7 ms·

After self-hosting email for 23 years I have thrown in the towel (2022)

61 points by ilamont 3y ago

leephillips 3y ago
This article exaggerates the problem. I’ve been hosting my own email for many years and I have almost zero deliverability obstacles. The advantages of running your own email server are huge.
- Sirizarry 3y ago
  What are the practical advantages to owning your own email server and not using something like proton? Maybe I’m just not a heavy user of email but I’m struggling to find use cases that aren’t mostly ideological.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    One less dependency that may suddenly change or vanish with little or no warning, causing you to drop your planned work and react to its whims. Also if you're already paying for IP service, there is no technical reason you should have to pay an email provider. Email standards and software are all open and free.
    - detourdog 3y ago
      Unlimited attachment size and storage. Ability to verify and document all steps of email delivery.
      - bell-cot 3y ago
        Unless a message needs no other email service provider to be delivered, your attachment sizes are still subject to other providers' limits. Yes, you can log the crap out of "$Server.$OtherProvider.$TLD accepted $MessageID for delivery" - but that doesn't stop $OtherProvider from failing to deliver it to the recipient's IN box.
        detourdog 3y ago
        True but not everyone limits email attachment sizes.
  - doublerabbit 3y ago
    For me, it's that all data that resides within the received email is mine. There's no outside force pre-scanning my receiving emails to display advertisements. I can create as many alias, mailboxes I prefer. Overall the freedom is soothing. I to have never had emails denied but then again I'm using colocation based hosting, so my IP block is one that's never been used before.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    As many addresses/aliases as you want on as many domains as you want. Custom filtering/sorting. Easy burner addresses. Custom reader tracking for marketing. Custom reader db response pattern mailouts/campaigns. Some of these are Some Assembly Required, but they're hard/impossible/expensive to do with 3rd party mailers.
  - leephillips 3y ago
    Mainly control. You can set your own policies, such as deciding which ban lists to use. I have a backup server in another continent. It’s far less likely to have my account deacitivated for a mysterious reason by (both) my hosting providers than some email hosting company. So I feel that my access to email is more assured. I can have an infinity of ad-hoc email addresses and set any routing, or run any program on the server, based on the recipient address.
  - nulld3v 3y ago
    - Another step up in security: ProtonMail can still read unencrypted incoming email. With self-hosting, you only have to trust your hosting provider. - Better IMAP support: ProtonMail doesn't support IMAP without the ProtonMail bridge. The ProtonMail bridge was very buggy for me, and I have to self-host it anyways. With self-hosted email, I can just use IMAP normally (yay). - Better email search: With ProtonMail you can search for keywords in the message body but it doesn't work if you have lots of mail. With self-hosting you can search however you like across as much mail as you like. - Easier backups: On my self-hosted setup I can configure automated periodic backups. I don't think that's possible on ProtonMail. - Cost: ProtonMail is really expensive :( The main reason I switched was the IMAP part. I just got tired of the bridge bugs.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - alerighi 3y ago
    The reason why I host my own email service is that I can have a wildcard address, that no provider (that I know) offers. So that I can use whatever address@mydomain that I want, without creating an alias in the mail server. For this reason I can have a different address for each service that I register with, for example facebook@domain, and thus easily block services that start spamming out, and even know if a service leaks my address without authorization. Yes, I know that GMail has a similar feature (by using address+whatever@gmail.com) but some sites blocks it, and still you don't have that ability to have a completely different address, that if one day you want can become its own mailbox. Another reason is that commercial email services started blocking the simple SMTP/IMAP authentication with username/password, making it difficult, if not impossible, to configure a server them to send email trough GMail or Outlook, or a service to subscribe trough IMAP subscription to the mailbox to trigger an action when a mail arrives. Proton even decided not to support plain SMTP/IMAP, and you need a bridge to use it! All my systems, being them servers or services that run on them, are configured to send the email trough my server, and the configuration is super easy. So that, for example, I'm notified if a cron job fails (basically the mail to the local Linux users gets routed to my server) or I have my Home Assistant installation notify me trough email. Next I manage different domains, and I can have all that domains in a single central mail server. That allows to manage the mail of different systems in a central place, and with a single account. As far as I know this is not possible with commercial services: what you can do is of course to have one system forward the mail to another, but to send the mail as another domain with the same mailbox? With my mailserver I can, I just configure multipe FROM addresses in Thunderbird. Finally on my server I don't have a limit on the number of accounts/mailbox, so I create an account/mailbox for whatever reason I want in two seconds, for a fixed montly cost (of around 10 euros, since I use the smallest AWS EC2 that they have available) As you see, there are plenty of reasons to have your own mail service. And, and let's conclude with: I've lost more mails thanks to antispam in commercial email software such as Outlook or GMail, that on my own server. I don't care about spam, I (if needed) know how to filter it out client-side. I don't want systems to refuse or even hide messages to me, something GMail and Outlook does.
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  > I’ve been hosting my own email for many years and I have almost zero deliverability obstacles. This is almost certainly false. If this is not false, please do show how you measured your deliverability (across all those years) and how those measurements show "almost no" issues.
  - leephillips 3y ago
