14 ms·

Self-hosted email is the hardest it's ever been, but also the easiest

316 points by hardwaresofton 4y ago

qwertox 4y ago
I wonder if we are legally entitled to have our email getting delivered if we have a record of playing by the rules and are no known bad actors.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  This sounds like the kind of measure the EU could pass and enshrine as an example for the rest of the free world. The idea of specifying "bad actors" is a little suspect but is already how the system works implicitly (and explicitly)... Requiring fair email delivery from standards-compliant businesses with a clear path to escalation at the government level might be amazing. For all of GDPR's warts and criticisms it's almost surely a net positive for consumers, so maybe this could be another piece of legislation in the same vein. Of course I'm not so naive (or rather I'm too cynical) to believe that governments are simply doing the bidding of the people, but I don't think I mind them mining this new revenue stream a bit in an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend kind of way.
peter_retief 4y ago
I am using mailinabox which works for me. Setting up mail from scratch is too complex and time absorbing. I am keen to look at the other options you mention now.
As_You_Wish 4y ago
This is totally not true, at least last time I checked 2 years ago when I decided to make the jump from the large email providers. email systems are retarded. They throw all kinds of acronyms, apps, subapps, etc at you. Why isn't there just some damn app that you can to to a website, click on download and install, and it is up and running? Everywhere I read, I was cautioned it was difficult because you always have to upgrade security with new patches, for example. Why are they even bothering me with this knowledge? Why would I have to do it? Can't people doing email apps figure out how to continuously update everything so I don't have to think about it? I simply do not have the time to figure it all out. I have other responsibilities taking up my time. I have a computer science degree, and have worked on all kinds of apps, but I can't figure the stuff out, how is somebody else going to do it "easily"? I've always thought someone could automate the entire thing, but no. And so, I got tutanota. Less than a minute for getting an email up and running. It should be that way to self-host, like any other app in the world. I didn't choose proton mail because it was WAY more expensive. I have multiple emails, and don't want to use aliases, heck with that. So buying multiple emails is WAY more expensive on Protonmail. If there is a simple one-step email hosting app, they sure as hell hide it very well. Because believe me, I looked. For those who want to explain why, I have a computer science degree. I can sort of guess why. But the reasons don't interest me. I just need a one-step self-hosted service. End of story. I'm not mad or bitter. I'm just being direct at outlining my experience and frustrations. But I'm ok now, not frustrated anymore. Except when I think back on it....like now. :)
na85 4y ago
A few months ago I wrote a comment on HN about algorithmic trading and someone emailed me about it. I sent him a reply from my self-hosted email domain, and I have no idea if he got it. I'm on a clean IP and clean domain, with a reputable hoster. I have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up correctly. Just last week I sent my gmail account a test email and sure enough it went to spam. There appears to be no rhyme or reason about it. I believe the difference between people who say "email self-hosting is dead" and people who say "email self-hosting is trivial" is probably the volume of mail sent from their domain(s). At my busiest, I was sending dozens of emails per day, but they were all from my work account. My personal account is pretty close to recv-only and probably averages an outgoing message count in the single digits per week. How can I reasonably keep an IP/domain reputation score fresh/warm if I send such a low volume? The answer is I realistically can't. Self-hosted email remains an extremely difficult and time-consuming endeavor unless you happen to have some good luck, it seems.
- walrus01 4y ago
  Almost certainly a large part of your problem is that your individual IP address is in a shared net block that has other neighbors that have historically been a source of spam. Unless you can get hosting at an ISP that does not sell low budget, commercial virtual private server, virtual machine or dedicated hosting to random people with $20 and a credit card, this will be an ongoing problem.
  - na85 4y ago
    As far as I can tell the host (Joe's Data center) has a clean ASN. I'm open to recommendations for clean IPs/providers.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  I'm going to update the article with this but one thing from the original HN discussion that was recommended is: https://improvmx.com/ https://improvmx.com/ Run your own email servers, but relay through there for better delivery? Maybe this is what we need more of -- A class of mail system participants who exclusively maintain trusted IPs and do the legwork of trying to get through the gnarly systems set up by the other large email providers. [EDIT] - "forward" -> "relay" for clarity I don't know the solution but I know it needs to be discussed.
walrus01 4y ago
Postfix and dovecot are not some evil "oligopoly", they're community based truly open source software. Almost none of the things linked there are run by serious isps that are responsible for other peoples' mail in quantities of tens of thousands of inboxes or more. Resist the urge to reinvent the wheel just to be a contrarian. Edit: yes, I see the issue, the mention of postfix+dovecot is jammed together in the same small paragraph as the oligopoly. It's as if they are being discussed as the same thing. The oligopoly is clearly google, office 365, etc. One hundred percent in agreement there.
- muti 4y ago
  I think the point is that there are easier options than postfix and dovecot for most self host cases, the oligopoly is formed by other entities.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  I'm not sure how the post came across as Postfix and Dovecot being the monopoly... Just to be clear, the oligopoly are the large email providers (Gmail and friends). > Almost none of the things linked there are run by serious isps that are responsible for other peoples' mail in quantities of tens of thousands of inboxes or more. Software doesn't have to be run by a large ISP to be worth running for people. Even at tens of thousands of inboxes (which is something post people don't need). Good software is out there for running self-hosted email and people should know about it. [EDIT] The post must have been unclear, I've edited it so hopefully no one will think I'm bashing postfix/dovecot. I've even tried to make them easier to use in the past[0], but gave up when I realized that there was better software out there that completely sidestepped the problem. [0]: https://gitlab.com/postmgr/postmgr https://gitlab.com/postmgr/postmgr
- pevey 4y ago
  I remember when sendmail was the de facto standard, and postfix was the lighter-weight new kid on the block. I’ve had my own domain since the 90s and self-hosted at one point out of my dorm room. I continued for years after, but I gave it up before I ran into issues with deliverability. It was largely due to issues from the other side of the equation: Too much spam in my inbox and not enough time and motivation on my part to keep fighting it. I noticed my throw-away gmail account had pretty good spam filtering, so when moving my Mx to gmail became an option, I threw in the self-hosting towel. EDIT: Again, with perspective from the other side of the spam fight, I wonder if anyone self-hosting on a non-residential IP that is having almost ZERO of their emails go through successfully has their DMARC set up properly. I use gmail for my own personal domain, but Microsoft 365 setups I manage for companies all use the strictest filters for emails without a tight spf rule (and a pass) and not using DKIM. Those are just not optional these days, unfortunately.
jedberg 4y ago
Self hosted email without deliverability is useless. It’s like saying “it’s easier than ever to build a car! But you can’t drive it on the street”. I would say deliverability is the most important feature for email.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  > I would say deliverability is the most important feature for email. You're not wrong, but the thing is, the deliverability problem is not completely broken. I don't have a problem sending emails with my self-hosted stack with DKIM, DMARC, and SPF set up. That said, some people do. I lightly monitor my domains to make sure they're not on blacklists and have figured out how to get things working over time. The battle isn't lost yet -- some people have problems and others do, but discouraging people from self-hosting is not the way to fix it. My main point is that while deliverability can still be hard, many of the other things that made sending email hard (configuring postfix, dovecot and DNS correctly) have become drastically easier.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    But how much time do you spend dealing with that? Is it worth it? I self hosted my email for more than a decade but I gave up when the time spent was just too much.
    - hardwaresofton 4y ago
      > But how much time do you spend dealing with that? Is it worth it? Oh not much now -- to be honest with you 99% of the time when it's an issue it's because I changed something on my side. Maybe I got lucky with the IPs I have (I use dedicated servers), and I've held them a while. What was jarring about the original post by Carlos is that he did all that AND he's been doing it 23 years and it was still a problem. It made me recall that one of the things I struggled with a long time ago was just setting up Postfix/Dovecot correctly. These days no one should be running into that. > I self hosted my email for more than a decade but I gave up when the time spent was just too much. Unfortunately I don't doubt this assessment. I just want people to know that if difficulty/technical work was a blocker, it is now mostly not (with the news software out there). As other people pointed out, there are services for improving deliverability that could fix the other (bigger) issue, and hopefully people could consider doing that going forward. At the end of the day people have to do what's right for them of course but I just want people to know that things HAVE gotten easier. It's the big companies that are making it hard now.
p-e-w 4y ago
It's not just self-hosted email that's dead, it's email itself. The federated system where clients and servers exchange messages according to well-defined standards doesn't exist anymore. Most clients now special-case Gmail because they have all but deprecated POP and IMAP. Push notifications, essential for seeing mail "in time", are a proprietary, inconsistent mess. Receiving servers use all kinds of voodoo to determine whether a message is acceptable to them, much of which is powered by proprietary software and semi-secret block/allowlists. Attachments are barely usable because Outlook uses a format that many other clients don't understand. Large providers have hardcoded logic for marking messages from "trusted" senders like banks and online shops, so some senders are more equal than others. Meanwhile zero meaningful progress in decades to address the protocols' basic shortcomings like lack of encryption, replies that don't involve sending hundreds of pages back and forth, ...
- closeparen 4y ago
  Practically every small business premise in every minor suburb of America contains (or used to) self-hosted email in a closet somewhere: Microsoft Exchange. As far as I can tell, IMAP has always been a sideshow, the real story has always been Microsoft.
