As the title reads, I really want to begin hosting my own email server again. I’m sick of the poor quality of the service providers out there. Damnit all I want/need is a reliable IMAP/SMTP provider. I spent 3 hours getting off of Hostinger and on to Zoho. I just hope Zoho won’t suck. It’s great for now but we’ll see.
Is the prevailing advice still not to bother with self-hosting email?
There’s no shortage of people who will tell you it’s okay to self host email… in fact, you’re probably not hearing all of them, because some will inevitably get routed to spam.
Is the prevailing advice still not to bother with self-hosting email?
From someone who never stopped: YES.
99.95% spam, and no amount of filters and training can do as good a job as Gmail (as much as I hate and would like to get away from Gmail)
I want to turn it off so bad, but fomo, that one email from that one person I knew 25 years ago who only has that email address … fml.
You can get a mailprovider that allows custom domain names for very little money. I use Mailbox.org and it works fine. Also used Protonmail previously which also works.
What are you doing to get spam? Somehow simple RBL check + pipelining block most of it for me.
Mailcow includes rspamd which learns spam using bayes analysis. Just move messages to the junk folder and it learns, after a month or so of training I get very very little actual spam, and no false positives.
99.95% spam
lol may I ask what you have to do to get that amount of spam? I at most get one spam mail per month to my server and I have some addresses listed as contact information on my public websites.
I want to turn it off so bad, but fomo, that one email from that one person I knew 25 years ago who only has that email address … fml.
If you want to turn it off, can’t you just use some free service to forward messages to your new address?
Honestly, if you want it, go for it. It’s a good learning experience!
I’ve been running postfix+dovecot for 10 years now and I’ve had very very few issues, I wouldn’t know it’s not Gmail or some other big provider. Kinda pain to set it up, especially if your provider hands you an IP that’s been used for spam previously, but it’s been smooth sailing since for me. Mails always delivered, DKIM/DMARC and everything.
Here’s a helpful site to test deliverability: https://www.mail-tester.com/
Mine scores 10/10
E: Also, surprisingly zero spam despite my addresses being quite public.
Maybe I’ll try it with my throwaway domain, fugzied.com. I did host my own email 8 years ago. I can imagine the landscape has changed.
Hi, email self hoster here, though with a unique circumstance. Self hosting email is fine given you know what you’re doing or have a unique circumstance like I do, I run my own ASN (internet thing allowing you to directly connect with other internet networks like your ISPs) and you can obtain your own IP addresses that you control yourself, meaning you lose the issue of ISPs giving you crap IPs, or your hosting provider being blacklisted because of someone else. I never get sent to spam as a result. Self hosting email is a doable thing, you just need more control over whatever IPs you use than most people will have at home
So self hosting yes, but not for the average person with a residential ISP IP address.
Do you own IPv4 address space as individual? I do not think it will happen in his era. Just pick ISP which provides internet services to businesses only (probably as colo), so you IP will not get listed as “residential” and start building up reputation. Secondary MX on cheap VPS is fine.
I have self-hosted my own emails many times. Up to having three SMTP servers with failsafe option at DNS.
It’s super nice, but I would never self-host SMTP again. It’s a nightmare. I had to email or open a ticket at most ISPs despite my clean IPs. Most ISPs simply blacklist all IPs unless they are major email providers already.
My advice is go for it but let SMTP be handled by who will deal with these frustrations. MXroute is a great choice and it’s cheap.