    I almost certainly don’t care whether you believe me.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
      Ok, so you didn't actually measure your deliverability, so a portion of the emails you send are not being delivered, just like everyone else who self hosts email.
  - j6zauas4gz 3y ago
    Not the person you are replying to, but I've been self hosting an email server for ~3 years (which is not that long tbh, so take this data point for what it is), and have similerly also had almost zero deliverability issues. I can tell because I also run a mailman mailing list (~500 people) on that same server and domain, I measure initiall discoverability by how many bounces I get (almost always none) and also that the high percentage of read receipts I get, and the fact that engagement with the list is pretty even across domains (IE, people with gmail, outlook, yahoo, and aol emails all frequently read and engage with the list).
    - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
      Interesting! Can you share the numbers for read receipts and "engagement" for different domains? I'm very surprised if the % for gmail and outlook truly is not lower than the % for yahoo and aol, as you indicated.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  I have also hosting my e-mail server for the last twenty years. I do not intend to ever give up on this. I had problems in the past, mainly with Microsoft, but they were not insurmountable. The worst problems with delivery have been a few years ago, I had less problems recently.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
trial3 3y ago
“This doesn't only affect contrarian nerds” is one of the best subheaders of all time
- duxup 3y ago
  It should probably be a required thing to clarify for an HN submission ;) I like hearing about what impacts contrarian nerds too, but that discussion usually happens so we may as well get that out of the way ;)
jamescridland 3y ago
> Please believe me. My current email server IP has been managed by me and used exclusively for my personal email with zero spam, zero, for the last ten years. I don't believe you. Sorry. Unless you never actually use your email address for anything, to have zero spam is impossible. Unless you mean that you have a 100% success rate in filtering that spam out, and in which case, I'd still not believe you.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  [dead]
- notRobot 3y ago
  They obviously mean zero outgoing spam.
- bspammer 3y ago
  I believe the author means that he has sent zero spam in the that time, not received zero spam.
- murbard2 3y ago
  He likely means he's not sending spam.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sleepydog 3y ago
  Given the context of IP reputation, I'm certain they mean that zero spam has been sent from that IP, not that zero spam has been received. Preventing spam from being sent from your IP is achievable.
- horusthegame 3y ago
  I've not been on any spam list in 10 years or more and only once in around 24 years (or more) of hosting my own email, and I do use my email accounts. That one time was 100% my goof, made a simple mistake, fixed it, was barely a hiccup.
- 3y ago
horusthegame 3y ago
> "You just cannot create another first-class node of this network. Uh, yeah, you can, I did it again recently. I've done it at Oracle Cloud, AWS Lightsail, Linode, GoDaddy, and several ISP's before that. I could start right this minute with Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc. pick one and be up and running, delivering email to Gmail, Microsoft, etc. in a day. Each time one of these articles is posted, I feel I must be some kind of email savant.
- roughly 3y ago
  You should write an article on how you’re doing it!
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  Here's the recipe: set up your own email server. Tweak configuration until eventually a test email from yourself to yourself lands in the inbox, then call it a day. Never actually measure your deliverability. Never investigate why you sometimes don't get replies to emails where you were expecting to get a reply to. In fact, just close your eyes and stick fingers in your ears. Then go on HN and talk about how easy it is to do this thing which you, totally, for real, really did do, like, for reals for reals.
  - horusthegame 3y ago
    > Here's the recipe We read from different cookbooks and my reading comprehension is high. My sent email stats shows over 20K successfully sent emails just for my personal account, since 1999, when I started tracking it.
    - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
      > My sent email stats shows over 20K successfully sent emails just for my personal account, since 1999, when I started tracking it. Ok, since you claim to have measurements, let's hear what they are: - What is the total number of emails sent? - What is the number of emails bounced? - What is the number of emails that landed in inbox (as opposed to spam)? - What is the number of emails blackholed? (recipient confirms delivery, but email doesn't show anywhere, not even in spam folder)
koreth1 3y ago
I threw in the towel after about 10 years but not because of deliverability problems. When I first started running an email server for myself and my friends and family, it was a great learning experience. And it kept being a good learning experience for a few years as I rolled out things like Bayesian spam filters and SPF. But eventually it got stable enough and did its job well enough that I stopped messing with it to learn things. And then it became a job instead of a hobby: friends texting me because my ISP was having an outage and they couldn't read their email, rolling out critical security patches ASAP, coping with the occasional DOS attack, and so on. At some point, I realized that I'd started to resent running it. It was eating little bits of my time for no additional benefit to me. I also, as one does with age, started thinking about what happens if I die or become incapacitated: my friends and family all lose their email service the next time there's an outage that requires manual recovery. So I moved it to a commercial email service and have zero regrets about the move. I make sure I've always prepaid for at least 6 months of service so that if something happens to both me and my wife, my friends and family will at least have half a year to make other arrangements.
- mosesk 3y ago
  Curious, what commercial service did you move to and how much does it cost you annually?
  - mikeyouse 3y ago