  - nrbsef 4y ago
    for the last decade those exchange installs have been disappearing in favor of office365
    - shapefrog 4y ago
      We once had a mainframe and storage servers in the cupboard, now its cloud based. Email has transitioned in the same manner, from local exchange servers to the cloud offering.
- yessirwhatever 4y ago
  Never ceases to amaze me how ignorant people continue to make such deranged and wide generations with little or no evidence. Let me guess, email is dead? RSS is also dead right? Literally no one ever uses them anymore. You probably think that all businesses should just all switch to TikTok and communicate with memes and dance routines.
echelon 4y ago
I think I may have finally found a use for bitcoin! For a nominal cryptocurrency fee, my email server won't reject your inbound email. If I respond, you may even get it back. The more you send me, the higher priority I'll flag it.
- easrng 4y ago
  That was actually the original application of proof-of-work, before it was used for cryptocurrency. AFAIK it was never widely deployed.
9woc 4y ago
I'm self-hosting and I'm using mailgun to solve the delivery issues. Free-tier of up to 1K messages per month is good enough for a personal domain.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  Funnily enough, I'm actually working on something (a proxy) that turns the Mailgun API into SMTP/Listmonk[0], since I was annoyed that Ghost only allows Mailgun. Great to hear they're a solution for this though -- will update my article to reflect them next to ImprovMX. [0]: https://github.com/knadh/listmonk https://github.com/knadh/listmonk
  - wzwy 4y ago
    From what I’ve read on this page[0], Ghost does allow other providers which I presume includes self-hosted emails. > I still want to use a different provider to send email newsletters, why can’t I do that? You can. There is no requirement to use Ghost’s built in newsletter delivery feature. Before we released this feature, thousands of people sent their newsletter using all sorts of other services such as Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Convertkit, and many others. You can easily sync your members database to an external newsletter provider via Zapier, or by following our detailed integration guides. I don’t know anything about self-hosting, but I’m curious to know if there’s no place for self-hosted email servers when it comes to integrating with Ghost. [0]https://ghost.org/docs/faq/mailgun-newsletters/ https://ghost.org/docs/faq/mailgun-newsletters/
    - hardwaresofton 4y ago
      > From what I’ve read on this page[0], Ghost does allow other providers which I presume includes self-hosted emails. Yup, "transactional" emails can be sent via a variety of methods, but "bulk" email can't. I think the differentiation between transactional and bulk email is also bullshit (and a result of a broken underlying ecosystem) but that's a different story. > I don’t know anything about self-hosting, but I’m curious to know if there’s no place for self-hosted email servers when it comes to integrating with Ghost. Just to be clear, transactions emails are fine, but bulk email is not. I personally think Ghost just didn't want to unleash a wave of under-prepared people into the difficult problem of email deliverability. Letting people use SMTP servers would immediately lead to people using their own postfix setups, GMail, transactional providers that offer SMTP, etc -- probably instantly leading to many people being banned for unintended use (there's that bullshit again), and people either being angry at Ghost or filing issues against Ghost about email not working. What's unfortunate is that they didn't really shim it out so it's easy to replace Mailgun... Which is why I'm embarking on this quixotic quest at all. It may end up being helpful down the road though, API aggregation has been a common theme for my ideas lately.
hardwaresofton 4y ago
Another solution to this problem is relaying through services which will do the heavy lifting for you (this was been discussed in the original thread, here and in the article I wrote). So far people have suggested: - ImprovMX (https://improvmx.com https://improvmx.com) - Mailgun (https://mailgun.com https://mailgun.com) - Postmark (https://postmarkapp.com https://postmarkapp.com) Commenting for visibility: as any others come in I will update this comment (until I can't, anyway) and the article as a reference.
- deepspace 4y ago
  But if you go that fire, you might as well use a third party for the entire stack. If you would rather not use the big 3/4/5, use something like Fastmail. They are an extremely reliable email provider, without the baggage of Google/Microsoft.
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    I’d rather use Proton Mail since they’re in a country with reasonable privacy/encryption laws, and generally don’t welcome government over reach.
- bounder 4y ago
  A good addition to this list is https://postmarkapp.com/ https://postmarkapp.com/. They are meet EU law in regards to the GDPR. They don’t have a free tier for their relay service, but do have a nice free reporting tool for DMARC.
  - linker3000 4y ago
    Can agree with this. Having slogged through the learning process of setting up DMARC and DKIM to supplement SPF, this site was a great help and allowed me to confirm my setup (Postfix and Dovecot) was behaving as expected and needed. The only issue I have with a Postfix setup is providing an easy-to-use out of office auto-reply facility - I have tried the manual approach and also some scripted solutions but they don't seem to work reliably and, inevitably, I get comments from colleagues (it's a small, family-run business), that they just want to be able to turn on an auto-reply in Outlook (which is used as a front end for multiple inboxes on different mail services) and for it to 'just work'.
shotgunner 4y ago
Also consider this: https://poste.io https://poste.io this has well documented and prevent going emails to spam with set DNS MX and SPF
defanor 4y ago
The "harder" argument is the regular deliverability uncertainty, while the "easier" one is availability of some less known and supposedly user-friendly software projects. I doubt they make it easier in the long run though: as with much of other new and supposedly user-friendly software, it's tempting to recommend that to new users (and they may prefer it anyway), but then all sorts of issues arise: often it's not in system repositories, so no updates (no automated/frequently happening in practice ones, that is), and there are occasional semi-broken manual installations, then there's a lack of documentation and community, probably it'll be abandoned in a few years, and generally you get all the characteristics of experimental/immature software, where you need more advanced skills to debug and maintain it than those needed to just use mature software. Throwing that onto new users, over the much more mature software, doesn't look like a good idea to me.
s_dev 4y ago
https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
highwaylights 4y ago
It hurts my soul to see a well-reasoned and well-intentioned post like this start off with good advice then immediately recommend ProtonMail. ProtonMail is about the single worst experience I’ve ever had with Big Email. I really do wonder how many people they’ve harmed but get away with it because the happy path works for most people most of the time. The worry I have with something like Gmail or Outlook is that they can just take away your access to your inbox without reason or recourse, but it’s never actually happened to anyone I know. It happened with ProtonMail though - I set up an account for a family member, updated some of their online registrations to point to it, then a couple of days later it was locked out permanently. Thankfully they hadn’t got to the point of using the account for anything they cared about yet, just a couple of big retailer mailing lists (they’re not the most tech literate so move very slowly with things like this). Literally it was receiving mailing list emails from two well known, non-shady retailers and that’s it. Password not forgotten, No way to have the account unlocked, no way to find out why it was locked, no way to have the account deleted, no way to get access to repoint the accounts using that address because now ProtonMail owned those other website accounts (not your email not your account). Pretty much just [you can’t have your account back, you can’t find out why, you can’t appeal, and every email that ever lands here in the future belongs to us now so go fish]. They are by a long way the worst experience I ever had with a provider of any online service, so much so that I’ve since moved my own e-mail that was there back to outlook before some arbitrary spam caused the same thing to happen to me. Never again.
- sierkov 4y ago
  - Big claims - No details or evidence to back them - Happened to you more than once Sure. We'll just believe that ProtonMail locks accounts randomly, for no reason. Or was spam the reason? If that was true, everyone would be locked out because, well, everyone is getting spam.
  - YesWeWill 4y ago
    Yes, we will, since it happened to others of us. What kind of evidence would you like? My account is inaccessible. Should I tell you the password so you can try yourself or what?
madmanweb 4y ago
I tried to set up an account on the ImprovMX service the article recommend. Their verification email never reached my GMail account. Nothing in spam either. That's a non-starter straight away.
bounder 4y ago
I am pretty happy with the Synology network drive I use for self-hosting email. Synology has developed a business email suite which comes with 5 mailboxes. You can buy permanent additional mailboxes for the price of what you normally would pay yearly to big tech. The mailbox suite is fully featured with easy to setup anti spam measures and an intelligent spam filter you can train by forwarding spam and not spam messages to it. I can certainly recommend it should you want to self-host from home.
jesterson 4y ago
I don't really see a value or point in this article, unless it is sponsored by ProtonMail. Life is hard so let's surrender and use WhateverMail service? That's a very pathetic way, that's how corporations thrive and screw us later. You shouldn't stop doing something just because someone did it for 20 years and failed. Some people learn - others are just getting older. That's defeatist mentality. I've personally selfhosted mail for 20+ years as well and see no reason why I would stop it. And yea, I use postfix + dovecot. 50+ domains. 2M messages a day on some domains. Everything works and costs $0. You can calculate yourself how much services like Postmark will charge you for similar volume. It's not a brag but attempt to show something is absolutely doable as contrary to someone who "did it for 20 years and gave up".
p5j2MAhgSivABmE 4y ago
- cmeacham98 4y ago
  The secret to winning against spam while only needing a basic spam filter is to buy your own domain, setup a redirect/alias for *@yourdomain.com, and use multiple addresses. When you start receiving spam on an address burn it and setup a rule to move all email it receives to spam. This has the dual benefit of letting you know who sold your email (or got compromised). I personally use Fastmail, but this should all be possible relatively easily with your own mail server as well.
- olau 4y ago
  I've seen people lose email with gmail. It's sent to the gmail account, but it never shows up, not in the inbox and not in spam.
  - account42 4y ago
