6 ms·
Self hosted email continues to steeply decline
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bell-cot 2mo agoI see no upsides to a Google/Microsoft duopoly in email. Except for those already-far-too-powerful corporations. EDIT: "I see no upsides to X" means "X is NOT good". (Responses suggest that this was not clear.)
- thelastgallon 2mo agoWe have to figure out a way to get out of FB social, iOS/Android phone, Google/Microsoft email, AWS/GOOG/MSFT cloud oligopolies. There is no competition and there will be massive rentier capitalism extraction from all these players for the rest of civilization.
- inigyou 2mo agoIt starts by just avoiding them as much as possible. E.g. self-host email. If you encounter a system that refuses to receive your email, I give you permission to use your old Gmail account with that system, while using your self hosted account for everything you can. If your email is Google or Microsoft, there are other people with self-hosted email who feel pressured to use their Google or Microsoft accounts to send email to you.
- mrngld 2mo agoThere's competition, but no one is interested. TBH, I blame IT leadership. The easy choice is Google or Microsoft. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" is now "No one ever got fired for subbing to Office." Someone needs to bite the bullet and stitch together an alternative array of services. They've cultivated their own monoculture by hitting the easy-button and forking over for Office365, etc. Which if we're being honest, Microsoft and Google products are rarely best-in-class at any one thing that they do. Teams, SharePoint, Google Docs, someone somewhere is doing those things much better. Those competitors just don't necessarily have a whole ecosystem that makes it a big Easy Button for corporate IT to smash. And they sometimes charge as much by themselves as Office365 costs in whole. But I know one problem my own employers IT team struggles with a bit is putting out the constant fire of different teams deciding the Microsoft tool we pay for sucks and going rogue and trying to subscribe to something else. Dropbox was a big one, but Teams and Planner alternatives come up a lot too. Not pretending to have all the answers but it doesn't seem to be a completely intractable problem.
- remote3body 2mo ago[flagged]
- avian 2mo agoHow times change. I remember when Gmail came around and everyone was more than happy to hand off their email to Google. No spam and ability to send and receive huge (for the time) attachments I think were the main things people wanted. Not sure if that was before or after everyone was happy to hand off their web browser to Google.
- herrherrmann 2mo agoYou like using Google and Microsoft products as an end user (even ignoring all the ethical issues with these companies)? That seems surprising to me. I find their products so horrible compared to e.g. Fastmail.
- bell-cot 2mo ago> You like using ... ? NO, and I avoid both of 'em as much as I can. (Note clarifying edit to my initial comment above.)
- leonidasrup 2mo agoThis very much depends you been U.S. citizen or not been U.S. citizen. "PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN. PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google and Apple under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_program "Section 702 permits the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to jointly authorize targeting of non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. By targeting, it is meant that US persons or persons located in the United States may not be the intended targets of the collection. The targeting must have as its object the acquisition of foreign intelligence information, as this is defined by FISA." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FISA_Amendments_Act_of_2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FISA_Amendments_Act_of_2008
- sharperguy 2mo agoIf someone can solve the spam problem in email without just manually whitelisting specific providers that heavily monitor their users, then they can completely reverse the direction of this problem. Unfortunately it doesn't seem likely someone could do that.
- andrewchambers 2mo agoSeems like AI is in a pretty good position to do that tbh.
- atmosx 2mo agoYou mean filtering? That could get extremely expensive computationally, though. Tools like Rspamd support LLM-based filtering, but traditional Bayesian filtering is vastly cheaper and more computationally efficient. Hm, maybe LLMs can be used as an additional signal for ambiguous messages rather than as the primary filter.
- andrewchambers 2mo agoI was sort of thinking a final stage of the filtering pipeline - though prompt injection etc are risks.
- binyu 2mo agoIf you are thinking using AI to classify messages, the scale of email spam is so massive that using conventional techniques won't work. It won't make sense energetically speaking IMO. I think techniques like HashCash by Adam Back should be revisited.