    I'm likewise curious - a family member runs a mail service on a box in his basement for everyone with a @lastname.com with about 40 or 50 inboxes. He's indicated he'd like to pass that responsibility on as he's nearing 75 years old and the everchanging spam and delivery rules make it tedious to keep up, but I have very little interest in running a mail server myself. Would love to find somewhere for super low volume mail under $100 or $150/month that could keep that domain intact..
    - Ir0nMan 3y ago
      Look into Migadu.com, a service out of Switzerland with very reasonable pricing. You get a set amount of storage space and inbound/outbound limits and everything else like how many inboxes you create is up to you.
Vermyndax 3y ago
I came to a similar sad conclusion many years ago. I just didn't have enough time to continue the fight. It sucks.
baobabKoodaa 3y ago
I can confirm OP's struggles with my own personal experience. I threw in the towel in 2019: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-server/ https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser...
maxclark 3y ago
I empathize with the author's viewpoint - maybe it's just my personal experience of running email for large corporations and ISPs but there's a reason why these systems have ended up with zero tolerance policies for spam sources. It's just not worth the overhead in people and hardware to try to be surgical in your approach - you don't win anything. It's the closest thing to working at the DMV for tech. Notes, cc:Mail, Groupwise, Exchange, Sendmail, Exim, qmail, postfix, etc... I have no interest in running my own email ever again.
- bloppe 3y ago
  > there's a reason why these systems have ended up with zero tolerance policies for spam sources The article is not about blackholing spam sources. It's about blackholing mail from sources that have never sent a single spam message since the dawn of the internet.
  - jwestbury 3y ago
    It's not, though - it's about blackholing unknown sources. Yes, this makes it incredibly difficult to self-host or to start up a new provider in the space. But from the perspective of anyone trying to protect their users, it makes sense. By definition, every new source has never sent spam -- but it's reasonable to assume that an unknown source is likely spam, however unfortunate that may be.
  - linehedonist 3y ago
    This author claims to be sending alumni newsletters from his server. I hey you anything that someone has (at least once) marked one of those newsletters as spam.
taulien 3y ago
I self host my own email using mailinabox. Its working like a charm for my personal use case. If anyone is interested in setting this up by themselves, here is the opentofu (formally terraform) code I am using: https://github.com/JonasTaulien/opentofu-mailinabox https://github.com/JonasTaulien/opentofu-mailinabox
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  The odds that this works is basically zero. Your post didn't refer to deliverability at all and the repo's README didn't address deliverability either. I can basically guarantee a portion of your email is not being delivered, you just aren't measuring it.
  - horusthegame 3y ago
    > The odds that this works is basically zero. It's times like this that I wish HN had better moderation, you are insultingly rude to the parent and to one of my comments.
    - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
      I'm calling out harmful misinformation. It makes me incredibly angry that it's 2023 and people are still peddling self-hosted email. That said, you have a point I've been unnecessarily rude in this thread and I should be more civil.
    - Ir0nMan 3y ago
      While you may not have liked the way it was said, this users reply is actually responding with correct information. While setting up your own mail server is fun, rewarding, and pretty easy, there are serious problems that anyone considers it needs to be made aware of. Over any serious period of time, the odds that not all your mail is getting delivered approaches and equals 100%. It's a sad reality but a true one unfortunately. If you okay with the fact that some percentage of your email will never make it to your destination (and in many cases you won't know that's happening) then it might be for you. Most people are not okay with that for obvious reasons.
mrb 3y ago
"But my emails are just not delivered anymore. I might as well not have an email server." I will never understand people who see it as an all or nothing proposition. You can perfectly self-host while using an outgoing SMTP provider. This would solve all the problems the OP is having while still preserving the main benefit of self-hosting, meaning: managing your own MX records, you own IMAP server, so that government authorities don't have a single organization they can target to get access to your emails. Heck, if you are paranoid you can even have multiple outgoing SMTP providers and round-robin between them. Edit: the author does mention not wanting to pay for an outgoing SMTP provider, but there are many free option: for example Gmail lets you use their SMTP server as long as you authenticate with a (free) Google account. That's possible with Yahoo, or many other providers.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  Glad I took a look at the comments first, because you just took the words from my mouth. Sure, it's a never ending battle with the behemoths but there are options and the most beautiful thing is what most of built-in in the SMTP itself.
- horusthegame 3y ago
  > You can perfectly self-host while using an outgoing SMTP provider. That's mostly selfhosting, not fully selfhosting. I full selfhost my email, I 100% control as much of it as is possible to do. When I send an email to someone, it goes from my client to my server and out to the recipient's server.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    How often do you check TLS certs the recipient' server provides? And you can have an additional route just for some recipients, that doesn't make it less (or more) selfhosting.
  - mrb 3y ago
    Still, I don't understand why someone who was self-hosting for 23 years suddenly abandons everything, instead of going "mostly self-hosting". I genuinely think some people are not aware you can have free, reliable, outgoing SMTP providers.
epaulson 3y ago
I wish there was a good nonprofit 'infrastructure cooperative' that could provide some of these core services but have a corporate governance that could be trusted. The place I most want it for is a domain name registrar but DNS and mail servers would be good additional services.
- MR4D 3y ago
  You know, if you started one, I bet there would be a bunch of people here who would use it. I would be one of them (but I don't have the time to start such an endeavor). Put up an ASK HN and see what happens.