    Exactly, Gmail's spam filters aren't good they are just aggressive. Getting 0 spam is easy: just drop all mail. Getting less spam while not dropping any legit mail is significantly harder - and Gmail fails on that. Then again, I don't really care about receiving even 40-50 spam mails per day since it does not take long to scan over the subjects to double check that no legit mail got flagged. I'd rather do that then miss a mail I care about.
- timbit42 4y ago
  Google's spam filters aren't very good these days. I still get spam in my gmail account and my non-gmail accounts sometimes get spam from gmail addresses.
  - Avamander 4y ago
    That is very good that you're receiving only a few spam emails.
avanttech 4y ago
Could there be a serverless alternative where the service wakes up only to receive emails and will be charged only when emails are processed, filtered and served & rest of the time no charge - avoiding $3 to $5 charged by behemoths per inbox? Idea is how cheap can it go for personal inbox with all the features denied by the superlative pricing plans
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  > Could there be a serverless alternative where the service wakes up only to receive emails and will be charged only when emails are processed, filtered and served & rest of the time no charge - avoiding $3 to $5 charged by behemoths per inbox? I love ideas as much as the next guy and serverless email is kind of floating out there: https://medium.com/schibsted-engineering/building-a-serverless-email-delivery-service-on-aws-9269f55533a0 https://medium.com/schibsted-engineering/building-a-serverle... https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email It's possible to build it, but the problem is that you still have the same problem of deliverability. Obviously it works fine/great for receving emails though. > Idea is how cheap can it go for personal inbox with all the features denied by the superlative pricing plans It could get really cheap, but would people buy it? I always wonder if price is really the limiting factor for self hosted emails. Zoho is already QUITE cheap: https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html Maybe this would work as a business, but it's a bit questionable to me.
- fakedcake 4y ago
  The biggest roadblock to serverless email is that it doesn't use the http protocol. Afaik all serverless providers only process http(s) requests, usually specifically on port 80/443 only, so SMTP/POP3/IMAP don't simply work serverless. You'd need at least a proxy that wraps them in http, or convince all email services to support a new http based protocol. Arguably, a http based email protocol would be a good thing. Not only would it enable serverless, it would also enable all the features of http/2&3, like compression, multiplexing and better pipelining. Someone would just need to define it. The downside would be that VPS providers can not limit mail spam from their servers by just blocking outbound traffic on certain ports, so you'd find all their IPs to quickly be blacklisted. So the protocol should ideally somehow also offer some form of spam detection/prevention that works better than simple IP blacklists to prevent that.
vbernat 4y ago
The solution is to forward your outgoing emails through a 9$/month provider? It feels like paying protection.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  That's one solution, and it is like paying protection, and it sucks. Can't fix the problem if everyone just stops self-hosting email though. I'm personally hoping the magic of free market competition drives down these costs (at least), and in the meantime we can know how to steer clear of the centralization.
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    The free market competition means that spammers will come along and pay their protection money as well and there goes the service.
    - hardwaresofton 4y ago
      > The free market competition means that spammers will come along and pay their protection money as well and there goes the service. And the free market competition will ensure that those providers make stopping spammers (at the source -- signing up for an email service) their priority. Spammers still use SES! Just the other day I found an SES IP blocked by Spamhaus. I'd argue smaller providers can be even better than AWS at preventing spammers from signing up -- they just need to play like smaller providers and actually vet/accept through referral/etc. Smaller providers also must be much more careful about accepting spammers, so this helps keep them sharp -- and hopefully we get to a bigger smorgasbord of choices. [0]: https://vadosware.io/post/even-amazon-ses-has-ips-blocked-by-spamhaus-sometimes/ https://vadosware.io/post/even-amazon-ses-has-ips-blocked-by...
  - RobMurray 4y ago
    I use AWS Simple Email Service to relay my outgoing mail. It costs almost nothing.
raffraffraff 4y ago
The hard thing is reliable sending. Receiving is easy, you just point an MX record somewhere. And the two are separate concepts. For cheap reliable sending, you can set up AWS SES with DKIM/SPF etc. Unless you're sending large volumes it costs basically nothing. That's my 2c.
dusted 4y ago
Self hosted == Running software on your own machine. Not some VPS.
- dark-star 4y ago
  umm... if the VPS is yours, then it is still self hosted
  - dusted 4y ago
    Usually, VPS is taken to mean the virtual private server that is rented at some company, not one of the virtual machines you host on the physical hardware that is located on your private property. It's real simple, if you don't own the hardware, if it's not physically available to you to go whack with an axe, then you don't own anything, you're just renting and entirely at the mercy of whoever you're renting from.
    - dark-star 4y ago
      self-hosting doesn't mean you have to own the hardware? Also, "owning" and "being able to walk over and physically whack it with an axe" are not the same thing. Servers can be leased, and there is something called "server housing" which breaks your analogy
      - dusted 4y ago
        yea, it does not, because people are using the word wrong.. Saying you own your leased server is the same as saying you own your rented apartment or leased car.. It's not yours if it's someone elses, in the same way the movies on netflix are inherently less yours than the movies on your laserdiscs, dvd's or blu-rays.
- account42 4y ago
  What exactly are you trying to achieve with that distinction. Obviously, if you can host at home then you have more control then over a VPS but it is also more work, especially if you want to prevent any disruption. Basically, your options are in increasing amount of control you have: 1) Free email provider (you have not recourse for anything) 2) Paid email provider (a little better) 3) Free/paid email provider with your own domain (gives you disaster recovery without the provider's cooperation) 4) Running your own MX but doing delivery via another provider (perhaps a bit more privacy) 5) Running your own MTA/etc. on a managed host, e.g. a VPS 6) Running your own MTA/etc. on a colocated host 7) Running your own MTA/etc. on a host on your own premises Even with the strictest definition of self hosting, i.e. (7) you still are subject to your ISP recording who you communicate with (and more since SMTP is not consistently encrypted) and are still subject to law enforcement accessing your data. (6) and (5) mean you do need to trust your hoster to not look at the data on your instance but at least for now that seems to be a reasonable asumption unlike for (1) to (4) where at least automated scans you don't control are the norm.
jokoon 4y ago
What are the best solutions to catch spam for self hosted email?
sgt 4y ago
I like maddy - would like to spend some time setting it up and experimenting. What webmail options are recommended to use with maddy? Some users want webmail as well, not just IMAP.
- cheesecreaser 4y ago
  I've been using alps[1]. Its pretty rough around the edges but its handy enough. there is also things like roundcube which is fairly popular [1]: https://sr.ht/~migadu/alps/ https://sr.ht/~migadu/alps/
cm2187 4y ago
And if you prefer to use windows, smartermail is a very good mail server software. It has smtp, pop, imap, webmail and (if you buy the commercial version) activesync.
fareesh 4y ago
Murphy's law says that if you self-host your email, the day you need it to work more than ever, is the day when it will let you down
- chalst 4y ago
  Murphy's law also says that if you trust your email provision to one of the mail oligopolists, the day you first hear of someone close to you having their account shut down for no intelligible reason will be the day it happens to you when you most need it to work.
  - account42 4y ago
    And unless your need is extremely time sensitive you can probably fix your own mail setup while good luck getting anything out of Google support for a free service.
wzwy 4y ago
> *All together, here are some alternate email providers: - ProtonMail - FastMail - Mailbox* Anyone uses or used to use Tutanota? That’s the only privacy-focused email provider I know of aside from ProtonMail. And why is having a data center in Germany a selling point for some of these email providers?
- inbx0 4y ago
  I use Tutanota and it's... fine for my needs. The web app is ok but it'd be nice if there was something like Proton Mail Bridge [1] for Tutanota so I could use my own email client. I guess having data center inside EU could be a plus for EU citizens? 1: https://proton.me/mail/bridge https://proton.me/mail/bridge
- Kovah 4y ago
  > And why is having a data center in Germany a selling point for some of these email providers? The EU, and Germany especially, have strong privacy regulations and laws to protect their citizens. Having a datacenter in the EU does not mean that your data can't be accessed by authorities at all, but it's harder than in other countries. At least in Germany, a judge-signed request with a specific reason is needed to get data from any email provider. Mailbox even publishes a transparency report[1] with details about said requests: in 2021 they just received 65 requests, 15% were incorrect. 61 of those requests were just about the contact data of the account owner, not even emails or any other data stored. [1]: https://mailbox.org/en/post/transparency-report-2021 https://mailbox.org/en/post/transparency-report-2021
  - stop50 4y ago
    The german provider posteo publishes every year anonymized requests and why they denied them.
  - dns_snek 4y ago
    > The EU, and Germany especially, have strong privacy regulations and laws to protect their citizens. This could quickly be changing with proposed mass-surveillance "Chat control" legislation which would force all providers to scan the contents of all messages, emails and other communications. https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/messaging-and-chat-control/ https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/messaging-and-chat-co...
kristov 4y ago
It costs more or less the same amount of money to send one email as it does to send hundreds of thousands of emails. So spammers send hundreds of thousands of emails and they only need to fool one person to make it worthwhile financially. Is anyone doing work around "proof of work" email sending? Could a blockchain be used to make the cost of bulk email sending proportional to the volume?
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  This is a awesome idea kernel. Somewhat related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32340305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32340305 https://github.com/mCaptcha/mCaptcha https://github.com/mCaptcha/mCaptcha
- webdelv 4y ago
  http://www.hashcash.org/ http://www.hashcash.org/
- sushibowl 4y ago
