I give up.
I tried left and right to try to install an email server so I could degoogle my life.
But therechnical barrier is thick and Google keeps adding more to it. Forget it. I can’t even get thru the installation process much less trying to get my shit off Google.
I figure, I don’t actually have any need for my email addresses. Just like my phone number. I never call anyone. I’m going to discourage my kids from using email at all. I’ll remind everyone I know that I don’t use email at every opportunity I get just like I remind people to not call me and that my phone number is not available.
Between spammers and Google, I just don’t need this headache in my life. My mom is much less technically savvy than the average pet. So Google will just siphon her data and when the megabits are full then you just delete the old stuff.
You don’t need it. No one will spend their life reading your emails when you’re gone or watching your videos or listening to your recordings or viewing your photos. There’s no need to worry about just deleting the pile of shit you’ve accumulated. I’m this done.
Self host all the services you want, but don’t ever touch sendmail and bind. The most constantly attacked services I’ve ever had my ass on the line for. I won’t even manage them for money anymore.
Sounds like a deal to me.
I mean I did an email transfer as a multihat guy at a small business and mx records are a bitch. granted more so because there needs to be no loss or delay. might be easier for an individual. but I don’t roll my own.
I dunno, mailcow dockerized seems to work ok for me. That being said, e-mail is so 20th century.
I’m sorry to great it’s been so frustrating for you. I know we all have our own tolerances for random junk and I’m glad you’re making the right decision for you at this time.
I’ve been running mailinabox for almost two years now and it has been very good for me. Especially once I send some email to my family members’ Gmail address and had them Mark it as “not spam” my deliverability has become very good.
Just get a domain and point it at a provider. Now you’re not locked in and can switch at will upon enshittification. Get one of the offline mail archive services like OpenArchiver. Job done.
Never self host email. It’s way too much of a pain.
Why people keep spreading this misinformation? It’s plainly not true and I am the living proof of that.
Been using my email self hosted (on VPs) for decades now, never had serious issues at all. And it’s all my family primary addresses
One wrong config entry, and you have an open relay and a domain that can never be used for SMTP again, yay.
Actually managing an email server properly is demanding, as it is one of the most attacked services. Of course, you can also take the easy route and just pray.
Sorry man, i understand your fears, but it’s not that difficult. Granted, you need to STUDY and UNDERSTAND what you do, it’s not just deploy a container and run. But hey, you can give up on learning new stuff and don’t run risks ever, in that case you should also stop driving a car, since it’s much more dangerous than running an open relay by error.
Also, use mailcow stalwart or any other already packaged solution if you want to be safe.
I used mailcow, got an open relay immediately. Stalwart seems to do things a bit better.
I host so many services and it is not that I don’t want to learn new stuff. The effort is simply too high for a single service. And since there are very good providers which fully encrypt your data, I went this route to keep my mind off this part of my system.
I fully understand your point, but the mailcow as open relay seems strange. Anyway, it’s a risk/cost tradeoff right? Everybody should do it’s own assessment and experimentation. But after the initial setup, it’s zero maintenance. The only maintenance i do is keep the stack regularly updated, and it broke twice in 20+ years (dovecot new config format, WTF…)
I had long discussions with some mailcow contributors and it turns out, that some default settings can lead to an open relay if you are not careful. The biggest problem is that they use postfix. Postfix is not bad itself, as it is probably the most battle tested mail server. The configuration of postfix is a different story. And even if I prefer battle tested GNU/BSD software, postfix would be one of the rare exceptions where I would be careful.
I had a postfix running for years without issues, when I self-hosted SimpleLogin, and I fully agree with you. Once it runs, you only need to make sure that the security is managed.
I don’t say it’s impossible. It’s just not worth it 90% of the people, especially for beginners.
Never said it’s for beginners. It’s not.
You must understand what you do and do it properly. IT’s not drop a container and run mindless. Regardless, you can do it if you take the proper precautions and have fun doing it.
Because it works for you, doesn’t mean it’s easy. If you have the experience, and done it at least once successfully, it’s “easy”. Compared to the average self-hosted configure and run a docker image and reverse proxy it’s objectively harder to run.
