8 ms·

Funny headline, because every time I try to self-host anything important like mail, I learn how deep that field is and how little I know and that I'll probably

by planb 6y ago

Funny headline, because every time I try to self-host anything important like mail, I learn how deep that field is and how little I know and that I'll probably need many many hours to do everything right and in a secure way (and my mails would still have a higher probability to be classified as spam). Then I think: "Screw it, I'll just use GMail"

syntheticnature 6y ago
Interestingly, it doesn't look like the author is self-hosting email. I know mail-in-a-box exists, but even with that I find it's worth the peace of mind to pay someone else for mail hosting.
- SavantIdiot 6y ago
  Same here. Over the past 20 years (25?) I've tried numerous times to self-host email and the issues I had with spam and blacklisting were too involved for me to resolve, and only got deeper. Definitely not something to attempt casually.
  - imwillofficial 6y ago
    No need to self host email, just use your own domain. That way if a provider gives you lip, you move on. It’s the email address itself that is valuable, the emails can be backed up.
    - SavantIdiot 6y ago
      That's true. I already host my domains with the requisite DKIM/SPF CNAME entries, and I supposed I could just export the mailboxes periodically.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  I ran my own email server on my own domain for years. You're right, it's kind of its own special nightmare to integrate all the parts of a comprehensive email system (I eventually started using Zimbra's free server software because of it), but spam effectively killed being able to self-host more. Even if you setup SPF and DKIM and all the rest, you'll find yourself getting blackholed anyway because you're NOT Google or Apple or Microsoft. It's not like I even sent email in bulk either. It was just my normal, personal account. But getting OFF blackhole lists became enough work that I had to route my mail through Gmail anyway, so I just gave up self-hosting entirely. That was, like, 7 or 8 years ago, though, so maybe things are different now, but I doubt it. I expect it to only have gotten worse.
- 2ion 6y ago
  No problem if you pull your complete mailboxes using a tool like isync/mbsync. I have background jobs, in addition to regular backups, which pull to all my powered on computers every 30m. As long as the source is IMAP, it's very easy to not get screwed. I couldn't care less if my email hoster today would lock me out. I'll point my domain elsewhere and I have all the data as maildirs.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dvdkon 6y ago
Regarding email, I spent some tens of hours setting it up, including implementing DKIM, DMARC, SPF and getting my mail delivered to Gmail and O365. That was over a year ago and things mostly just work with the occasional upgrade or configuration change. You could also save a lot of time by going with a pre-packaged solution. I understand if you don't have time for that, but at least in my experience, self-hosting email isn't the impossible task it's sometimes made out to be.
- petronio 6y ago
  My experience has been similar. The most important thing that can't be easily resolved is if the server's IP is already on the blocklists, but other than that DKIM, DMARC, SPF, and reverse resolution together solves the ~~magical ritual~~ heuristics that make the big guys happy.
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  It is near impossible. I did all the same things, totally valid and secure setup, gmail would never deliver. YMMV.
  - quesera 6y ago
    Two negatives: new domain names, and historically troublesome sending IP addresses. And of course SPF, DKIM, DMARC are all prerequisites. But if you can avoid the first two problems, hosting email yourself is rock-solid reliable and requires very little attention.
  - alephu5 6y ago
    I've got the same problem. Using a Hetzner VPS and can't find my IP on any blacklists but it's all sent straight to spam...
- Anthony-G 6y ago
  People’s experience with deliverability of messages from self-hosted mail servers seems to be very hit-or-miss but I’m another one of the lucky ones. Rather than using Mail-in-a-box or something similar, I used a cautions step-by-step approach. About 5 years ago, I read the O’Reilly book, Postfix: The Definitive Guide that had been sitting in my book-shelf for years. I installed and configured Postfix as a sending-only mail server on a Hetzner VPS. I sent a few test emails to GMail accounts and a friend’s Office 365 and they both worked! I then gradually added extra layers of functionality (TLS, DKIM, SPF, DMARC). Once I was happy that I could successfully send emails, the next step was to receive email: I added MX records for my domain and opened port 25 on the firewall. I was able to use Mutt over SSH to read emails sent to my account. I later installed Dovecot (excellent documentation) and Squirrelmail (lacking in features but was easy to install). I don’t really use web-mail but I’ll probably install Roundcube at some stage and I plan to learn how to use Sieve for automatic filtering. I thought I’d have serious problems with spam and have to install anti-spam software and/or use black-lists but that hasn’t (yet) been an issue. Simply using Postfix default options along with grey-listing and not accepting messages from invalid (according to SPF records) sources blocks all spam. The only times I received spam was when I had accidentally disabled the grey-listing (the mail logs show I get hundreds of connection attempts with only a tenth of successful connections being genuine). The system actually works better than GMail in that I don’t miss messages that were wrongly flagged as Spam. Another benefit of self-hosting is that I can quickly and easily set up account-specific email addresses, e.g., <hackernews@example.com> – no need for <anthony+hackernews@example.com> I gradually started using it instead of GMail and it’s now my primary email account for important communication. In the four years of serious use, I haven’t had any problems (touch wood).
simion314 6y ago
I use gmail too but I also have an email from my cheap hosting as a backup. The big problem with gmail is not that Google is reading my email but that this giants can lock you out without a reason and without a right to appeal. I am super salty that Sony banned my PlayStation account(used by my son) for 2 months (I have a Plus subscription paid for 1 year too) without no way for me to see the exact reason (was it a text message, or a screenshot that was shared, or just a report from an troll) and no way to contest this. I made my decision and fuck consoles my son will have to learn to use a medium spec PC for gaming.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  >The big problem with gmail is not that Google is reading my email but that this giants can lock you out without a reason and without a right to appeal. I also worry about that. What I do is sync gmail with outlook.com. Now I worry that I just doubled my risk of falling victim to a security breach :-)
codpiece 6y ago
Email totally sucks. I ran BSD servers for an enterprise web app, but Postfix/SASL/Cyrus brings me to my knees when I need to build it. Most hosting providers with a $3/mo CPanel option gives you an out-of-the-box, highly configurable email server.
- watermelon0 6y ago
  I definitely trust Google/Outlook/ProtonMail/Fastmail with my data a lot more than any of the web hosting companies.
npteljes 6y ago
You could also look for alternative providers. Posteo for example promises to run on FOSS code, and is endorsed by FSF. Definitely a middle ground between an artisanal email setup and gmail.
bachmeier 6y ago
> self-host anything important like mail Email is basically pointless to host yourself from a privacy perspective. Every email has one or more people on the other end that also get a copy. Privacy and email are mutually exclusive. That said, the alternative doesn't have to be something like gmail, where they can do whatever they want with your data. I use Fastmail and that's "sufficiently private" for my needs.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  Also you disconnect email from other cloud services. So if you do something bad with your android app development you don't suddenly loose your email. Or if you forgot to pay your apple card you don't loose access to the email etc. I think diversification is valuable here.
  - vlozko 6y ago
    The Apple example was proven to be inaccurate. The loss of access to email wasn't due to him not paying his Apple Card; it was for not paying for his iCloud services. In other words, his shutoff could have happened if he had his iCloud account set up to charge to any other credit card.
    - dcurtis 6y ago
      This is incorrect. (Author of that article.)
- Skunkleton 6y ago
  I use Fastmail + a custom domain. Because fastmail is the provider, I am not on any spam lists. My emails make it through. My service is very reliable, so I always get my emails. If fastmail decides to hate me, I can just point my domain MX records somewhere else. TODO: need a non-fastmail backup of my email
  - Matumio 6y ago
    I'm doing that with a cronjob calling mbsync. This gives me offline mail access with mutt or even grep.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by planb 6y ago