  The "chain" element is completely unnecessary here, since emails do not need to be strictly ordered (as opposed to currency transactions, where order is crucial). So all you need is to consider each e-mail like a standalone block and apply a proof of work to it. This is not new, by the way. Preventing spam was the original application for PoW way before the blockchain existed. First proposed in 1997 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash The downside is that it can be tricky to correctly tune the difficulty factor for a wide variety of e-mail sending hardware with wildly varying computing power available.
- p49k 4y ago
  The original/first proof of work proposal, Hashcash, was in fact designed to solve email spam. It obviously served as the inspiration for Bitcoin’s proof of work component.
Normille 4y ago
I'm surprised no-one in the comments has mentioned MailInABox [0]. On recommendations here, I switched to it 2 or 3 months ago from Gmail, after Google announced they were going to start charging for Gmail on custom domains. I'd no previous experience at all with running my own mailservers and had always been put off by how complicated it seemed. Even with a non supported configuration setup [running the mailserver for my domain on a separate VPS from the domain itself] MIAB setup was pretty easy. I had it installed and was up and running in no time. I then spent a couple of days setting up the various DMARC MTA-STS policies etc. [most of that time involved looking up what they were and why I needed them!] and [after testing with an unimportant account] migrating the rest of mine and my family's and friends' emails across from Gmail. I was able to import half a dozen accounts from Gmail with about 8GB of emails between them, using ImapSync [1] So far [fingers crossed] it's been almost painless. Giving the lie to the commonly held belief that running your own mailservers needs constant hands-on maintenance. My MIAB setup runs quite happily on a $5/month Linode [I checked the IP was not on any blacklists, before I started] and the whole thing has been pretty much 'fire and forget'. MIAB sends me weekly reports on what's been happening. Software updates are a one-liner in the terminal and I've had no trouble whatsoever with Google, Microsoft etc. as regards the mail not getting through. If you've always hankered after running your own mailserver but [as I did] thought it was too difficult and required too much 'hands on' tinkering, I heartily recommend you give MIAB a go. DISCLAIMER: I run a couple of dozen email addresses on 3 or 4 domains on my MIAB. Probably sending and receiving a few hundred emails a week between them. YMMV if you're a heavier user than this. [0] https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/ [1] https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ https://imapsync.lamiral.info/
- bmsleight_ 4y ago
  I found MailInABxo to be a dream. I ran it on home, with port forwarding etc with ease. It is great for having a project have a completely different identity. I want to get a used to a few upgrade cycles before I use it for a "main" email address - but I concur the ease of set-up and use. If it is for a separate project - normally only receiving emails are vital, sending has been ok even with low volume behind a residential IP.
- thunderbong 4y ago
Havoc 4y ago
Seems pretty high effort low reward compared to other self hosting adventures to be honest
efesak 4y ago
Running self-hosting email is not problem. There is so much solutions to run easily own server these days. But the main problem is that you need a lot of knowledge to do that properly - software might help but it will never be "run and forget" service type. For example large part of IT professionals which contacts our support (https://poste.io https://poste.io) don't get difference between SMTP envelope and from/to headers.
- juskrey 4y ago
  I ran mailinabox several years ago and forgot.. Even if they ever decide to charge for it, I’d pay
  - efesak 4y ago
    For only your personal use sure. If you run stack for more than couple users you will sooner or later hit problems not with software itself but with outer world.
- prox 4y ago
  Also the term “easy” is a terrible trap for any developer to use as a word. Easy would be flipping a switch, maybe one or two easy to remember credentials tops. Something like turning on your smartphone on for the first time. Heck, like 95% of open source fails in that regard. Hell, anything Linux fails (even though progress has been made, it falls halfway short still)
  - skohan 4y ago
    There's a ton of software that succeeds at being easy. NPM for example is amazing - just write a simple package.json file and 99% of the time you have a perfectly portable project which you can run anywhere with a few simple commands.
    - dns_snek 4y ago
      I have to wonder, is this satire? package.json is notorious for not pinning dependencies by default, leading to unexpected behavior such as dependencies being updated to new minor versions when you run `npm install`, which fails the principle of least surprise. You'll usually only learn about this after getting bitten by a bug in an auto-updated dependency and at that point you'll learn to manually pin your dependencies and use commands such as `npm ci` instead of `npm install` in your build pipeline. As such, navigating around the NPM world is anything but easy. There are razor sharp edges and footguns lying around everywhere, just waiting for you to use them.
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
Nice job, thanks! As a side not, taken who the author is, I had hope to have something responding to French requests :(
jrootabega 4y ago
The risk about self-hosting that still worries me the most: what happens when you piss someone off, they email you highly illegal images, and then they alert the authorities? It's in your mail, on infrastructure you own (for the moment), and possibly in your home or on your personal devices. With a larger provider, they would at least have a chance at blocking the content, and hopefully be involved in any investigation that happened. They probably know how to deal with that well because it probably happens from time to time. If you self-host, it's probably going to be a very direct, unpleasant, and harmful matter between the authorities and you, and the authorities will probably not be willing to understand your hacker ethos if they can just assume you're an evil scumbag. EDIT: I'm assuming here that, if you use e.g. gmail, you would be suspicious of any unsolicited attachments and not sync them to your personal devices. EDIT: If you're not worried about this happening once, what about if it happens once a month for several years?
- Aldipower 4y ago
  This could happen to everybody having an email address. Why is this self-hosting specific?
  - jrootabega 4y ago
    That's a good question, but it's so obvious that that's almost the point. So, to look at it another way, this isn't something anyone really worries about today with gmail et al. I agree. But if you host your mail on your cloud server, or even in your home, wouldn't you feel especially worried if you saw that you had received such illegal material? What do you even do? Do you wipe the server? How many logs do you keep just in case? Do you keep them for 5 years? 10? If you feel even slightly differently about those two options, that's the concern that is still unresolved for me. If you honestly don't, after having thought about it, then I would consider that a valid point of view here. One reason I would feel safer with larger providers is they would be better-equipped to block the content, better-equipped to deal with the authorities, and liable for the infrastructure itself. If the cops come to confiscate or investigate some of the hardware, they're going to be dealing with Google. They may also deal with you, but if you're savvy enough not to download attachments you don't expect to receive, you may have SOME buffer there. If it's clear you are hosting your own mail, you have absolutely no buffer. It's very likely to get all your home/cloud computing equipment seized. Maybe THAT's the part that's not realistic?
supermatt 4y ago
The irony: https://imgur.com/a/X3135Eh https://imgur.com/a/X3135Eh Must be using one of those incorrect regexp or something...
BirAdam 4y ago
I did dovecot/postfix, and then switched to mail in a box, but I am now just paying Proton. Proton is annoying because I need their bridge tool, but otherwise it’s fine.
dang 4y ago
Recent and related: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437 - Sept 2022 (628 comments) Email Done My Way, Part 0 – The Journey - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32719956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32719956 - Sept 2022 (10 comments)
lbriner 4y ago
I run 7 postfix servers for a company, we have not had any major problems (that are not now fixed) but this is because of a number of reasons: 1) Clean IP addresses. This can be hit-and-miss so you might need to move service providers since it seems like some (OVH, Linode) seem more likely to have been used by spammers before. We have also held the IPs for a while. We have servers at 3 different VPS providers. 2) Making sure you setup DKIM/SPF properly. We see plenty of mail from others that doesn't align properly - accidentally or by ignorance - and it can mean very different things: GMail is quite forgiving but Yahoo (and their children) are very strict about alignment 3) Using the various tools available like mxtoolbox and the various blacklist checkers. We had a problem the other day because the parent domain was linked with Vidahosts (an old email provider) so even though the subdomains were clean, one domain didn't care and strongly greylisted us (some got through!) 4) Making sure your postfix installation is up-to-date and not fiddled with too much. Postfix includes features to retry greylisted mail and to backoff if it gets a "Too Many Requests" response from the other end. 5) Use https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ to check a mail sent from your domain, it can reveal all kinds of things you might not have set up correctly. 6) Understand your DMARC policy - even having one is a good idea even if it is p=quarantine Most of all, before complaining about the large providers, think about how you would deal with SPAMmers and you might understand why they do certain things. Blocking ranges of IPs might seem harsh but is a much quicker way to deal with higher volumes than trying to filter each IP; more email can be better than less. Sending very low volumes doesn't allow you to build up a good reputation, especially since you can not trust by default on the web; greylisting (retry after 1 minute) is a reasonable way to block a lot of lazy SPAM attempts while allowing properly configured servers to get through.
jacooper 4y ago
Personally, I find the most realistic use case for self hosted email is service email. The user is actively seeking the email, spam filters won't matter, and its easier to get out of spam once other email providers recognize its a legit service. I host email on a Hetzner dedicated server, and it arrives in inbox on gmail, not Outlook though. But that didn't affect anyone really, its OK. I use postal, but Maddy looks interesting.
bcrl 4y ago
You're running a mailing list with a web signup form that doesn't even use a captcha to filter out bots. That's going to result in a bad reputation for your mail server. At the bare minimum you need to put some barriers between pressing Subscribe and sending out an email. I've run mailing lists for decades without trouble, but the barrier to making my mail server send an email to someone has more friction, and therefore can't be abused quite so easily.
mbrodersen 4y ago
I recently switched my email domain to a different DNS and the amount of opaque random knowledge needed to make that work is crazy. Is there a guide somewhere explaining why the 20+ DNS records are needed to receive email? It seems to be way more complicated than necessary.

