the ease to configure a client to set up everything (contacts, calendar, emails). Plus they have a rest api so you can automate certain things.
- mkirschner 8y agoThanks. I assume you mean this? https://www.smartertools.com/smartermail/business-email-server https://www.smartertools.com/smartermail/business-email-serv... That's way more than I need, and if I can avoid Windows I will, but...it is cool to see a competitor to Exchange.
- cm2187 8y agoYeah but you don’t need to use all the features (I only use emails, contacts and calendar). Most of the defaults are reasonbable, you just need to harden the security a little bit.
- syshum 8y ago>>It's stories like these that reinforce my own justification for running my own email server. Stories like these that reinforce my continual recommendation to client to maintain their own backups of all data on "cloud services" I see a trend of people believing that once "its in the cloud" they do not have to worry about backups anymore... This will burn alot of people and companies
- Qwertie 8y agoBacking up email isn't even hard. Just use a desktop client and you have a local copy now.
- mehrdadn 8y agoIt's hard to keep it updated when you don't regularly use a desktop client and also don't want someone stealing your laptop to get a copy of all your emails.
- reilly3000 8y agoMy ISP (Comcast) won't allow it.
- lvillani 8y agoIt depends. I used to have my own email server. Having to manage yet another public server is a stress on its own. Having to worry about server backups, security, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, avoid being blacklisted, etc made it even worse. Despite all of this I couldn't shake off the feeling that my mails went directly to the recipient's spam folder. I'm not interested in maintaining mail servers. I can certainly do it, but my spare time is scarce. Nowadays, I periodically sync all mailboxes to my laptop, so that they enter the backup chain I already have. If GSuite goes down or Google disables my account, I'll upload my backups to Fastmail, point the MX records there and go on with my life. I find this setup way easier to understand and maintain than a mail server.
- skrause 8y ago> The only caveat is time - time for SMTP servers around the world to know that your mail server's IP is not sending spam - and filling out some forms to unblock the server's IP address. You can save yourself a lot of hassle by using a mail relay with a good reputation for all outgoing mail. That's what I do: I run my own mail server so I have full control about spam filtering etc, all incoming mail goes directly to my server. When I send an email my server does the DKIM signing itself and then forwards the message to an external realy (with SMTP Auth). I use https://posteo.de/en https://posteo.de/en for that because it only costs 1 € per month, doesn't require any personal data to create an account and it lets you send emails with any from address (not having from address filtering is important here). Their servers have a good reputation so I have no problems having my mail delivered.
- nothrabannosir 8y agoI would suggest a hybrid: run your own incoming mail server, but use a trusted sender for outgoing mail. Fastmail is pretty good, but there are hundreds. This doesn't solve any prying eyes business, but it does give you some agency over your e-mail. Meanwhile, your never have to worry about mail being marked spam. It just works.
- jwr 8y agoI've been running my own E-mail server since 2001 or so. Contrary to what some people say, it is not a big hassle. Just make sure you set it up using a well-supported distribution (I chose Ubuntu, specifically because it is widely used), follow a good guide for setting up postfix+dovecot+amavis, update it regularly, and you'll be fine. As for DNS, I'd recommend CloudFlare's free offering. Overall, I spend minuscule amounts of time on maintenance (a total of 30 minutes per two months, perhaps?), and I have the comfort of being indepenendent. I think we should all value our freedom and independence more.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y agoI think running your own server is hard - hard not to wind up on spam lists almost impossible to be removed from. What I do, to keep a local copy of my email, is I run a pi that crons offlineimap twice a day to one disk, then another cron to rsync to another one.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- eigengrau 8y ago> hard not to wind up on spam lists almost impossible to be removed from I’ve been running my own infrastructure for years now and know various people that do this also. Not once have I heard about anyone winding up on a blacklist. The only way I could imagine that happening is either a new server inheriting a legacy IP with bad reputation, or possibly running your server inside a home ISP network, which are frequently rejected by MTAs. Is there any other way in your opinion?
- doxavore 8y agoDoes anyone hosting even their immediate family email have a plan for what happens when they're hit by a bus? I've documented how my wife or executor accesses DNS settings and how to access the vendor portals. I can't imagine them, bright as they may be, doing anything more complex than that.
- e40 8y agoI'm a comcast customer (there is no choice where I live) and there are reasons why this is not possible: 1. I can only send/receive SMTP through their servers. 2. Static IPs cost a lot. When I canceled my static IP it was ~$25/mo (it was previously something like $5/mo).