syntheticnature 6y ago

Interestingly, it doesn't look like the author is self-hosting email. I know mail-in-a-box exists, but even with that I find it's worth the peace of mind to pay someone else for mail hosting.

SavantIdiot 6y ago
Same here. Over the past 20 years (25?) I've tried numerous times to self-host email and the issues I had with spam and blacklisting were too involved for me to resolve, and only got deeper. Definitely not something to attempt casually.
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  No need to self host email, just use your own domain. That way if a provider gives you lip, you move on. It’s the email address itself that is valuable, the emails can be backed up.
  - SavantIdiot 6y ago
    That's true. I already host my domains with the requisite DKIM/SPF CNAME entries, and I supposed I could just export the mailboxes periodically.
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
I ran my own email server on my own domain for years. You're right, it's kind of its own special nightmare to integrate all the parts of a comprehensive email system (I eventually started using Zimbra's free server software because of it), but spam effectively killed being able to self-host more. Even if you setup SPF and DKIM and all the rest, you'll find yourself getting blackholed anyway because you're NOT Google or Apple or Microsoft. It's not like I even sent email in bulk either. It was just my normal, personal account. But getting OFF blackhole lists became enough work that I had to route my mail through Gmail anyway, so I just gave up self-hosting entirely. That was, like, 7 or 8 years ago, though, so maybe things are different now, but I doubt it. I expect it to only have gotten worse.
2ion 6y ago
No problem if you pull your complete mailboxes using a tool like isync/mbsync. I have background jobs, in addition to regular backups, which pull to all my powered on computers every 30m. As long as the source is IMAP, it's very easy to not get screwed. I couldn't care less if my email hoster today would lock me out. I'll point my domain elsewhere and I have all the data as maildirs.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dvdkon 6y ago

Regarding email, I spent some tens of hours setting it up, including implementing DKIM, DMARC, SPF and getting my mail delivered to Gmail and O365. That was over a year ago and things mostly just work with the occasional upgrade or configuration change. You could also save a lot of time by going with a pre-packaged solution. I understand if you don't have time for that, but at least in my experience, self-hosting email isn't the impossible task it's sometimes made out to be.