I wonder if we are legally entitled to have our email getting delivered if we have a record of playing by the rules and are no known bad actors.

hardwaresofton 4y ago
This sounds like the kind of measure the EU could pass and enshrine as an example for the rest of the free world. The idea of specifying "bad actors" is a little suspect but is already how the system works implicitly (and explicitly)... Requiring fair email delivery from standards-compliant businesses with a clear path to escalation at the government level might be amazing. For all of GDPR's warts and criticisms it's almost surely a net positive for consumers, so maybe this could be another piece of legislation in the same vein. Of course I'm not so naive (or rather I'm too cynical) to believe that governments are simply doing the bidding of the people, but I don't think I mind them mining this new revenue stream a bit in an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend kind of way.

peter_retief 4y ago

I am using mailinabox which works for me. Setting up mail from scratch is too complex and time absorbing. I am keen to look at the other options you mention now.

As_You_Wish 4y ago

This is totally not true, at least last time I checked 2 years ago when I decided to make the jump from the large email providers. email systems are retarded. They throw all kinds of acronyms, apps, subapps, etc at you. Why isn't there just some damn app that you can to to a website, click on download and install, and it is up and running? Everywhere I read, I was cautioned it was difficult because you always have to upgrade security with new patches, for example. Why are they even bothering me with this knowledge? Why would I have to do it? Can't people doing email apps figure out how to continuously update everything so I don't have to think about it? I simply do not have the time to figure it all out. I have other responsibilities taking up my time. I have a computer science degree, and have worked on all kinds of apps, but I can't figure the stuff out, how is somebody else going to do it "easily"? I've always thought someone could automate the entire thing, but no. And so, I got tutanota. Less than a minute for getting an email up and running. It should be that way to self-host, like any other app in the world. I didn't choose proton mail because it was WAY more expensive. I have multiple emails, and don't want to use aliases, heck with that. So buying multiple emails is WAY more expensive on Protonmail. If there is a simple one-step email hosting app, they sure as hell hide it very well. Because believe me, I looked. For those who want to explain why, I have a computer science degree. I can sort of guess why. But the reasons don't interest me. I just need a one-step self-hosted service. End of story. I'm not mad or bitter. I'm just being direct at outlining my experience and frustrations. But I'm ok now, not frustrated anymore. Except when I think back on it....like now. :)

na85 4y ago

A few months ago I wrote a comment on HN about algorithmic trading and someone emailed me about it. I sent him a reply from my self-hosted email domain, and I have no idea if he got it. I'm on a clean IP and clean domain, with a reputable hoster. I have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up correctly. Just last week I sent my gmail account a test email and sure enough it went to spam. There appears to be no rhyme or reason about it. I believe the difference between people who say "email self-hosting is dead" and people who say "email self-hosting is trivial" is probably the volume of mail sent from their domain(s). At my busiest, I was sending dozens of emails per day, but they were all from my work account. My personal account is pretty close to recv-only and probably averages an outgoing message count in the single digits per week. How can I reasonably keep an IP/domain reputation score fresh/warm if I send such a low volume? The answer is I realistically can't. Self-hosted email remains an extremely difficult and time-consuming endeavor unless you happen to have some good luck, it seems.

walrus01 4y ago
Almost certainly a large part of your problem is that your individual IP address is in a shared net block that has other neighbors that have historically been a source of spam. Unless you can get hosting at an ISP that does not sell low budget, commercial virtual private server, virtual machine or dedicated hosting to random people with $20 and a credit card, this will be an ongoing problem.
- na85 4y ago
  As far as I can tell the host (Joe's Data center) has a clean ASN. I'm open to recommendations for clean IPs/providers.
hardwaresofton 4y ago
I'm going to update the article with this but one thing from the original HN discussion that was recommended is: https://improvmx.com/ https://improvmx.com/ Run your own email servers, but relay through there for better delivery? Maybe this is what we need more of -- A class of mail system participants who exclusively maintain trusted IPs and do the legwork of trying to get through the gnarly systems set up by the other large email providers. [EDIT] - "forward" -> "relay" for clarity I don't know the solution but I know it needs to be discussed.

walrus01 4y ago

Postfix and dovecot are not some evil "oligopoly", they're community based truly open source software. Almost none of the things linked there are run by serious isps that are responsible for other peoples' mail in quantities of tens of thousands of inboxes or more. Resist the urge to reinvent the wheel just to be a contrarian. Edit: yes, I see the issue, the mention of postfix+dovecot is jammed together in the same small paragraph as the oligopoly. It's as if they are being discussed as the same thing. The oligopoly is clearly google, office 365, etc. One hundred percent in agreement there.

muti 4y ago
I think the point is that there are easier options than postfix and dovecot for most self host cases, the oligopoly is formed by other entities.
hardwaresofton 4y ago
I'm not sure how the post came across as Postfix and Dovecot being the monopoly... Just to be clear, the oligopoly are the large email providers (Gmail and friends). > Almost none of the things linked there are run by serious isps that are responsible for other peoples' mail in quantities of tens of thousands of inboxes or more. Software doesn't have to be run by a large ISP to be worth running for people. Even at tens of thousands of inboxes (which is something post people don't need). Good software is out there for running self-hosted email and people should know about it. [EDIT] The post must have been unclear, I've edited it so hopefully no one will think I'm bashing postfix/dovecot. I've even tried to make them easier to use in the past[0], but gave up when I realized that there was better software out there that completely sidestepped the problem. [0]: https://gitlab.com/postmgr/postmgr https://gitlab.com/postmgr/postmgr
pevey 4y ago
I remember when sendmail was the de facto standard, and postfix was the lighter-weight new kid on the block. I’ve had my own domain since the 90s and self-hosted at one point out of my dorm room. I continued for years after, but I gave it up before I ran into issues with deliverability. It was largely due to issues from the other side of the equation: Too much spam in my inbox and not enough time and motivation on my part to keep fighting it. I noticed my throw-away gmail account had pretty good spam filtering, so when moving my Mx to gmail became an option, I threw in the self-hosting towel. EDIT: Again, with perspective from the other side of the spam fight, I wonder if anyone self-hosting on a non-residential IP that is having almost ZERO of their emails go through successfully has their DMARC set up properly. I use gmail for my own personal domain, but Microsoft 365 setups I manage for companies all use the strictest filters for emails without a tight spf rule (and a pass) and not using DKIM. Those are just not optional these days, unfortunately.

jedberg 4y ago

Self hosted email without deliverability is useless. It’s like saying “it’s easier than ever to build a car! But you can’t drive it on the street”. I would say deliverability is the most important feature for email.

hardwaresofton 4y ago
> I would say deliverability is the most important feature for email. You're not wrong, but the thing is, the deliverability problem is not completely broken. I don't have a problem sending emails with my self-hosted stack with DKIM, DMARC, and SPF set up. That said, some people do. I lightly monitor my domains to make sure they're not on blacklists and have figured out how to get things working over time. The battle isn't lost yet -- some people have problems and others do, but discouraging people from self-hosting is not the way to fix it. My main point is that while deliverability can still be hard, many of the other things that made sending email hard (configuring postfix, dovecot and DNS correctly) have become drastically easier.
- jedberg 4y ago
  But how much time do you spend dealing with that? Is it worth it? I self hosted my email for more than a decade but I gave up when the time spent was just too much.
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    > But how much time do you spend dealing with that? Is it worth it? Oh not much now -- to be honest with you 99% of the time when it's an issue it's because I changed something on my side. Maybe I got lucky with the IPs I have (I use dedicated servers), and I've held them a while. What was jarring about the original post by Carlos is that he did all that AND he's been doing it 23 years and it was still a problem. It made me recall that one of the things I struggled with a long time ago was just setting up Postfix/Dovecot correctly. These days no one should be running into that. > I self hosted my email for more than a decade but I gave up when the time spent was just too much. Unfortunately I don't doubt this assessment. I just want people to know that if difficulty/technical work was a blocker, it is now mostly not (with the news software out there). As other people pointed out, there are services for improving deliverability that could fix the other (bigger) issue, and hopefully people could consider doing that going forward. At the end of the day people have to do what's right for them of course but I just want people to know that things HAVE gotten easier. It's the big companies that are making it hard now.

p-e-w 4y ago

It's not just self-hosted email that's dead, it's email itself. The federated system where clients and servers exchange messages according to well-defined standards doesn't exist anymore. Most clients now special-case Gmail because they have all but deprecated POP and IMAP. Push notifications, essential for seeing mail "in time", are a proprietary, inconsistent mess. Receiving servers use all kinds of voodoo to determine whether a message is acceptable to them, much of which is powered by proprietary software and semi-secret block/allowlists. Attachments are barely usable because Outlook uses a format that many other clients don't understand. Large providers have hardcoded logic for marking messages from "trusted" senders like banks and online shops, so some senders are more equal than others. Meanwhile zero meaningful progress in decades to address the protocols' basic shortcomings like lack of encryption, replies that don't involve sending hundreds of pages back and forth, ...

closeparen 4y ago
Practically every small business premise in every minor suburb of America contains (or used to) self-hosted email in a closet somewhere: Microsoft Exchange. As far as I can tell, IMAP has always been a sideshow, the real story has always been Microsoft.
- nrbsef 4y ago
  for the last decade those exchange installs have been disappearing in favor of office365
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    We once had a mainframe and storage servers in the cupboard, now its cloud based. Email has transitioned in the same manner, from local exchange servers to the cloud offering.
yessirwhatever 4y ago
Never ceases to amaze me how ignorant people continue to make such deranged and wide generations with little or no evidence. Let me guess, email is dead? RSS is also dead right? Literally no one ever uses them anymore. You probably think that all businesses should just all switch to TikTok and communicate with memes and dance routines.

echelon 4y ago

I think I may have finally found a use for bitcoin! For a nominal cryptocurrency fee, my email server won't reject your inbound email. If I respond, you may even get it back. The more you send me, the higher priority I'll flag it.

easrng 4y ago
That was actually the original application of proof-of-work, before it was used for cryptocurrency. AFAIK it was never widely deployed.

