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I used to in the late 90s early 2000s, but it became impractical. I also maintained one as part of my job in the 2000s, and it became obvious that the amount of
by Someone1234 4y ago
I used to in the late 90s early 2000s, but it became impractical. I also maintained one as part of my job in the 2000s, and it became obvious that the amount of upkeep/time was not worth it just to host it yourself.
The main headache? Anti-spam. A lot of IP ranges are just outright broadly blacklisted (e.g. residential IPs, some hosting services), but also a lot of individual IPs reused by hosting providers got blacklisted for actually sending spam. Then you have trust scores which are a huge chicken/egg headache (how do you gain trust while being span-binned from the get-go?). You'll spend your days asking to get unblocked from various random third party providers that you may never have heard of (e.g. email a small business about their online shop, and their email vendor bounced you because they never heard of you, they take ten days to respond, and now it takes two weeks to email some random small business).
Plus the ever-changing requirements (and they ARE requirements, if you lack reverse DNS/DMARC/SPF/DKIM/TLSA/valid certificates you will be blocked).
It is just a headache, time, and it actually costs more for the pleasure. Free Google Workspaces killed 90% of people self-hosting, too bad it costs tons of money these days.
- wankle 4y agoSelf-hosting email for over 20 years, I will say most of what you stated is either greatly exaggerated or grossly factually incorrect.
- bobleeswagger 4y agoI'd say if enough people share this sentiment, then there are legitimate problems in self-hosting email. I don't think deliverability is a made up problem. Differing complexities can contribute to one person thinking it's easy, and another knowing it's not. Both perspectives may be entirely correct, but the devil is in the details. It seems more right to say that in general, self-hosting email is hard, rather than act like it's easy because you figured it out and everyone else running into issues is just inexperienced/dumb/not good enough. Chances are, those folks were dealing with more complexity than you have.
- wankle 4y agoIt takes some research and effort, the title of the post wasn't [do you host your own email and is it so easy a stock broker could do it].
- Someone1234 4y agoIf you've self-hosted for that long you've avoided some problems I've mentioned by having long-running IPs and high trust scores. Go launch one today and you'll see. Since other people planning on starting today don't have a time machine, my advice applies. Plus I have as much experience between commercially and personally, and that is my take. The fact you couldn't give one single example should give people pause.
- wankle 4y agoI have every confidence today, tomorrow 5 or 10 years from now I can do the same thing I've done every time I changed ISP's the past over 20 years and would have zero issues.