petronio 6y ago
My experience has been similar. The most important thing that can't be easily resolved is if the server's IP is already on the blocklists, but other than that DKIM, DMARC, SPF, and reverse resolution together solves the ~~magical ritual~~ heuristics that make the big guys happy.
imwillofficial 6y ago
It is near impossible. I did all the same things, totally valid and secure setup, gmail would never deliver. YMMV.
- quesera 6y ago
  Two negatives: new domain names, and historically troublesome sending IP addresses. And of course SPF, DKIM, DMARC are all prerequisites. But if you can avoid the first two problems, hosting email yourself is rock-solid reliable and requires very little attention.
- alephu5 6y ago
  I've got the same problem. Using a Hetzner VPS and can't find my IP on any blacklists but it's all sent straight to spam...
Anthony-G 6y ago
People’s experience with deliverability of messages from self-hosted mail servers seems to be very hit-or-miss but I’m another one of the lucky ones. Rather than using Mail-in-a-box or something similar, I used a cautions step-by-step approach. About 5 years ago, I read the O’Reilly book, Postfix: The Definitive Guide that had been sitting in my book-shelf for years. I installed and configured Postfix as a sending-only mail server on a Hetzner VPS. I sent a few test emails to GMail accounts and a friend’s Office 365 and they both worked! I then gradually added extra layers of functionality (TLS, DKIM, SPF, DMARC). Once I was happy that I could successfully send emails, the next step was to receive email: I added MX records for my domain and opened port 25 on the firewall. I was able to use Mutt over SSH to read emails sent to my account. I later installed Dovecot (excellent documentation) and Squirrelmail (lacking in features but was easy to install). I don’t really use web-mail but I’ll probably install Roundcube at some stage and I plan to learn how to use Sieve for automatic filtering. I thought I’d have serious problems with spam and have to install anti-spam software and/or use black-lists but that hasn’t (yet) been an issue. Simply using Postfix default options along with grey-listing and not accepting messages from invalid (according to SPF records) sources blocks all spam. The only times I received spam was when I had accidentally disabled the grey-listing (the mail logs show I get hundreds of connection attempts with only a tenth of successful connections being genuine). The system actually works better than GMail in that I don’t miss messages that were wrongly flagged as Spam. Another benefit of self-hosting is that I can quickly and easily set up account-specific email addresses, e.g., <hackernews@example.com> – no need for <anthony+hackernews@example.com> I gradually started using it instead of GMail and it’s now my primary email account for important communication. In the four years of serious use, I haven’t had any problems (touch wood).

simion314 6y ago

I use gmail too but I also have an email from my cheap hosting as a backup. The big problem with gmail is not that Google is reading my email but that this giants can lock you out without a reason and without a right to appeal. I am super salty that Sony banned my PlayStation account(used by my son) for 2 months (I have a Plus subscription paid for 1 year too) without no way for me to see the exact reason (was it a text message, or a screenshot that was shared, or just a report from an troll) and no way to contest this. I made my decision and fuck consoles my son will have to learn to use a medium spec PC for gaming.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fauigerzigerk 6y ago
>The big problem with gmail is not that Google is reading my email but that this giants can lock you out without a reason and without a right to appeal. I also worry about that. What I do is sync gmail with outlook.com. Now I worry that I just doubled my risk of falling victim to a security breach :-)

codpiece 6y ago

Email totally sucks. I ran BSD servers for an enterprise web app, but Postfix/SASL/Cyrus brings me to my knees when I need to build it. Most hosting providers with a $3/mo CPanel option gives you an out-of-the-box, highly configurable email server.

watermelon0 6y ago
I definitely trust Google/Outlook/ProtonMail/Fastmail with my data a lot more than any of the web hosting companies.

npteljes 6y ago

You could also look for alternative providers. Posteo for example promises to run on FOSS code, and is endorsed by FSF. Definitely a middle ground between an artisanal email setup and gmail.

bachmeier 6y ago

> self-host anything important like mail Email is basically pointless to host yourself from a privacy perspective. Every email has one or more people on the other end that also get a copy. Privacy and email are mutually exclusive. That said, the alternative doesn't have to be something like gmail, where they can do whatever they want with your data. I use Fastmail and that's "sufficiently private" for my needs.

kmonsen 6y ago
Also you disconnect email from other cloud services. So if you do something bad with your android app development you don't suddenly loose your email. Or if you forgot to pay your apple card you don't loose access to the email etc. I think diversification is valuable here.
- vlozko 6y ago
  The Apple example was proven to be inaccurate. The loss of access to email wasn't due to him not paying his Apple Card; it was for not paying for his iCloud services. In other words, his shutoff could have happened if he had his iCloud account set up to charge to any other credit card.
  - dcurtis 6y ago
    This is incorrect. (Author of that article.)
Skunkleton 6y ago
I use Fastmail + a custom domain. Because fastmail is the provider, I am not on any spam lists. My emails make it through. My service is very reliable, so I always get my emails. If fastmail decides to hate me, I can just point my domain MX records somewhere else. TODO: need a non-fastmail backup of my email
- Matumio 6y ago
  I'm doing that with a cronjob calling mbsync. This gives me offline mail access with mutt or even grep.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]