- abirch 2mo agoIt's not in the current providers' interest to help people avoid the current providers' advertisement or avoid paying the providers to host the customers' email.
- Hilliard_Ohiooo 2mo ago[dead]
- glum64 2mo agoStopped reading at "The MX record says where the mailbox lives."
- marcusb 2mo agoInterestingly, DNS does have such a record (MB,) just never widely used - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035/#section-3.3.3 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035/#section-3.3.3
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- petcat 2mo agoSpam ruined email. It's really as simple as that.
- redeeman 2mo agospam filters are effective at dealing with that
- brikym 2mo agoIt works both ways right? If you self-host you are seen as the spam.
- nh2 2mo agoNot in my experience. My self-hosted email filters too little spam, while GMail etc filter too much (e.g. important company correspondence leading to orders almost being lost because they landed in our GMail spam).
- _joel 2mo agoI hardly ever see any spam nowadays, happy fastmail user.
- gglitch 2mo agoNothing will ever ruin email. A private email server, or a federation of mutually-whitelisting ones, is the ultimate social media, and not at all a bad personal information management system too. Edit: typo
- liotier 2mo agoAt this point, self-hosting email is as much a practical convenience as it is a political statement. Or maybe I'm just stubborn.
- poetaster 2mo agoDitto. It is practical and I am stubborn. Though I no longer run sendmail :-)
- throwaway67743 2mo agoI'm sure it's a good article but there is no need for it to be written by an LLM... Is everyone really this lazy now? I don't think I've read anything written by a human for at least a full month.
- flyingcoder 2mo agoThis seems like a load bearing issue. Would you like me to put together a plan to put human-written text in your daily routine?
- throwaway67743 2mo agoOh you.
- stavros 2mo agoThe need is that writing is expensive. An LLM is around a hundred times cheaper than a human, so this kind of article that doesn't provide tons of value just makes sense to write with an LLM. I hate LLM writing, but the economics checks out.
- iLoveOncall 2mo agoHow about not writing the article at all then?
- sandebert 2mo agoInteresting topic. I wonder if the AI was given notes to base the article on, or if it was given the data and also made the full analysis itself.
- kypro 2mo agoI switched to M365 as my provider a few years back as my emails kept being flagged as spam. I've done it for decades, but I don't know much beyond the basics of email hosting tbh, however my understanding is that these days email coming from self-hosted servers carries a much higher spam/junk risk and so often automatically marked as spam. Maybe there are ways to avoid this happening, but when a few clients all reported that they were not receiving my emails I didn't have much of a choice but to switch.
- rantingdemon 2mo agoI would also be interested in self-hosting but have limited understanding of what would be required to ensure my email does not get flagged as spam.
- DogRunner 2mo agoAnd on the other side, projects like stalwart email ( http://stalw.art/ http://stalw.art/ ) and mox ( http://xmox.nl/ http://xmox.nl/ ) makes it so much easier to build an e-mailsystem on your server.
- Scarjit 2mo agoI have deployed stalwart as my replacement for mailu and iv never had such an easy time setting up mail, i love it.
- lluisantoni 2mo ago[dead]
- IFC_LLC 2mo agoThe hardest thing in setting up your emails server is to keep your messages out of spam folders. Even if you are completely legit company that sends out ONLY human-written personal emails, you will get tagged as spam first. I've self-hosted for about 2 months, and promptly switched to iCloud. Just because I've been spending too much time calling people and telling them to check their spam folders. Recently our business moved to another domain. We had a guy who has spent over a month "warming up" traffic, so our new domain won't be tagged as spam by default.
- richard_gg 2mo ago[flagged]
- VladVladikoff 2mo ago20 years of running the classic postfix + dovecot stack for about 10 business domains. I’ve recently been testing out stalwart, with just one company domain, which is nice but seems quite fragile, 4 times now it’s killed itself doing some self updates. If it wasn’t for Claude assistance I probably would have given up on it by now. It is quite feature rich though, but its spam detection is not great, too much ham flagged as spam, not enough spam flagged as spam. 2FA is a nice bonus but for some unknown reason it breaks itself every few weeks and I gotta turn it back off again. If I could get stalwart stable I would migrate all my domains to it.