snapetom 3y ago
Someone please tell me if this is sane and viable. I'm starting to do this because of the large number of domains I own and my registrar recently getting rid of free email hosting. For incoming mail, I'm hosting it all virtually on a home server. I set my MX record to my home IP address, point a CNAME of "mail.domain.com" to it. I do letsencrypt on a cert for each domain. This has been working fine for the 3 domains I've tested. For outgoing mail, because I send so few from these domains, I'm using Amazon SES. I looked at setting up DKM to avoid exactly what the author describes about blackholing. Setting it up for multiple domains on one IP made my head spin. I might send 1-2 emails per month on these domains, so at 10 cents per email, that's quite affordable.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  Have you considered Fastmail? I switched to it a few years back and it works excellently.
  - snapetom 3y ago
    Looked into it. It's more than I need, and it's got the same issue as my registrar's paid plans. The price is per domain, per user. For ~10 domains I rarely use at $5 per user, per month, per domain, it's not worth it.
    - shepherdjerred 3y ago
      Do you need different user accounts, or just different addresses? I'm able to user any address with my domains, but I just pay for the one user account. If you do have 10 domains that would be quite a lot still.
      - snapetom 3y ago
        Many different domains. For example, both my wife and I have professional/consulting/personal consulting sites and we both do artsy stuff as a side hobby and business so that's two separate domains eachs. Each one has 1-2 emails tops. I have a couple of domains that I use for recon and testing. I can have a ton of addresses there. My friends and I are trying out two side ventures, and there's about 10 addresses, but still two additional domains.
kmeisthax 3y ago
>In many countries politicians are forced to deploy their own email servers for security and confidentiality reasons. We only need one politician's emails not delivered due to poorly implemented or arbitrary hellbans and this will be a hot button issue. The GOP sued Google for blocking their campaign e-mails and lost.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  They weren't blocked. They were received and filtered into the spam folder. Which is damned well what it should be; politicians shouldn't be immune to spam blocking. These cries of protest were just more ridiculous outrage fuel, from a party that loves portraying themselves as some kind of victim.
johnea 3y ago
I've been self-hosting email for ~15 years, and have experienced many of the issues described. The biggest error in blackholing, that I never hear mentioned, is that no mail server sending several hundred email per day is a spam server. If traffic is below a threshold level, several hundred or thousand emails per day, there is no way that server is part of a commercial spam distribution network. Small system operators should not be banned or blackholed in the same way as servers producing millions of email messages per day...
kstrauser 3y ago
I did the same. I could have tolerated the random delivery issues, but my immediate family members were understandably irked the moment things didn't work perfectly. After running the service for 20+ years, I was tired of it. Tired of the continual war against spam. Tired of annoying corner cases that I had to fix on my end because the giant corp sending demonstrably malformed messages to me wasn't going to correct their system. Tired of this week's Mysterious New RHBL breaking connectivity. Tired of not being able to effectively filter email the same way giants do, because I only see a tiny sliver of messages and can't identify bulk senders. I appreciate and respect anyone still hosting their own email. I did it for many, many years, and feel their pain. It wore me out. (The nail in the coffin was Apple offering free email hosting for iCloud+ users. It checked the right boxes for my family's needs, at an incremental price of $0.00 over what I was already paying them.)
micah94 3y ago
Man, these articles come out every once in a while. I'm in this camp. My own email server going on 25 years. I'm also responsible for the email of other businesses as well. And maybe that's the difference? I'm getting paid to understand the nuances in mail delivery? But it's a chore no doubt. I never plan on stopping. EMail is TOO IMPORTANT. I don't have any secret formula other than be reachable. Read your email to postmaster@domain, sign up for all the Postmaster Feedback loops. I have two major issues (which have lessened over time) 1) you have to slow-deliver mail to gmail/comcast/yahoo/hotmail or you will get deferred very quickly. 2) users getting their passwords hacked leading to spam delivery. But I catch that automatically these days with a script that checks the IP of the connection. Too many successful connections from Pakistan within a minute gets the account disabled. It's kept me off blacklists for years.
tamimio 3y ago
Self-hosting an email is one of those things that if you have the time to do and maintain, sure, else it will be a chore.
gaws 3y ago
> They now point to one of the Big Email Providers. I'm interested to know which one. I'm guessing Gmail.
dvfjsdhgfv 3y ago
As a counter-argument, I set up another mail server last week. It took me almost one day. The only change from the usual routine was that in the past I had to fill in a hidden form so that Microsoft unblocks my IP but this time for some reason it wasn't necessary. Google is another beast altogether. * First, I disable IPv6 in my MTA. Yeah, I know, other people managed to do it but it never worked for me and it's not worth the hassle. * The next step is SPF. I set it up correctly and verify it actually works using several online tools, not just one. And, lo and behold, this was enough to get first emails to Gmail spambox (Actually getting it to the inbox needs time and never works reliably). First for one account, then to others. So yeah, the oligopoly is real, but as of now, December 2023, you can still set up your email server and send messages to Outlook and Gmail recipients (Yahoo too, but they are easiest to deal with than the preceding two in my experience.) I encourage everyone interested to experiment and at least try if they can set it up for personal purposes, because if everybody just gives up it will be the end of email.
Barbaraklaus 3y ago
[flagged]
nateb2022 3y ago
Previously: 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 (733 comments)