9woc 4y ago

I'm self-hosting and I'm using mailgun to solve the delivery issues. Free-tier of up to 1K messages per month is good enough for a personal domain.

hardwaresofton 4y ago
Funnily enough, I'm actually working on something (a proxy) that turns the Mailgun API into SMTP/Listmonk[0], since I was annoyed that Ghost only allows Mailgun. Great to hear they're a solution for this though -- will update my article to reflect them next to ImprovMX. [0]: https://github.com/knadh/listmonk https://github.com/knadh/listmonk
- wzwy 4y ago
  From what I’ve read on this page[0], Ghost does allow other providers which I presume includes self-hosted emails. > I still want to use a different provider to send email newsletters, why can’t I do that? You can. There is no requirement to use Ghost’s built in newsletter delivery feature. Before we released this feature, thousands of people sent their newsletter using all sorts of other services such as Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Convertkit, and many others. You can easily sync your members database to an external newsletter provider via Zapier, or by following our detailed integration guides. I don’t know anything about self-hosting, but I’m curious to know if there’s no place for self-hosted email servers when it comes to integrating with Ghost. [0]https://ghost.org/docs/faq/mailgun-newsletters/ https://ghost.org/docs/faq/mailgun-newsletters/
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    > From what I’ve read on this page[0], Ghost does allow other providers which I presume includes self-hosted emails. Yup, "transactional" emails can be sent via a variety of methods, but "bulk" email can't. I think the differentiation between transactional and bulk email is also bullshit (and a result of a broken underlying ecosystem) but that's a different story. > I don’t know anything about self-hosting, but I’m curious to know if there’s no place for self-hosted email servers when it comes to integrating with Ghost. Just to be clear, transactions emails are fine, but bulk email is not. I personally think Ghost just didn't want to unleash a wave of under-prepared people into the difficult problem of email deliverability. Letting people use SMTP servers would immediately lead to people using their own postfix setups, GMail, transactional providers that offer SMTP, etc -- probably instantly leading to many people being banned for unintended use (there's that bullshit again), and people either being angry at Ghost or filing issues against Ghost about email not working. What's unfortunate is that they didn't really shim it out so it's easy to replace Mailgun... Which is why I'm embarking on this quixotic quest at all. It may end up being helpful down the road though, API aggregation has been a common theme for my ideas lately.

hardwaresofton 4y ago

Another solution to this problem is relaying through services which will do the heavy lifting for you (this was been discussed in the original thread, here and in the article I wrote). So far people have suggested: - ImprovMX (https://improvmx.com https://improvmx.com) - Mailgun (https://mailgun.com https://mailgun.com) - Postmark (https://postmarkapp.com https://postmarkapp.com) Commenting for visibility: as any others come in I will update this comment (until I can't, anyway) and the article as a reference.

deepspace 4y ago
But if you go that fire, you might as well use a third party for the entire stack. If you would rather not use the big 3/4/5, use something like Fastmail. They are an extremely reliable email provider, without the baggage of Google/Microsoft.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  I’d rather use Proton Mail since they’re in a country with reasonable privacy/encryption laws, and generally don’t welcome government over reach.
bounder 4y ago
A good addition to this list is https://postmarkapp.com/ https://postmarkapp.com/. They are meet EU law in regards to the GDPR. They don’t have a free tier for their relay service, but do have a nice free reporting tool for DMARC.
- linker3000 4y ago
  Can agree with this. Having slogged through the learning process of setting up DMARC and DKIM to supplement SPF, this site was a great help and allowed me to confirm my setup (Postfix and Dovecot) was behaving as expected and needed. The only issue I have with a Postfix setup is providing an easy-to-use out of office auto-reply facility - I have tried the manual approach and also some scripted solutions but they don't seem to work reliably and, inevitably, I get comments from colleagues (it's a small, family-run business), that they just want to be able to turn on an auto-reply in Outlook (which is used as a front end for multiple inboxes on different mail services) and for it to 'just work'.

shotgunner 4y ago

Also consider this: https://poste.io https://poste.io this has well documented and prevent going emails to spam with set DNS MX and SPF

defanor 4y ago

The "harder" argument is the regular deliverability uncertainty, while the "easier" one is availability of some less known and supposedly user-friendly software projects. I doubt they make it easier in the long run though: as with much of other new and supposedly user-friendly software, it's tempting to recommend that to new users (and they may prefer it anyway), but then all sorts of issues arise: often it's not in system repositories, so no updates (no automated/frequently happening in practice ones, that is), and there are occasional semi-broken manual installations, then there's a lack of documentation and community, probably it'll be abandoned in a few years, and generally you get all the characteristics of experimental/immature software, where you need more advanced skills to debug and maintain it than those needed to just use mature software. Throwing that onto new users, over the much more mature software, doesn't look like a good idea to me.

s_dev 4y ago

https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/

highwaylights 4y ago

It hurts my soul to see a well-reasoned and well-intentioned post like this start off with good advice then immediately recommend ProtonMail. ProtonMail is about the single worst experience I’ve ever had with Big Email. I really do wonder how many people they’ve harmed but get away with it because the happy path works for most people most of the time. The worry I have with something like Gmail or Outlook is that they can just take away your access to your inbox without reason or recourse, but it’s never actually happened to anyone I know. It happened with ProtonMail though - I set up an account for a family member, updated some of their online registrations to point to it, then a couple of days later it was locked out permanently. Thankfully they hadn’t got to the point of using the account for anything they cared about yet, just a couple of big retailer mailing lists (they’re not the most tech literate so move very slowly with things like this). Literally it was receiving mailing list emails from two well known, non-shady retailers and that’s it. Password not forgotten, No way to have the account unlocked, no way to find out why it was locked, no way to have the account deleted, no way to get access to repoint the accounts using that address because now ProtonMail owned those other website accounts (not your email not your account). Pretty much just [you can’t have your account back, you can’t find out why, you can’t appeal, and every email that ever lands here in the future belongs to us now so go fish]. They are by a long way the worst experience I ever had with a provider of any online service, so much so that I’ve since moved my own e-mail that was there back to outlook before some arbitrary spam caused the same thing to happen to me. Never again.

sierkov 4y ago
- Big claims - No details or evidence to back them - Happened to you more than once Sure. We'll just believe that ProtonMail locks accounts randomly, for no reason. Or was spam the reason? If that was true, everyone would be locked out because, well, everyone is getting spam.
- YesWeWill 4y ago
  Yes, we will, since it happened to others of us. What kind of evidence would you like? My account is inaccessible. Should I tell you the password so you can try yourself or what?

madmanweb 4y ago

I tried to set up an account on the ImprovMX service the article recommend. Their verification email never reached my GMail account. Nothing in spam either. That's a non-starter straight away.

bounder 4y ago

I am pretty happy with the Synology network drive I use for self-hosting email. Synology has developed a business email suite which comes with 5 mailboxes. You can buy permanent additional mailboxes for the price of what you normally would pay yearly to big tech. The mailbox suite is fully featured with easy to setup anti spam measures and an intelligent spam filter you can train by forwarding spam and not spam messages to it. I can certainly recommend it should you want to self-host from home.

jesterson 4y ago

I don't really see a value or point in this article, unless it is sponsored by ProtonMail. Life is hard so let's surrender and use WhateverMail service? That's a very pathetic way, that's how corporations thrive and screw us later. You shouldn't stop doing something just because someone did it for 20 years and failed. Some people learn - others are just getting older. That's defeatist mentality. I've personally selfhosted mail for 20+ years as well and see no reason why I would stop it. And yea, I use postfix + dovecot. 50+ domains. 2M messages a day on some domains. Everything works and costs $0. You can calculate yourself how much services like Postmark will charge you for similar volume. It's not a brag but attempt to show something is absolutely doable as contrary to someone who "did it for 20 years and gave up".

p5j2MAhgSivABmE 4y ago

cmeacham98 4y ago
The secret to winning against spam while only needing a basic spam filter is to buy your own domain, setup a redirect/alias for *@yourdomain.com, and use multiple addresses. When you start receiving spam on an address burn it and setup a rule to move all email it receives to spam. This has the dual benefit of letting you know who sold your email (or got compromised). I personally use Fastmail, but this should all be possible relatively easily with your own mail server as well.
olau 4y ago
I've seen people lose email with gmail. It's sent to the gmail account, but it never shows up, not in the inbox and not in spam.
- account42 4y ago
  Exactly, Gmail's spam filters aren't good they are just aggressive. Getting 0 spam is easy: just drop all mail. Getting less spam while not dropping any legit mail is significantly harder - and Gmail fails on that. Then again, I don't really care about receiving even 40-50 spam mails per day since it does not take long to scan over the subjects to double check that no legit mail got flagged. I'd rather do that then miss a mail I care about.
timbit42 4y ago
Google's spam filters aren't very good these days. I still get spam in my gmail account and my non-gmail accounts sometimes get spam from gmail addresses.
- Avamander 4y ago
  That is very good that you're receiving only a few spam emails.

