I have been thinking of completely going off Google. I have a Nextcloud server for documents and contacts and calendar. Thinking of moving mail away too. Currently I am conflicted between hosting my own email server. On searching only advice I am getting is not to do it.
How many of the homelabers do host their own email server? What software do you use? Any tips.
I do, Postfix and Dovecot. Mine’s got 10 years of history so I’ve been spared being blocked everywhere.
Most will tell you the software side is not too bad these days but the constant fighting to get your emails through can be really rough.
Personally I find it useful if only for the sake of just registering every service to its own unique email address so I can track who got my data where, and I get the privacy of Google not knowing every site I’m registered with. I still use my Gmail when I want to be sure it goes through.
I really don’t send that many emails so it works pretty well for me.
I did for a while but stopped because it’s a massive pain and far easier to just use proton or something.
I host my own, on a server in a data center on IP space owned by a friend of mine. I use mailcow for software.
Yes, although like someone else mentioned - I don’t, and ever wouldn’t try to host it at home, but on a server at a data center. The network is operated by a person I know and trust.
No IP reputation issues that I’ve run into, but even going in I knew that its very rare I send emails so it probably wasn’t going to be an issue either way. I’ve only had it running for about two years now, but in that time frame I’ve sent one email out where I “started the conversation”, and three emails where I was replying back to someone who already had my email in their address book.
Yes, self-hosting my email server since 2 years without issues so far. I only send a handful of emails per month but haven’t stumbled into any issues of being blocked by any big provider, even the ones that are known to block small email servers here in Germany. I enjoy the flexibility of as many aliases and distribution groups as I want for the family and being able to configure the anti-spam-component the way it works best for us.
I run everything on a small VPS at a known provider and checked the IP against block lists. It was indeed listed on one but I never had issues and when checking again a few days ago it wasn’t listed on any list anymore.
First I tried the available all-in-one solutions but troubleshooting is hard if you don’t know each component.
So, I followed this guide but moved all components in their own docker containers instead of installing natively to be more failsafe regarding system upgrades:
https://workaround.org/ispmail-bullseye/
Everything is running fine and in case of issues I know exactly how each component is set up and can troubleshoot quickly.