61 points by ilamont 3y ago

This article exaggerates the problem. I’ve been hosting my own email for many years and I have almost zero deliverability obstacles. The advantages of running your own email server are huge.

Sirizarry 3y ago
What are the practical advantages to owning your own email server and not using something like proton? Maybe I’m just not a heavy user of email but I’m struggling to find use cases that aren’t mostly ideological.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  One less dependency that may suddenly change or vanish with little or no warning, causing you to drop your planned work and react to its whims. Also if you're already paying for IP service, there is no technical reason you should have to pay an email provider. Email standards and software are all open and free.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    Unlimited attachment size and storage. Ability to verify and document all steps of email delivery.
    - bell-cot 3y ago
      Unless a message needs no other email service provider to be delivered, your attachment sizes are still subject to other providers' limits. Yes, you can log the crap out of "$Server.$OtherProvider.$TLD accepted $MessageID for delivery" - but that doesn't stop $OtherProvider from failing to deliver it to the recipient's IN box.
      - detourdog 3y ago
        True but not everyone limits email attachment sizes.
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  For me, it's that all data that resides within the received email is mine. There's no outside force pre-scanning my receiving emails to display advertisements. I can create as many alias, mailboxes I prefer. Overall the freedom is soothing. I to have never had emails denied but then again I'm using colocation based hosting, so my IP block is one that's never been used before.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  As many addresses/aliases as you want on as many domains as you want. Custom filtering/sorting. Easy burner addresses. Custom reader tracking for marketing. Custom reader db response pattern mailouts/campaigns. Some of these are Some Assembly Required, but they're hard/impossible/expensive to do with 3rd party mailers.
- leephillips 3y ago
  Mainly control. You can set your own policies, such as deciding which ban lists to use. I have a backup server in another continent. It’s far less likely to have my account deacitivated for a mysterious reason by (both) my hosting providers than some email hosting company. So I feel that my access to email is more assured. I can have an infinity of ad-hoc email addresses and set any routing, or run any program on the server, based on the recipient address.
- nulld3v 3y ago
  - Another step up in security: ProtonMail can still read unencrypted incoming email. With self-hosting, you only have to trust your hosting provider. - Better IMAP support: ProtonMail doesn't support IMAP without the ProtonMail bridge. The ProtonMail bridge was very buggy for me, and I have to self-host it anyways. With self-hosted email, I can just use IMAP normally (yay). - Better email search: With ProtonMail you can search for keywords in the message body but it doesn't work if you have lots of mail. With self-hosting you can search however you like across as much mail as you like. - Easier backups: On my self-hosted setup I can configure automated periodic backups. I don't think that's possible on ProtonMail. - Cost: ProtonMail is really expensive :( The main reason I switched was the IMAP part. I just got tired of the bridge bugs.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- alerighi 3y ago
  The reason why I host my own email service is that I can have a wildcard address, that no provider (that I know) offers. So that I can use whatever address@mydomain that I want, without creating an alias in the mail server. For this reason I can have a different address for each service that I register with, for example facebook@domain, and thus easily block services that start spamming out, and even know if a service leaks my address without authorization. Yes, I know that GMail has a similar feature (by using address+whatever@gmail.com) but some sites blocks it, and still you don't have that ability to have a completely different address, that if one day you want can become its own mailbox. Another reason is that commercial email services started blocking the simple SMTP/IMAP authentication with username/password, making it difficult, if not impossible, to configure a server them to send email trough GMail or Outlook, or a service to subscribe trough IMAP subscription to the mailbox to trigger an action when a mail arrives. Proton even decided not to support plain SMTP/IMAP, and you need a bridge to use it! All my systems, being them servers or services that run on them, are configured to send the email trough my server, and the configuration is super easy. So that, for example, I'm notified if a cron job fails (basically the mail to the local Linux users gets routed to my server) or I have my Home Assistant installation notify me trough email. Next I manage different domains, and I can have all that domains in a single central mail server. That allows to manage the mail of different systems in a central place, and with a single account. As far as I know this is not possible with commercial services: what you can do is of course to have one system forward the mail to another, but to send the mail as another domain with the same mailbox? With my mailserver I can, I just configure multipe FROM addresses in Thunderbird. Finally on my server I don't have a limit on the number of accounts/mailbox, so I create an account/mailbox for whatever reason I want in two seconds, for a fixed montly cost (of around 10 euros, since I use the smallest AWS EC2 that they have available) As you see, there are plenty of reasons to have your own mail service. And, and let's conclude with: I've lost more mails thanks to antispam in commercial email software such as Outlook or GMail, that on my own server. I don't care about spam, I (if needed) know how to filter it out client-side. I don't want systems to refuse or even hide messages to me, something GMail and Outlook does.
baobabKoodaa 3y ago
> I’ve been hosting my own email for many years and I have almost zero deliverability obstacles. This is almost certainly false. If this is not false, please do show how you measured your deliverability (across all those years) and how those measurements show "almost no" issues.
- leephillips 3y ago
  I almost certainly don’t care whether you believe me.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
    Ok, so you didn't actually measure your deliverability, so a portion of the emails you send are not being delivered, just like everyone else who self hosts email.
- j6zauas4gz 3y ago
  Not the person you are replying to, but I've been self hosting an email server for ~3 years (which is not that long tbh, so take this data point for what it is), and have similerly also had almost zero deliverability issues. I can tell because I also run a mailman mailing list (~500 people) on that same server and domain, I measure initiall discoverability by how many bounces I get (almost always none) and also that the high percentage of read receipts I get, and the fact that engagement with the list is pretty even across domains (IE, people with gmail, outlook, yahoo, and aol emails all frequently read and engage with the list).
  - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
    Interesting! Can you share the numbers for read receipts and "engagement" for different domains? I'm very surprised if the % for gmail and outlook truly is not lower than the % for yahoo and aol, as you indicated.
adrian_b 3y ago
I have also hosting my e-mail server for the last twenty years. I do not intend to ever give up on this. I had problems in the past, mainly with Microsoft, but they were not insurmountable. The worst problems with delivery have been a few years ago, I had less problems recently.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