- raddan 2mo agoWhy switch then? Need more excitement in your life? I have been running Postfix for 22 years, from a big corporate installation to my own on a Raspberry Pi Zero. It just does its job.
- VladVladikoff 2mo ago2FA is a big one. We need it to please the insurance companies.
- A_D_E_P_T 2mo agoI wish there were a way to self-host without my emails constantly getting stuck in other people's spam folders. And it made me really paranoid about email, too -- like I'd send emails, and I'd never know if the other end received them or not, unless they replied. Without a reply, I would always wonder whether the message got a look, or disappeared without a trace. The only way around this seems to be hosting with Google, Microsoft, or maybe Proton. Any other ideas?
- the_real_cher 2mo agoI think that is the Crux of the issue. Email spam has made self hosting untenable.
- hdgvhicv 2mo agoI don’t self host, I pay zoho to do it. Over never had any suspicion my emails haven’t been received.
- jml78 2mo agoIt happens on zoho. I ran my business email on zoho. Multiple instances where people on Gmail had my messages go to spam. I have the same issue with proton mail.
- cjs_ac 2mo agoI started self-hosting my email last year, but I use MailPace (other email sending services are available) to avoid being memory-holed.
- frizlab 2mo agoI use fastmail which is very good. Like “oh this is how it should feel!” good.
- MikeNotThePope 2mo agoI only have one minor complaint about Fastmail after 5 years. I can’t do a full-page screenshot of a long email on my iPhone.
- gostsamo 2mo agoHosting my own server with mailinabox. low traffic, but keeping their random subscriptions, newsletters and occasional single purpose address. Haven't had any issues so far.
- gommm 2mo agoI've been running my own email server with exim and dovecot for 20ish years, I like the freedom it gives me but I have to say it's a significant investment. Not so much keeping things up to date but instead making sure that my emails are actually delivered. I've eventually switched to using fastmail just for sending emails and even with that, I don't get perfect delivery.
- mrighele 2mo agoLast year I started self hosting my email. I found that once you setup the “usual suspects” (DMARC, DKIM, SPF…) outgoing mail works without issues. In fact it works now better than the (small) provider I was using before. And setting them up properly is not even that difficult nowadays
- groomlake 2mo agoWhenever HN discusses self-hosting email, half the people with self-hosting experience say they never had any issues and the other half says they had so many issues they had to give it up. I self-hosted for years and I did all the standard things you're supposed to do, but I had tremendous problems with Gmail and Outlook. Other providers usually went through without issue.
- weavie 2mo agoHow much of this is just down to your mail server being randomly assigned an IP address with dubious history or not?
- groomlake 2mo agoHard to tell. My server's IP was not on any public blacklists (confirmed by https://multirbl.valli.org/ https://multirbl.valli.org/) and it was whitelisted on DNSWL.org at medium trust level.
- mrighele 2mo agoI guess there is a certain amount of luck in this, probably related to the provider, or the range that your IP reside into. (I guess google and microsoft keep their own blacklists, regardless of what public blacklists say). I wonder if the best course of action in that case is to just spin up a new server on a different provider and try again. FWIW, in my case, I am running the server on Hetzner, even though is supposed to have a bad reputation, but I have been using its IP for more than 10 years for other things (web server, personal services etc) so I guess that helps
- avian 2mo ago> DMARC: adopted everywhere, enforced nowhere in particular Unfortunately this only talks about what DMARC policies are published by domains. I was hoping they will go into some analysis of how many mailboxes actually hard-enforce DMARC rules on ingress (as in, respect the DMARC policy as published by the sender's domain, p=reject or whatever else it might be) I have been hesitant to enforce DMARC rules on my server. Partly because maintaining it was a pain (see opendmarc - maybe better with rspamd now), but also because on my test runs I saw plenty of legitimate incoming mail that simply would get rejected if I were to enforce DMARC on ingress. I suspect big players like gmail have some kind of soft enforcement/reputation/machine learning approach to DMARC, but this is way too much work for a small time admin like me.
