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Sadly self hosted e-mail is a 24/7 job where you will be fighting against big players for the luxury of sending e-mail from your own system. Despite the dozen o

Sadly self hosted e-mail is a 24/7 job where you will be fighting against big players for the luxury of sending e-mail from your own system. Despite the dozen or so different standards to attest you are a legitimate sender it has basically boiled down to a handful of big e-mail providers that trust each other and everyone else is eyed with utter suspicion and contempt - and it has nothing to do with the fact every member of the “in” crowd makes significant money selling access to their infrastructure - honest (sarcasm).

citrin_ru 4y ago
I self host my email spending a couple hours a month at most. But I have email related experience and if this is a new for you area you will need to learn it spending more time. Risk of being blocked by big players (gmail/O365) is real but IMHO very low if you follow BCP. The main problem is that big companies make it very hard or impossible to contact them to resolve the issue.
- mpldr 4y ago
  > Risk of being blocked by big players (gmail/O365) is real but IMHO very low if you follow BCP Can confirm, only issue I have is with outlook.com because their MTA-STS validator is… for lack of a better word: wrong. I decided that replying to mails from outlook.com is not part of my mailserver's offerings and if it's required others channels have to be sought out. I'm not going to violate established standards just so Microsoft can do things their way.
- boisgerault 4y ago
  Could you elaborate what BCP is? (I am not familiar with the term)
  - citrin_ru 4y ago
    BCP is Best Current Practice, which for email includes at least having Forward-confirmed reverse DNS for mailserver hostname (with the same FQDN in EHLO hostname), SPF, DKIM, DMARC. I'm sure most people here know about DMARC but there are still a lot of mail senders which either have no DMARC record, or send some messages in a way that either DKIM or SPF or even both fail, or have a syntax error in SPD/DKIM/DMARC DNS records. On top of this it is good to ensure that your servers doesn't generate email backsatter when possible. Send rate limits is a simple but rarely enforced by small servers way to limit amount of spam which can be send if user credentials or web-app hosted on the same server are compromised.

citrin_ru 4y ago

I self host my email spending a couple hours a month at most. But I have email related experience and if this is a new for you area you will need to learn it spending more time. Risk of being blocked by big players (gmail/O365) is real but IMHO very low if you follow BCP. The main problem is that big companies make it very hard or impossible to contact them to resolve the issue.

mpldr 4y ago
> Risk of being blocked by big players (gmail/O365) is real but IMHO very low if you follow BCP Can confirm, only issue I have is with outlook.com because their MTA-STS validator is… for lack of a better word: wrong. I decided that replying to mails from outlook.com is not part of my mailserver's offerings and if it's required others channels have to be sought out. I'm not going to violate established standards just so Microsoft can do things their way.
boisgerault 4y ago
Could you elaborate what BCP is? (I am not familiar with the term)
- citrin_ru 4y ago
  BCP is Best Current Practice, which for email includes at least having Forward-confirmed reverse DNS for mailserver hostname (with the same FQDN in EHLO hostname), SPF, DKIM, DMARC. I'm sure most people here know about DMARC but there are still a lot of mail senders which either have no DMARC record, or send some messages in a way that either DKIM or SPF or even both fail, or have a syntax error in SPD/DKIM/DMARC DNS records. On top of this it is good to ensure that your servers doesn't generate email backsatter when possible. Send rate limits is a simple but rarely enforced by small servers way to limit amount of spam which can be send if user credentials or web-app hosted on the same server are compromised.