trial3 3y ago

“This doesn't only affect contrarian nerds” is one of the best subheaders of all time

duxup 3y ago
It should probably be a required thing to clarify for an HN submission ;) I like hearing about what impacts contrarian nerds too, but that discussion usually happens so we may as well get that out of the way ;)

jamescridland 3y ago

> Please believe me. My current email server IP has been managed by me and used exclusively for my personal email with zero spam, zero, for the last ten years. I don't believe you. Sorry. Unless you never actually use your email address for anything, to have zero spam is impossible. Unless you mean that you have a 100% success rate in filtering that spam out, and in which case, I'd still not believe you.

AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
[dead]
notRobot 3y ago
They obviously mean zero outgoing spam.
bspammer 3y ago
I believe the author means that he has sent zero spam in the that time, not received zero spam.
murbard2 3y ago
He likely means he's not sending spam.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sleepydog 3y ago
Given the context of IP reputation, I'm certain they mean that zero spam has been sent from that IP, not that zero spam has been received. Preventing spam from being sent from your IP is achievable.
horusthegame 3y ago
I've not been on any spam list in 10 years or more and only once in around 24 years (or more) of hosting my own email, and I do use my email accounts. That one time was 100% my goof, made a simple mistake, fixed it, was barely a hiccup.
3y ago

horusthegame 3y ago

> "You just cannot create another first-class node of this network. Uh, yeah, you can, I did it again recently. I've done it at Oracle Cloud, AWS Lightsail, Linode, GoDaddy, and several ISP's before that. I could start right this minute with Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc. pick one and be up and running, delivering email to Gmail, Microsoft, etc. in a day. Each time one of these articles is posted, I feel I must be some kind of email savant.

roughly 3y ago
You should write an article on how you’re doing it!
baobabKoodaa 3y ago
Here's the recipe: set up your own email server. Tweak configuration until eventually a test email from yourself to yourself lands in the inbox, then call it a day. Never actually measure your deliverability. Never investigate why you sometimes don't get replies to emails where you were expecting to get a reply to. In fact, just close your eyes and stick fingers in your ears. Then go on HN and talk about how easy it is to do this thing which you, totally, for real, really did do, like, for reals for reals.
- horusthegame 3y ago
  > Here's the recipe We read from different cookbooks and my reading comprehension is high. My sent email stats shows over 20K successfully sent emails just for my personal account, since 1999, when I started tracking it.
  - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
    > My sent email stats shows over 20K successfully sent emails just for my personal account, since 1999, when I started tracking it. Ok, since you claim to have measurements, let's hear what they are: - What is the total number of emails sent? - What is the number of emails bounced? - What is the number of emails that landed in inbox (as opposed to spam)? - What is the number of emails blackholed? (recipient confirms delivery, but email doesn't show anywhere, not even in spam folder)

koreth1 3y ago

I threw in the towel after about 10 years but not because of deliverability problems. When I first started running an email server for myself and my friends and family, it was a great learning experience. And it kept being a good learning experience for a few years as I rolled out things like Bayesian spam filters and SPF. But eventually it got stable enough and did its job well enough that I stopped messing with it to learn things. And then it became a job instead of a hobby: friends texting me because my ISP was having an outage and they couldn't read their email, rolling out critical security patches ASAP, coping with the occasional DOS attack, and so on. At some point, I realized that I'd started to resent running it. It was eating little bits of my time for no additional benefit to me. I also, as one does with age, started thinking about what happens if I die or become incapacitated: my friends and family all lose their email service the next time there's an outage that requires manual recovery. So I moved it to a commercial email service and have zero regrets about the move. I make sure I've always prepaid for at least 6 months of service so that if something happens to both me and my wife, my friends and family will at least have half a year to make other arrangements.

mosesk 3y ago
Curious, what commercial service did you move to and how much does it cost you annually?
- mikeyouse 3y ago
  I'm likewise curious - a family member runs a mail service on a box in his basement for everyone with a @lastname.com with about 40 or 50 inboxes. He's indicated he'd like to pass that responsibility on as he's nearing 75 years old and the everchanging spam and delivery rules make it tedious to keep up, but I have very little interest in running a mail server myself. Would love to find somewhere for super low volume mail under $100 or $150/month that could keep that domain intact..
  - Ir0nMan 3y ago
    Look into Migadu.com, a service out of Switzerland with very reasonable pricing. You get a set amount of storage space and inbound/outbound limits and everything else like how many inboxes you create is up to you.

