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It’s not so bad to run your own email server. Im doing it, because email is very sensitive data, and I don’t want to share it with Google or Microsoft or any ot
by andix 5y ago
It’s not so bad to run your own email server. Im doing it, because email is very sensitive data, and I don’t want to share it with Google or Microsoft or any other cloud provider.
The worst part is, that you can’t use any fancy email clients, because they all use proprietary protocols and once again cloud services. But imap and activesync works well enough too.
The most important thing is, to get a clean IP address. Don’t ever try to host your Mailserver on digital ocean for example, their IPs have such a bad reputation that some providers even block them on network level. Their whole subnets can’t connect to them, no possibility to get unblocked at all.
Once you found a legitimate hoster, check that your IP is not bkacklisted at any major provider. If it is, try to get other IPs, until you get a clean one. Don’t try to go through unblock-processes, that often won’t work.
And then you need to set up your server well. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, …
- arichard123 5y agoI've had real trouble with digital ocean as they just don't want to get involved in helping email providers at all. They don't want to do anything with managing IP reputation.
- andix 5y agoI know. I think there is a study, that showed digital ocean is the provider that sends the most spam emails, and just doesn’t care. As self defense, some providers just block their ips because of that. And if you try to unblock such an ip, they require you to do a lot of erfrort. You can skip it, if you get an IP from a provider with good reputation. AWS for example doesn’t kid around if you send spam. You need a special permission in the first place to even be able to use port 25 outgoing.
- nulbyte 5y ago> The worst part is, that you can’t use any fancy email clients, because they all use proprietary protocols and once again cloud services. What fancy email clients did you have in mind that don't support IMAP?
- andix 5y agoMore or less all iOS and Android mail clients. https://www.imore.com/best-email-apps-your-iphone-and-ipad https://www.imore.com/best-email-apps-your-iphone-and-ipad They do support imap, but they process your messages on their proprietary cloud service. What sane person would agree to that? In the US there seems to be not a lot of concern about data protection yet, so there seems to be a market for those services.