avanttech 4y ago

Could there be a serverless alternative where the service wakes up only to receive emails and will be charged only when emails are processed, filtered and served & rest of the time no charge - avoiding $3 to $5 charged by behemoths per inbox? Idea is how cheap can it go for personal inbox with all the features denied by the superlative pricing plans

hardwaresofton 4y ago
> Could there be a serverless alternative where the service wakes up only to receive emails and will be charged only when emails are processed, filtered and served & rest of the time no charge - avoiding $3 to $5 charged by behemoths per inbox? I love ideas as much as the next guy and serverless email is kind of floating out there: https://medium.com/schibsted-engineering/building-a-serverless-email-delivery-service-on-aws-9269f55533a0 https://medium.com/schibsted-engineering/building-a-serverle... https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email It's possible to build it, but the problem is that you still have the same problem of deliverability. Obviously it works fine/great for receving emails though. > Idea is how cheap can it go for personal inbox with all the features denied by the superlative pricing plans It could get really cheap, but would people buy it? I always wonder if price is really the limiting factor for self hosted emails. Zoho is already QUITE cheap: https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html Maybe this would work as a business, but it's a bit questionable to me.
fakedcake 4y ago
The biggest roadblock to serverless email is that it doesn't use the http protocol. Afaik all serverless providers only process http(s) requests, usually specifically on port 80/443 only, so SMTP/POP3/IMAP don't simply work serverless. You'd need at least a proxy that wraps them in http, or convince all email services to support a new http based protocol. Arguably, a http based email protocol would be a good thing. Not only would it enable serverless, it would also enable all the features of http/2&3, like compression, multiplexing and better pipelining. Someone would just need to define it. The downside would be that VPS providers can not limit mail spam from their servers by just blocking outbound traffic on certain ports, so you'd find all their IPs to quickly be blacklisted. So the protocol should ideally somehow also offer some form of spam detection/prevention that works better than simple IP blacklists to prevent that.

vbernat 4y ago

The solution is to forward your outgoing emails through a 9$/month provider? It feels like paying protection.

hardwaresofton 4y ago
That's one solution, and it is like paying protection, and it sucks. Can't fix the problem if everyone just stops self-hosting email though. I'm personally hoping the magic of free market competition drives down these costs (at least), and in the meantime we can know how to steer clear of the centralization.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  The free market competition means that spammers will come along and pay their protection money as well and there goes the service.
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    > The free market competition means that spammers will come along and pay their protection money as well and there goes the service. And the free market competition will ensure that those providers make stopping spammers (at the source -- signing up for an email service) their priority. Spammers still use SES! Just the other day I found an SES IP blocked by Spamhaus. I'd argue smaller providers can be even better than AWS at preventing spammers from signing up -- they just need to play like smaller providers and actually vet/accept through referral/etc. Smaller providers also must be much more careful about accepting spammers, so this helps keep them sharp -- and hopefully we get to a bigger smorgasbord of choices. [0]: https://vadosware.io/post/even-amazon-ses-has-ips-blocked-by-spamhaus-sometimes/ https://vadosware.io/post/even-amazon-ses-has-ips-blocked-by...
- RobMurray 4y ago
  I use AWS Simple Email Service to relay my outgoing mail. It costs almost nothing.

raffraffraff 4y ago

The hard thing is reliable sending. Receiving is easy, you just point an MX record somewhere. And the two are separate concepts. For cheap reliable sending, you can set up AWS SES with DKIM/SPF etc. Unless you're sending large volumes it costs basically nothing. That's my 2c.

dusted 4y ago

Self hosted == Running software on your own machine. Not some VPS.

dark-star 4y ago
umm... if the VPS is yours, then it is still self hosted
- dusted 4y ago
  Usually, VPS is taken to mean the virtual private server that is rented at some company, not one of the virtual machines you host on the physical hardware that is located on your private property. It's real simple, if you don't own the hardware, if it's not physically available to you to go whack with an axe, then you don't own anything, you're just renting and entirely at the mercy of whoever you're renting from.
  - dark-star 4y ago
    self-hosting doesn't mean you have to own the hardware? Also, "owning" and "being able to walk over and physically whack it with an axe" are not the same thing. Servers can be leased, and there is something called "server housing" which breaks your analogy
    - dusted 4y ago
      yea, it does not, because people are using the word wrong.. Saying you own your leased server is the same as saying you own your rented apartment or leased car.. It's not yours if it's someone elses, in the same way the movies on netflix are inherently less yours than the movies on your laserdiscs, dvd's or blu-rays.
account42 4y ago
What exactly are you trying to achieve with that distinction. Obviously, if you can host at home then you have more control then over a VPS but it is also more work, especially if you want to prevent any disruption. Basically, your options are in increasing amount of control you have: 1) Free email provider (you have not recourse for anything) 2) Paid email provider (a little better) 3) Free/paid email provider with your own domain (gives you disaster recovery without the provider's cooperation) 4) Running your own MX but doing delivery via another provider (perhaps a bit more privacy) 5) Running your own MTA/etc. on a managed host, e.g. a VPS 6) Running your own MTA/etc. on a colocated host 7) Running your own MTA/etc. on a host on your own premises Even with the strictest definition of self hosting, i.e. (7) you still are subject to your ISP recording who you communicate with (and more since SMTP is not consistently encrypted) and are still subject to law enforcement accessing your data. (6) and (5) mean you do need to trust your hoster to not look at the data on your instance but at least for now that seems to be a reasonable asumption unlike for (1) to (4) where at least automated scans you don't control are the norm.

jokoon 4y ago

What are the best solutions to catch spam for self hosted email?

sgt 4y ago

I like maddy - would like to spend some time setting it up and experimenting. What webmail options are recommended to use with maddy? Some users want webmail as well, not just IMAP.

cheesecreaser 4y ago
I've been using alps[1]. Its pretty rough around the edges but its handy enough. there is also things like roundcube which is fairly popular [1]: https://sr.ht/~migadu/alps/ https://sr.ht/~migadu/alps/

cm2187 4y ago

And if you prefer to use windows, smartermail is a very good mail server software. It has smtp, pop, imap, webmail and (if you buy the commercial version) activesync.

fareesh 4y ago

Murphy's law says that if you self-host your email, the day you need it to work more than ever, is the day when it will let you down

chalst 4y ago
Murphy's law also says that if you trust your email provision to one of the mail oligopolists, the day you first hear of someone close to you having their account shut down for no intelligible reason will be the day it happens to you when you most need it to work.
- account42 4y ago
  And unless your need is extremely time sensitive you can probably fix your own mail setup while good luck getting anything out of Google support for a free service.

wzwy 4y ago

> *All together, here are some alternate email providers: - ProtonMail - FastMail - Mailbox* Anyone uses or used to use Tutanota? That’s the only privacy-focused email provider I know of aside from ProtonMail. And why is having a data center in Germany a selling point for some of these email providers?

inbx0 4y ago
I use Tutanota and it's... fine for my needs. The web app is ok but it'd be nice if there was something like Proton Mail Bridge [1] for Tutanota so I could use my own email client. I guess having data center inside EU could be a plus for EU citizens? 1: https://proton.me/mail/bridge https://proton.me/mail/bridge
Kovah 4y ago
> And why is having a data center in Germany a selling point for some of these email providers? The EU, and Germany especially, have strong privacy regulations and laws to protect their citizens. Having a datacenter in the EU does not mean that your data can't be accessed by authorities at all, but it's harder than in other countries. At least in Germany, a judge-signed request with a specific reason is needed to get data from any email provider. Mailbox even publishes a transparency report[1] with details about said requests: in 2021 they just received 65 requests, 15% were incorrect. 61 of those requests were just about the contact data of the account owner, not even emails or any other data stored. [1]: https://mailbox.org/en/post/transparency-report-2021 https://mailbox.org/en/post/transparency-report-2021
- stop50 4y ago
  The german provider posteo publishes every year anonymized requests and why they denied them.
- dns_snek 4y ago
  > The EU, and Germany especially, have strong privacy regulations and laws to protect their citizens. This could quickly be changing with proposed mass-surveillance "Chat control" legislation which would force all providers to scan the contents of all messages, emails and other communications. https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/messaging-and-chat-control/ https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/messaging-and-chat-co...

kristov 4y ago

It costs more or less the same amount of money to send one email as it does to send hundreds of thousands of emails. So spammers send hundreds of thousands of emails and they only need to fool one person to make it worthwhile financially. Is anyone doing work around "proof of work" email sending? Could a blockchain be used to make the cost of bulk email sending proportional to the volume?

hardwaresofton 4y ago
This is a awesome idea kernel. Somewhat related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32340305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32340305 https://github.com/mCaptcha/mCaptcha https://github.com/mCaptcha/mCaptcha
webdelv 4y ago
http://www.hashcash.org/ http://www.hashcash.org/
sushibowl 4y ago
The "chain" element is completely unnecessary here, since emails do not need to be strictly ordered (as opposed to currency transactions, where order is crucial). So all you need is to consider each e-mail like a standalone block and apply a proof of work to it. This is not new, by the way. Preventing spam was the original application for PoW way before the blockchain existed. First proposed in 1997 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash The downside is that it can be tricky to correctly tune the difficulty factor for a wide variety of e-mail sending hardware with wildly varying computing power available.
p49k 4y ago
The original/first proof of work proposal, Hashcash, was in fact designed to solve email spam. It obviously served as the inspiration for Bitcoin’s proof of work component.