Vermyndax 3y ago

I came to a similar sad conclusion many years ago. I just didn't have enough time to continue the fight. It sucks.

baobabKoodaa 3y ago

I can confirm OP's struggles with my own personal experience. I threw in the towel in 2019: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-server/ https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser...

maxclark 3y ago

I empathize with the author's viewpoint - maybe it's just my personal experience of running email for large corporations and ISPs but there's a reason why these systems have ended up with zero tolerance policies for spam sources. It's just not worth the overhead in people and hardware to try to be surgical in your approach - you don't win anything. It's the closest thing to working at the DMV for tech. Notes, cc:Mail, Groupwise, Exchange, Sendmail, Exim, qmail, postfix, etc... I have no interest in running my own email ever again.

bloppe 3y ago
> there's a reason why these systems have ended up with zero tolerance policies for spam sources The article is not about blackholing spam sources. It's about blackholing mail from sources that have never sent a single spam message since the dawn of the internet.
- jwestbury 3y ago
  It's not, though - it's about blackholing unknown sources. Yes, this makes it incredibly difficult to self-host or to start up a new provider in the space. But from the perspective of anyone trying to protect their users, it makes sense. By definition, every new source has never sent spam -- but it's reasonable to assume that an unknown source is likely spam, however unfortunate that may be.
- linehedonist 3y ago
  This author claims to be sending alumni newsletters from his server. I hey you anything that someone has (at least once) marked one of those newsletters as spam.

taulien 3y ago

I self host my own email using mailinabox. Its working like a charm for my personal use case. If anyone is interested in setting this up by themselves, here is the opentofu (formally terraform) code I am using: https://github.com/JonasTaulien/opentofu-mailinabox https://github.com/JonasTaulien/opentofu-mailinabox

baobabKoodaa 3y ago
The odds that this works is basically zero. Your post didn't refer to deliverability at all and the repo's README didn't address deliverability either. I can basically guarantee a portion of your email is not being delivered, you just aren't measuring it.
- horusthegame 3y ago
  > The odds that this works is basically zero. It's times like this that I wish HN had better moderation, you are insultingly rude to the parent and to one of my comments.
  - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
    I'm calling out harmful misinformation. It makes me incredibly angry that it's 2023 and people are still peddling self-hosted email. That said, you have a point I've been unnecessarily rude in this thread and I should be more civil.
  - Ir0nMan 3y ago
    While you may not have liked the way it was said, this users reply is actually responding with correct information. While setting up your own mail server is fun, rewarding, and pretty easy, there are serious problems that anyone considers it needs to be made aware of. Over any serious period of time, the odds that not all your mail is getting delivered approaches and equals 100%. It's a sad reality but a true one unfortunately. If you okay with the fact that some percentage of your email will never make it to your destination (and in many cases you won't know that's happening) then it might be for you. Most people are not okay with that for obvious reasons.

mrb 3y ago

"But my emails are just not delivered anymore. I might as well not have an email server." I will never understand people who see it as an all or nothing proposition. You can perfectly self-host while using an outgoing SMTP provider. This would solve all the problems the OP is having while still preserving the main benefit of self-hosting, meaning: managing your own MX records, you own IMAP server, so that government authorities don't have a single organization they can target to get access to your emails. Heck, if you are paranoid you can even have multiple outgoing SMTP providers and round-robin between them. Edit: the author does mention not wanting to pay for an outgoing SMTP provider, but there are many free option: for example Gmail lets you use their SMTP server as long as you authenticate with a (free) Google account. That's possible with Yahoo, or many other providers.

justsomehnguy 3y ago
Glad I took a look at the comments first, because you just took the words from my mouth. Sure, it's a never ending battle with the behemoths but there are options and the most beautiful thing is what most of built-in in the SMTP itself.
horusthegame 3y ago
> You can perfectly self-host while using an outgoing SMTP provider. That's mostly selfhosting, not fully selfhosting. I full selfhost my email, I 100% control as much of it as is possible to do. When I send an email to someone, it goes from my client to my server and out to the recipient's server.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  How often do you check TLS certs the recipient' server provides? And you can have an additional route just for some recipients, that doesn't make it less (or more) selfhosting.
- mrb 3y ago
  Still, I don't understand why someone who was self-hosting for 23 years suddenly abandons everything, instead of going "mostly self-hosting". I genuinely think some people are not aware you can have free, reliable, outgoing SMTP providers.

epaulson 3y ago

I wish there was a good nonprofit 'infrastructure cooperative' that could provide some of these core services but have a corporate governance that could be trusted. The place I most want it for is a domain name registrar but DNS and mail servers would be good additional services.