The issue is not running the individual components or servers, but that there’s infrastructure and to some extent crypto involved, which is just outside of the comfort zone for many. You tried to host it like any other thing on your homelab? Nope. Has your VPS been involved in spam? Enjoy the blacklist you’ll never find out about and the debugging why it doesn’t work. No experience in managing your DNS? Have fun getting DMARC/DKIM/SPF to work.
Theres just way more stuff that needs to be done, and a lot of it will fail silently.
I fully agree with you: it’s NOT easy. And you must understand what you do. It’s not just deploy a container and run happy.
I might say this is the first serious step for a selfhoster, something that goes over and beyond just hosting a service for yourself and fun, since it federates (modern term fur how email works) with the outside world.
Are you scared of hosting email? don’t do it. You want to learn and improve your skills and you are happy with running the risks associated? go for it.
Anyway tools like stalwart and mailcow do provide full instructions for DKIM/DMARK and DNS records that you only need to follow, so today there are easier options than the “old days”.
Anyway you don’t have to do it on your primary email from day one, just use a test account/domain and see how it goes. Keep using your gmail account and spin it up on a secondary domain, if it works good… switch over in 6 months or 2 years as you are confortable. OTherwise, keep gmail and stop.
I fully agree with you: it’s NOT easy. And you must understand what you do. It’s not just deploy a container and run happy.
This is literally what you’ve called misinformation.
Again, not everyone is self-hosting only for learning and experimentation only. Making a deliberate call that mailing infra might be too hard might be too hard, have too big of a knowledge gap, or is simply not worth the effort is something I’d call more serious than hardlining on “self host everything or stay on gmail”, especially in the case of mailing, where it’s pretty much impossible to self-host on your own hardware / network.
Full instructions do not reduce any effort or resources involved or complexity of the problem. And the problem is that you’re suddenly moving from “I’m hosting a few services” to being balls deep in networking, dns, and a deceivingly easy protocol which blows up in complexity due to being federated and absolutely dominated by big providers at the same time, and all of the extensions for security.
Except for learning, self-hosting serves a purpose. You might want privacy, you might not want to be dependent on corpo infra or external services at all, you might want to host something that offers something more or better than a SaaS solution - but first of all, it needs to work. For mail, you gain none of those. Self-hosting on your own hardware (or rather network) is pretty much impossible, so you’re reliant on a hosting provider at least. There is basically zero difference in functionality between mailing servers or providers. Sure, you’ll run into problems when copy pasting instructions, but those problems will break the service. Fucking up your DNS or networking will break your whole server. At the same time, while failing silently it will costs a magnitude of effort more than most other usually self-hosted services.
I think the general gist is as beginner self hosters we get more and more comfortable too “easily spin up a docker webserver”
At some point we arrive at “what other services can i host” and email is a pretty obvious addition expecting it to at least not be more difficult then running nextcloud.
It may be doable but hell is it not a comparable challenge.
I fully agree …
Email server require to understand what and why you are doing. This is a steep step up from spinning docker containers.
Nothing against docker containers, I run quite a few myself… But indeed a successful email server is a different beast.
Many people also try self host it at home, and this is a serious issue with email due to the residential ip address as well.
But it can be done successfully and it’s a great feeling of accomplishment when you do it. And you learn way more than using containers
Also all containerized solutions for email require the understanding and additional steps like DNS done properly as well .
I worked for years on a large email infrastructure for a job and for me it’s absolutely not worth it either.
I would prefer to take a subscription on a reputable host.
Why?
Because even if I do everything perfectly at setup (TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) that will still be precarious.
The security of SMTP is a patchwork of protocols added on top of it and a bunch of opaque reputation systems. If anything ever goes wrong with my email my domain’s reputation would fall. And that’s the thing, once your domain reputation goes too low, you can’t fix right away and say “my bad” and recover. Your mail will be silently blocked like Spam until a few days of sending perfectly clean emails. You need time to recover.
So mail self hosting is accepting that at any time if you make a slight mistake, your communications to other will be almost impossible for days. And again since a lot of it is reputation based you can’t fix the issue and recover immediately.
The business I was working for had everyday scenarios like that. A client that failed to update its DKIM and didn’t notice right away. When they do their reputation on for example Cisco’s platform is super low and we filter them as spam. And then it took days for them to recover even if they fixed the DKIM just one or two days after their mistake.
On the other hand I could take a protonmail subscription and use a domain that has so much volume and is tracked so carefully in term of reputation that I know my mails will be received and have all the necessary security done right.