- Madareyou 2mo ago[flagged]
- FriedrichN 2mo agoSelf hosting is not that hard actually. The problem lies with the big e-mail providers marking your e-mail as spam, even if you have everything configured right (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc.) and you're not on any blacklists. They use their mysterious opaque algo to determine that your e-mail is spam and you have no idea what you could do to not get in peoples junk boxes.
- sshine 2mo ago> They use their mysterious opaque algo to determine that your e-mail is spam and you have no idea what you could do to not get in peoples junk boxes. And that’s not hard? Running a modern mail server, a spam filter, a self-hosted webmail, and learning just enough about DNS and networking to get mail through: this is what’s not that hard. Figuring out how to stay whitelisted, or accept ending up in people’s filters, asking them to whitelist you while your public IP gradually gains trust, is a job.
- FriedrichN 2mo agoThat's pretty much what I mean. Implementing the authenticity measures is very easy, making sure the e-mails get delivered to peoples inboxes without getting marked as spam is hard. I just wish these big parties would give you a more formal way to make clear you're not a spammer.
- sshine 2mo agoI have somehow accepted that it's impossible to distinguish a spammer and an earnest newcomer. There is only one metric of an honest mailserver and that is time spent not blacklisted. This is true "proof of work" on behalf of the mail server admin. Running a mailserver on an IP range easily accessible to spammers (e.g. a cloud provider) gives you a negative start. You need to invest in "good IP addresses". I will gladly pay money to anyone who wants to do this. There are medium-sized players who deliver affordable, top-notch service. Turns out $5/mo. is enough for human service, because something that just works doesn't need a lot of it.
- ferrow 2mo ago[flagged]
- bilekas 2mo agoMail self hosting is not an easy process to maintain.. If you do manage to get whitelisted you need to ensure you're on top of maintaining it, let alone some larger provider like Google just deciding they don't like you. I do empathise with wanting to self host, I just always found the cost of effort to do so really didn't offer enough benefits versus a good provider like proton for example. It sucks but maybe a fight that's too far gone to win.
- agentultra 2mo agoIt’s not that bad, but it does require some effort. I self-host. I spend far more time using and enjoying email than I do maintaining the infrastructure. However you do have to live with the occasional blacklist when you host on a VPS like I do. Some idiot in your IP range may get blacklisted for spam and then you get caught in it. It’s generally temporary. And there are some corporate policies that will flat out reject emails from you which is fun. I’ve probably spent less than 10 hours over the last 5 or 6 years on maintenance.
- sshprotocol 2mo ago> However you do have to live with the occasional blacklist when you host on a VPS like I do. Some idiot in your IP range may get blacklisted for spam and then you get caught in it. It’s generally temporary. >And there are some corporate policies that will flat out reject emails from you which is fun. This is what keeps me away from self-hosting it, though. As long as there's some possibility that my ability to deliver email could get nuked, all because someone else made a mistake, it's not worth it to me, especially since using / sending email is mandatory for doing most things. I guess I'm just not really willing to take that sort of risk
- agentultra 2mo agoBlacklisting is a shady practice, unfortunately. They generally work on ranges and you don’t get much of a say. Most blacklist maintainers have a way for you to report a false positive. Responsiveness varies. Most maintainers will drop your range off the blacklist after a fixed period. Or you can pay to get off the list. Not all email services use blacklists anyway. Bit of a racket. You can mitigate against it by hosting on a dedicated IP. But I understand the risk. It’s really annoying when I send someone an email and they call me some days later wondering why I hadn’t sent them an email. Failures are often silent on the sending side. It’s not for everyone. There are risks.