Normille 4y ago

I'm surprised no-one in the comments has mentioned MailInABox [0]. On recommendations here, I switched to it 2 or 3 months ago from Gmail, after Google announced they were going to start charging for Gmail on custom domains. I'd no previous experience at all with running my own mailservers and had always been put off by how complicated it seemed. Even with a non supported configuration setup [running the mailserver for my domain on a separate VPS from the domain itself] MIAB setup was pretty easy. I had it installed and was up and running in no time. I then spent a couple of days setting up the various DMARC MTA-STS policies etc. [most of that time involved looking up what they were and why I needed them!] and [after testing with an unimportant account] migrating the rest of mine and my family's and friends' emails across from Gmail. I was able to import half a dozen accounts from Gmail with about 8GB of emails between them, using ImapSync [1] So far [fingers crossed] it's been almost painless. Giving the lie to the commonly held belief that running your own mailservers needs constant hands-on maintenance. My MIAB setup runs quite happily on a $5/month Linode [I checked the IP was not on any blacklists, before I started] and the whole thing has been pretty much 'fire and forget'. MIAB sends me weekly reports on what's been happening. Software updates are a one-liner in the terminal and I've had no trouble whatsoever with Google, Microsoft etc. as regards the mail not getting through. If you've always hankered after running your own mailserver but [as I did] thought it was too difficult and required too much 'hands on' tinkering, I heartily recommend you give MIAB a go. DISCLAIMER: I run a couple of dozen email addresses on 3 or 4 domains on my MIAB. Probably sending and receiving a few hundred emails a week between them. YMMV if you're a heavier user than this. [0] https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/ [1] https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ https://imapsync.lamiral.info/

bmsleight_ 4y ago
I found MailInABxo to be a dream. I ran it on home, with port forwarding etc with ease. It is great for having a project have a completely different identity. I want to get a used to a few upgrade cycles before I use it for a "main" email address - but I concur the ease of set-up and use. If it is for a separate project - normally only receiving emails are vital, sending has been ok even with low volume behind a residential IP.
thunderbong 4y ago

Havoc 4y ago

Seems pretty high effort low reward compared to other self hosting adventures to be honest

efesak 4y ago

Running self-hosting email is not problem. There is so much solutions to run easily own server these days. But the main problem is that you need a lot of knowledge to do that properly - software might help but it will never be "run and forget" service type. For example large part of IT professionals which contacts our support (https://poste.io https://poste.io) don't get difference between SMTP envelope and from/to headers.

juskrey 4y ago
I ran mailinabox several years ago and forgot.. Even if they ever decide to charge for it, I’d pay
- efesak 4y ago
  For only your personal use sure. If you run stack for more than couple users you will sooner or later hit problems not with software itself but with outer world.
prox 4y ago
Also the term “easy” is a terrible trap for any developer to use as a word. Easy would be flipping a switch, maybe one or two easy to remember credentials tops. Something like turning on your smartphone on for the first time. Heck, like 95% of open source fails in that regard. Hell, anything Linux fails (even though progress has been made, it falls halfway short still)
- skohan 4y ago
  There's a ton of software that succeeds at being easy. NPM for example is amazing - just write a simple package.json file and 99% of the time you have a perfectly portable project which you can run anywhere with a few simple commands.
  - dns_snek 4y ago
    I have to wonder, is this satire? package.json is notorious for not pinning dependencies by default, leading to unexpected behavior such as dependencies being updated to new minor versions when you run `npm install`, which fails the principle of least surprise. You'll usually only learn about this after getting bitten by a bug in an auto-updated dependency and at that point you'll learn to manually pin your dependencies and use commands such as `npm ci` instead of `npm install` in your build pipeline. As such, navigating around the NPM world is anything but easy. There are razor sharp edges and footguns lying around everywhere, just waiting for you to use them.

BrandoElFollito 4y ago

Nice job, thanks! As a side not, taken who the author is, I had hope to have something responding to French requests :(

jrootabega 4y ago

The risk about self-hosting that still worries me the most: what happens when you piss someone off, they email you highly illegal images, and then they alert the authorities? It's in your mail, on infrastructure you own (for the moment), and possibly in your home or on your personal devices. With a larger provider, they would at least have a chance at blocking the content, and hopefully be involved in any investigation that happened. They probably know how to deal with that well because it probably happens from time to time. If you self-host, it's probably going to be a very direct, unpleasant, and harmful matter between the authorities and you, and the authorities will probably not be willing to understand your hacker ethos if they can just assume you're an evil scumbag. EDIT: I'm assuming here that, if you use e.g. gmail, you would be suspicious of any unsolicited attachments and not sync them to your personal devices. EDIT: If you're not worried about this happening once, what about if it happens once a month for several years?

Aldipower 4y ago
This could happen to everybody having an email address. Why is this self-hosting specific?
- jrootabega 4y ago
  That's a good question, but it's so obvious that that's almost the point. So, to look at it another way, this isn't something anyone really worries about today with gmail et al. I agree. But if you host your mail on your cloud server, or even in your home, wouldn't you feel especially worried if you saw that you had received such illegal material? What do you even do? Do you wipe the server? How many logs do you keep just in case? Do you keep them for 5 years? 10? If you feel even slightly differently about those two options, that's the concern that is still unresolved for me. If you honestly don't, after having thought about it, then I would consider that a valid point of view here. One reason I would feel safer with larger providers is they would be better-equipped to block the content, better-equipped to deal with the authorities, and liable for the infrastructure itself. If the cops come to confiscate or investigate some of the hardware, they're going to be dealing with Google. They may also deal with you, but if you're savvy enough not to download attachments you don't expect to receive, you may have SOME buffer there. If it's clear you are hosting your own mail, you have absolutely no buffer. It's very likely to get all your home/cloud computing equipment seized. Maybe THAT's the part that's not realistic?

supermatt 4y ago

The irony: https://imgur.com/a/X3135Eh https://imgur.com/a/X3135Eh Must be using one of those incorrect regexp or something...

BirAdam 4y ago

I did dovecot/postfix, and then switched to mail in a box, but I am now just paying Proton. Proton is annoying because I need their bridge tool, but otherwise it’s fine.

dang 4y ago

Recent and related: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437 - Sept 2022 (628 comments) Email Done My Way, Part 0 – The Journey - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32719956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32719956 - Sept 2022 (10 comments)

lbriner 4y ago

I run 7 postfix servers for a company, we have not had any major problems (that are not now fixed) but this is because of a number of reasons: 1) Clean IP addresses. This can be hit-and-miss so you might need to move service providers since it seems like some (OVH, Linode) seem more likely to have been used by spammers before. We have also held the IPs for a while. We have servers at 3 different VPS providers. 2) Making sure you setup DKIM/SPF properly. We see plenty of mail from others that doesn't align properly - accidentally or by ignorance - and it can mean very different things: GMail is quite forgiving but Yahoo (and their children) are very strict about alignment 3) Using the various tools available like mxtoolbox and the various blacklist checkers. We had a problem the other day because the parent domain was linked with Vidahosts (an old email provider) so even though the subdomains were clean, one domain didn't care and strongly greylisted us (some got through!) 4) Making sure your postfix installation is up-to-date and not fiddled with too much. Postfix includes features to retry greylisted mail and to backoff if it gets a "Too Many Requests" response from the other end. 5) Use https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ to check a mail sent from your domain, it can reveal all kinds of things you might not have set up correctly. 6) Understand your DMARC policy - even having one is a good idea even if it is p=quarantine Most of all, before complaining about the large providers, think about how you would deal with SPAMmers and you might understand why they do certain things. Blocking ranges of IPs might seem harsh but is a much quicker way to deal with higher volumes than trying to filter each IP; more email can be better than less. Sending very low volumes doesn't allow you to build up a good reputation, especially since you can not trust by default on the web; greylisting (retry after 1 minute) is a reasonable way to block a lot of lazy SPAM attempts while allowing properly configured servers to get through.

jacooper 4y ago

Personally, I find the most realistic use case for self hosted email is service email. The user is actively seeking the email, spam filters won't matter, and its easier to get out of spam once other email providers recognize its a legit service. I host email on a Hetzner dedicated server, and it arrives in inbox on gmail, not Outlook though. But that didn't affect anyone really, its OK. I use postal, but Maddy looks interesting.

bcrl 4y ago

You're running a mailing list with a web signup form that doesn't even use a captcha to filter out bots. That's going to result in a bad reputation for your mail server. At the bare minimum you need to put some barriers between pressing Subscribe and sending out an email. I've run mailing lists for decades without trouble, but the barrier to making my mail server send an email to someone has more friction, and therefore can't be abused quite so easily.

mbrodersen 4y ago

I recently switched my email domain to a different DNS and the amount of opaque random knowledge needed to make that work is crazy. Is there a guide somewhere explaining why the 20+ DNS records are needed to receive email? It seems to be way more complicated than necessary.