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Hosting it for $5/month on a Linode VPS using mailinabox.email
by slenk 7y ago
Hosting it for $5/month on a Linode VPS using mailinabox.email
- dbmueller 7y agoI'm tempted to do that, but how much effort does it take to have something rock solid with no downtime? Or in general, what are the `uptime` over `time investment` and `security` over `time investment` curves like?
- gervu 7y agoNo downtime is "unicorn feathers" territory. Extremely low downtime requires redundant systems and a dedicated support team actively trying to head off potential problems. And Gmail still has downtime. But you're asking the wrong questions. Email itself has retries built in, it doesn't need perfect uptime. What you should be asking is how badly Gmail deciding you might be a spammer and not caring about fixing that for one person is going to torpedo your deliverability rate.
- optmzr 7y agoI haven't tried mailinabox.email, but I've run a mailcow-dockerized instance for about 4 months. It took about 1 day to set it all up, where most of the time was spent waiting for DNS changes and for Microsoft to de-list my IP from their blacklist (I probably got a bad IP from DigitalOcean). After that I have logged in to the instance every two weeks to update the machine, haven't had any problems as of yet. The uptime shouldn't be any problem, as the other mail providers should retry sending their mail, it's even mentioned in the RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.4 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.4 Hopefully I haven't missed any mail when updating mailcow-dockerized, I'll never know, hehe. Really easy and a great experience, compared to doing it from scratch.
- dbmueller 7y agoGood to know, thanks for sharing your experience!
- slenk 7y agoI have done mailinabox.email and recently I switched to mailcow-dockerized like optmzr. By default, they both apply strict security practices so you won't have an open relay, worried about domain masking etc. Either are about a day to set up and its mostly DNS.
- Ajedi32 7y agoWhat are Linode's legal obligations regarding real-time surveillance though? Is there any reason to believe they're any better than ProtonMail?
- slenk 7y agoI am sure they can record IPs if neeeded. The difference is linode doesn't know who I am sending email to/receiving from.
- virusduck 7y agoYou just have to be sure and disable most logging if you're using something like mailinabox. Defaults are still pretty loquacious.
- gsnedders 7y agoDon't they? They certainly have access to the VPS file system. But even beyond that, can they be compelled by a court order to install software on the VPS (and securing against someone with unlimited access to the VM host is… about as practical as securing against someone with physical access)? I'd assume so?
- slenk 7y agoProbably? The main benefit to me for runnign my own email is owning my own data/domain, and not having to allow third parties (aka google) full access to all my emails.
- LinuxBender 7y agoLong time user of Linode. I assume like any other provider, they would be obligated to make a best effort to obtain forensic data. i.e. logs from your ext4 filesystem. If you use a raw disk and encrypt it, then I assume they would live-snapshot your VM (they can live migrate them) and dump memory contents. Some of the lower-end VPS providers do not have live migrate capabilities (or at least, don't have an easy way to use them in their tooling). It is your call how long you save/enable logs and if you save them to tmpfs and encrypt your swap. You can also encourage your users to 7-zip encrypt sensitive contents. You can also add specific MX routes in transport maps to use VPN connections to make connection logging less useful. Tinc (open source VPN) is great for this, as traffic routes in user-space through your mesh and therefor traffic can end up at its destination without a direct connection.