- logicallee 2mo agoI run my own mail server, and I am very concerned about its reputation and deliverability. I've run my own Linux server full time since at least 2017, obviously well before LLM's, but only recently put up a mail server. I don't usually run any agents on the server, such as Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex, or Grok Build, all of which I have subscriptions for but don't run on this server. Instead, I manually administer the server using ssh, while getting interactive help from ChatGPT in a chat window. It was complicated to get security, DNSSEC, DKIM, DMARC right this way. I did it just under a year ago, around September 15, 2025. I tried to follow and understand what I was doing, and keep good records on it. It was a complicated process, but everything was up and working at the end and I received email my server sent me. It felt good to be able use this simple script to send myself email: #!/usr/bin/env python3 import smtplib from email.message import EmailMessage msg = EmailMessage() msg["From"] = "(user's from address)" msg["To"] = "(my gmail address)" msg["Subject"] = "(a test subject)" msg.set_content("(a test body)") with smtplib.SMTP("127.0.0.1", 25, timeout=30) as smtp: smtp.send_message(msg) print("Message submitted successfully to local Postfix.") and have it show up instantly in my gmail within seconds. This is powerful. (I've removed the details from this comment.) I understand that as my server's reputation grows, it becomes very powerful to be able to email anyone without any intermediary except potential spam filters. I am very careful about what I put on my server. Nevertheless, I had a recent experience that was a little sad for me. I wanted to forward some mail to my gmail address automatically, and used ChatGPT Sol 5.6 on medium thinking time to help me with the administration to do this. (I find extra high and pro thinking times are excessively long.) I was very disappointed with the results, which included a very badly written regex for authentication. I'll write up my experience in an experience report. It was a big disappointment for me. The burden on administrating one's own email is already very large, and it is disappointing that we can't really rely on frontier models to help with it.
- akashy123 2mo ago[flagged]
- skeledrew 2mo agoI've been using GMail roughly since it existed I think, and have thought on and off over the years about self-hosting. The notion scares me every time because with it comes thoughts of what would happen if I were to lose the domain name or server, or even if there was an outage at the "wrong time". And then there's also the idea of updating the 1 million+1 services, etc that I used it to sign up for. As much as I'm not a fan of a decent amount of what they've been doing, they're however a stable entity which offers a very reliable service for essentially free. Very likely that many others also think along those lines. The only thing I think can compete with that is some kind of decentralized solution, also something I've thought about a bit. Like a Keyoxide-based[0] - or similar - setup that makes it virtually impossible for one to lose their online identity (since lost keys can be rotated out once one has - access to - enough proofs), and then that identity can be used - without fear - to route associated data, etc. Of course adoption of what could become an adjacent or new standard would be the next hurdle to overcome... [0] https://keyoxide.org/ https://keyoxide.org/
- IsTom 2mo ago> what would happen if I were to lose the domain name or server On the other side of the coin, what would happen if google bans you? That's certainly not unheard of.
- defaultcompany 2mo agoIf Google bans you they at least will not hand out your email address to someone else. If your domain expires and someone else registers it that’s essentially what’s going to happen.
- skeledrew 2mo agoTrue, something else I've considered. But the reported incidents are few and far between, and the stories always have some trigger. I have been taking small steps to move away, though it's yet another service where "stuff" could happen: since DuckDuckGo introduced their proxy email service I got one and have been using it for my more recent sign-ups. So if something does happen to the GMail or I hit some switch-over threshold, I can point it elsewhere, though everything before would be lost.
- ubermonkey 2mo agoI self-hosted for a while in the early 2000s. It was a hassle. My box got hacked -- I'm sure I missed a security update or something -- and while I didn't lose any data because of my obsessive backup paranoia, it was enough of a Thing that I just punted. I used Gmail for Domains for a hot minute, but never really liked it very much. Soon I found Fastmail, and I've been using them ever since (so about 13 years now).
- rdwrrr 2mo agoTo be fair, hosting your own email server is just a pain in the ass.
