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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
by 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 agoCurious, what commercial service did you move to and how much does it cost you annually?
- mikeyouse 3y agoI'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 agoLook 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.
- holigot 3y agoSwitzerland means nearly nothing within this context. Have a look at their pro/cons (in general really good): https://www.migadu.com/procon/#in-switzerland-but-servers-are-not https://www.migadu.com/procon/#in-switzerland-but-servers-ar...
- steve_rambo 3y agoI've been pretty happy with purelymail.com. It's really cheap (~$10 a year) and has unlimited mailboxes and domains, perfect for low volume. The downside is that it's a one man operation, so if you need more reliability for the technically illiterate, migadu.com or fastmail.com might fit the bill. I don't have personal experience with either, but my friend swears by migadu (which also supports unlimited domains and mailboxes). Search on HN for either, there's lots of discussion and reviews from accounts way older than mine.