MR4D 3y ago
You know, if you started one, I bet there would be a bunch of people here who would use it. I would be one of them (but I don't have the time to start such an endeavor). Put up an ASK HN and see what happens.

snapetom 3y ago

Someone please tell me if this is sane and viable. I'm starting to do this because of the large number of domains I own and my registrar recently getting rid of free email hosting. For incoming mail, I'm hosting it all virtually on a home server. I set my MX record to my home IP address, point a CNAME of "mail.domain.com" to it. I do letsencrypt on a cert for each domain. This has been working fine for the 3 domains I've tested. For outgoing mail, because I send so few from these domains, I'm using Amazon SES. I looked at setting up DKM to avoid exactly what the author describes about blackholing. Setting it up for multiple domains on one IP made my head spin. I might send 1-2 emails per month on these domains, so at 10 cents per email, that's quite affordable.

shepherdjerred 3y ago
Have you considered Fastmail? I switched to it a few years back and it works excellently.
- snapetom 3y ago
  Looked into it. It's more than I need, and it's got the same issue as my registrar's paid plans. The price is per domain, per user. For ~10 domains I rarely use at $5 per user, per month, per domain, it's not worth it.
  - shepherdjerred 3y ago
    Do you need different user accounts, or just different addresses? I'm able to user any address with my domains, but I just pay for the one user account. If you do have 10 domains that would be quite a lot still.
    - snapetom 3y ago
      Many different domains. For example, both my wife and I have professional/consulting/personal consulting sites and we both do artsy stuff as a side hobby and business so that's two separate domains eachs. Each one has 1-2 emails tops. I have a couple of domains that I use for recon and testing. I can have a ton of addresses there. My friends and I are trying out two side ventures, and there's about 10 addresses, but still two additional domains.

kmeisthax 3y ago

>In many countries politicians are forced to deploy their own email servers for security and confidentiality reasons. We only need one politician's emails not delivered due to poorly implemented or arbitrary hellbans and this will be a hot button issue. The GOP sued Google for blocking their campaign e-mails and lost.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
They weren't blocked. They were received and filtered into the spam folder. Which is damned well what it should be; politicians shouldn't be immune to spam blocking. These cries of protest were just more ridiculous outrage fuel, from a party that loves portraying themselves as some kind of victim.

johnea 3y ago

I've been self-hosting email for ~15 years, and have experienced many of the issues described. The biggest error in blackholing, that I never hear mentioned, is that no mail server sending several hundred email per day is a spam server. If traffic is below a threshold level, several hundred or thousand emails per day, there is no way that server is part of a commercial spam distribution network. Small system operators should not be banned or blackholed in the same way as servers producing millions of email messages per day...

kstrauser 3y ago

I did the same. I could have tolerated the random delivery issues, but my immediate family members were understandably irked the moment things didn't work perfectly. After running the service for 20+ years, I was tired of it. Tired of the continual war against spam. Tired of annoying corner cases that I had to fix on my end because the giant corp sending demonstrably malformed messages to me wasn't going to correct their system. Tired of this week's Mysterious New RHBL breaking connectivity. Tired of not being able to effectively filter email the same way giants do, because I only see a tiny sliver of messages and can't identify bulk senders. I appreciate and respect anyone still hosting their own email. I did it for many, many years, and feel their pain. It wore me out. (The nail in the coffin was Apple offering free email hosting for iCloud+ users. It checked the right boxes for my family's needs, at an incremental price of $0.00 over what I was already paying them.)

micah94 3y ago

Man, these articles come out every once in a while. I'm in this camp. My own email server going on 25 years. I'm also responsible for the email of other businesses as well. And maybe that's the difference? I'm getting paid to understand the nuances in mail delivery? But it's a chore no doubt. I never plan on stopping. EMail is TOO IMPORTANT. I don't have any secret formula other than be reachable. Read your email to postmaster@domain, sign up for all the Postmaster Feedback loops. I have two major issues (which have lessened over time) 1) you have to slow-deliver mail to gmail/comcast/yahoo/hotmail or you will get deferred very quickly. 2) users getting their passwords hacked leading to spam delivery. But I catch that automatically these days with a script that checks the IP of the connection. Too many successful connections from Pakistan within a minute gets the account disabled. It's kept me off blacklists for years.

tamimio 3y ago

Self-hosting an email is one of those things that if you have the time to do and maintain, sure, else it will be a chore.

gaws 3y ago

> They now point to one of the Big Email Providers. I'm interested to know which one. I'm guessing Gmail.

dvfjsdhgfv 3y ago

As a counter-argument, I set up another mail server last week. It took me almost one day. The only change from the usual routine was that in the past I had to fill in a hidden form so that Microsoft unblocks my IP but this time for some reason it wasn't necessary. Google is another beast altogether. * First, I disable IPv6 in my MTA. Yeah, I know, other people managed to do it but it never worked for me and it's not worth the hassle. * The next step is SPF. I set it up correctly and verify it actually works using several online tools, not just one. And, lo and behold, this was enough to get first emails to Gmail spambox (Actually getting it to the inbox needs time and never works reliably). First for one account, then to others. So yeah, the oligopoly is real, but as of now, December 2023, you can still set up your email server and send messages to Outlook and Gmail recipients (Yahoo too, but they are easiest to deal with than the preceding two in my experience.) I encourage everyone interested to experiment and at least try if they can set it up for personal purposes, because if everybody just gives up it will be the end of email.

Barbaraklaus 3y ago

[flagged]

nateb2022 3y ago

Previously: 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 (733 comments)