- elendilm 2mo agoNo
- 63 2mo agoLike many others, I gave up on self hosting email when I realized Gmail and Outlook would always mark me as spam, if I even got delivered. DMARC and DKIM did nothing, I think the datacenter IP was just blacklisted. Ostensibly there are ways to get it unblacklisted but man what a pain the ass for the whole process.
- m463 2mo agoI had some email bounced by gmail, had to hardcode the ip addresses in the SPF records. I think gmail can just gradually bounce self-hosted email and people will give up and move to their service.
- dbingham 2mo agoThis is the counter example to "protocols and interop solve enshittification". No, they don't. Email is the model protocol: perfectly interoperable, perfectly decentralizable. And yet it is centralizing in the hands of a few organizations who then wield enough market power to bend everyone else to their will. It's still enshittifying. If email hasn't resisted enshittification, then interoperable protocols are not the solution for it. And yet, pretty much all of the pro-social, anti-enshittification effort in tech is being directed into protocols and interop.
- Leonard_of_Q 2mo agoDoes it or is this part of the push to keep people from hosting their own email services? I've self-hosted email for about 35 years now and see no reason to stop, it hardly ever needs maintenance and my mail tends to arrive even at hostile destinations (Micros..., Ggl, ...). Don't listen to those who fight against decentralisation, their agenda does not match yours.
- layer8 2mo agoSame here (well, 25-ish years). And while self-hosted email may be declining, it apparently still outnumbers any single email provider: https://labs.ripe.net/images/r_uuIdAmmdbhI1R9Der6slvvH5U=/10070/width-1536/2_1RLxEin.png https://labs.ripe.net/images/r_uuIdAmmdbhI1R9Der6slvvH5U=/10...
- cube00 2mo agoEspecially someone who stands to gain if they only need to get cozy with two email providers to deliver their spam. (Blog author) runs the email infrastructure measurement project at Live Direct Marketing Google offers "mail merge in Gmail to send personalized email campaigns, newsletters, and announcements to a wide audience." [1] Based on how much @gmail.com spam I used get within GMail I can only assume they treat mail from their internal accounts much more favourably then us dirty self hosters. [1]: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12921167 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12921167
- throwaway67743 2mo ago"(Blog author) runs the email infrastructure measurement project at Live Direct Marketing" - really? amazing. minimum effort business model posting minimum effort slop to promote minimum effort agenda. the world disgusts me. RIPE really should know better, this isn't a mistake. edit: fuck me, from the author page: Email: art-online-shop@yandex.ru Website: https://check.live-direct-marketing.online/email-stats/ https://check.live-direct-marketing.online/email-stats/ - may as well be a spam email itself
- ArtemBerzin 2mo ago
- lazyweb 2mo agoHosting a personal, low volume mail server works as well as ever. If you know what you're doing. I've written about it five years ago, still applies: https://schumacher.sh/2021/05/10/running-a-private-mail-server-for-six-years-easy-peasy.html https://schumacher.sh/2021/05/10/running-a-private-mail-serv...
- elendilm 2mo agoRecently went self hosted. Not going back ever again. Also had a couple of ui pages on our app to have full email functionality. This also means custom integration into our existing ecosystem.
- smalltorch 2mo agoOn the other hand, I'm working on a prototype to completely throw away conventional email. Creating a system where you can simply spin your own physical mail box and node, and reach others at their unique address. https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/tmail https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/tmail
- litoE 2mo agoI don't understand how independent health professionals can avoid using self-hosted email. Think of your neighborhood psychologist: any email she sends to or receives from a patient or potential patient should be completely confidential, down to the email address of the correspondents. It's no secret that Google and Microsoft "read" the emails they send and receive and mine them for information. And yet, a quick search of "psychologists near me" in Google Maps gives me a list of professionals most of whose email addresses have MX records pointing to Google servers.
- illiac786 2mo agoAnyone (successfully) selfhosting since less than 10 years? I see only 20-25 years selfhosters and I suspect the bar was made much higher later on. Probably in terms of blocking/banning newcomers.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]