I have run my own mail server now for 20+ years. its is runnig postfix , with spamassain. the users have imaps, and roundcube www gui.
It had been running fine, and have been updated HW / OS a lot of time over the years, now its runnig on rocky O/S
I’ve been told running an email server is the final boss of self-hosting
The ultimate boss fight is hosting your email server AND making your family use it
Actually to be fair, mine works fine and always has. The final boss is making Hotmail/live/Microsoft actually accept your email despite you jumping through all the hoops to have perfect spam score.
Everyone keeps saying that but I just can’t see it. The only time my mails were rejected was because I didn’t know what I was doing at the beginning of my journey. Now, whenever I changed my stack or did some major updates the past 20 years or so, I just go to 2-3 sites that analyze my mail server from the outside and tell me if there is anything wrong. The free tier is always more than enough. Just make sure there is at least one service in the list where you send an email to a generated mailbox and have it analyzed. Just looking at the mail server is not enough to find all potential configuration issues.
I aim at a100% score. It’s time consuming the first time around but later it’s just a breeze.
IMHO, as someone running his own mail server, the real final boss is LDAP and implementing SSO on all your selfhosted goodies. Bonus points if you then use it to login to other services that support OAuth 2.0.
I have my own mailserver just for me and it wasn’t that complicated to be honest. I set it up with Mailcow in Docker in under a day. So far it has been stable with regular backups and updates through Lighthouse.
Maintenance comes down to 5 minutes every three months because somehow Let’s Encrypt and Mailcow don’t like each other and I have to renew the certificate manually.
Do you know if this setup could run on 512mb of RAM? I tried to set up mailman 3 but it gets OOM-killed immediately
Yeah, I’d recommend using rspamd for lower-end hardware over spamassassin. Might be a bit more work to set up, mostly because it’s not as popular, and there are fewer tutorials, but it doesn’t have the overhead from running on perl like spamassassin. That said, while there are people using rspamd on systems with 512MB of ram, they are usually smaller, personal setups that aren’t dealing with hundreds of emails a day.
Buy yourself a cookie!
Awesome, I’m only on year 3 or so. Have you implemented DANE? I haven’t gotten to a point where I can properly make it work but I’m slowly getting there.
Now for the Final Challenge, write an eli5 tutorial on how to host and maintain a mail server!
I can’t take credit for writing it, but here you go!