These reputation systems are inherently difficult for small volume mail domains. There is no other users ln your domain so one mistake is all it takes to start having delivery issues and most importantly silent failed deliveries that you dont know about.
Is it possible? Yes. Is it necessary? Not really. If you can pay for a privacy respecting host…
Hence for me it’s not worth it because there are privacy respecting providers so it’s not like I absolutely have to self host it.
Just because you can do it doesn’t mean it is feasible
It comes with a lot of downsides
Isn’t that the gist of selfhosting?
Yes you can do it, yes you can have it done for you by somebody else. The first is fun, and risky, the second is less fun and less risky. We are all here for the fun… and probably we all don’t care too much of the risks. But why shut down everybody who ask about email selfhosting with a don’t do it? Let them try, make errors and fix them, maybe they learn something new, maybe it works out for them
What is the worst that might come out of it? Some spam? A blacklist? Come on, you can survive both. Don’t use your primary email account as self hosted from the beginning maybe, to mitigate all those risks, no?
It’s not too bad if you use an outbound SMTP relay for sending. SMTP2Go is pretty good, and they have a free plan with 1000 emails per month. I use Mailcow and you can configure relays in their web UI, but it works just as well with the
sender_dependent_relayhost_mapssetting in Postfix.Sure, it’s not fully self-hosted, but the interesting part to self-host is the storage of your emails, not the sending (which will just relay through other SMTP servers along the way anyways).
If it was painful for you, this does not mean nobody should even try. FMPOV my mailbox contains too much personal information to host in in the cloud.
Yeah, hosting your own email server is pretty tough.
I think something like https://migadu.com/ might be more in the middle of hosting your own server and purely using someone else’s frontend.
I just switched to migadu and found it painless and easy, I also run an email server with mail-in-a-box, which is great.
It’s not really worth the trouble to try to host your own e-mail. There are lots of e-mail hosts that you can use with your own domain. A few of them are free and there are plenty of low cost ones. As long as you use your own domain, you can switch hosts whenever you want and keep your addresses.
This really saddens me. Email is such a fundamentally good and open protocol. The only reason people don’t like it is because of big tech’s shenanigans.
I run an email service called Port87. I invite you to try it and see if it can convince you that email is actually a great technology, when detached from big tech slop. It’s got some really killer features that make it great for organization and preventing spam. You can also tell it that on certain addresses, it should completely ignore the strict auth requirements it usually has, so it will accept email from your own services without you having to set up all the extra bullshit that’s meant for stuff that matters more.
I was told about this one but never actually tried it. I am more hellbent on setting up my own server so I never have to migrate from anywhere.
If you have your own domain, you won’t ever have to migrate addresses, just possibly providers.
I do have one yeah. I’ll have to take a look.
Proton or Tuta mail. Supports aliasing so you can make unique email addresses per website, and trash them if you get spammed.
Singing up for a paid account you also get VPN, drive storage, password manager, docs, sheets, AI chat (I know), calendar, meetings and authenticator.
Posteo is a good provider for 1usd per month.
I also use mxroute. I paid for ten years at once. I only needed it because I wanted a catch-all and my previous hosting provider stopped allowing that.
My email solution for decades has been to have a mailbox separate from my email domain. Currently it’s FastMail. I then give out a different
entity@example.comto each entity that needs my email address. I can then shut off (route to null) any address that starts getting spam.I did order Run Your Own Mail Server because one day I’d like to try.
From the Kickstarter:
Running a mail server is an advanced systems administration skill, though. Mind tricks are not enough. You need to be able to operate a Unix-like operating system, understand logging and TLS, make DNS changes and adjust packet filters. RYOMS takes you through the protocol, configuring Postfix and Dovecot, and the DKIM and SPF and DMARC authentication protocols. (They’re not proper authentication protocols, but that’s what the Empire calls them.) It covers anti-spam measures, mail filters, and virtual domains, all at the command line and with pretty web interfaces. While the reference platforms are Debian and FreeBSD, the Postfix and Dovecot servers and assorted infrastructure work on any open source Unix.
This book does not contain absolutely everything you might ever need to understand running a mail server. Every environment has its oddities. But it does contain the core knowledge that every mail administrator must have. A sysadmin with this orientation can sort out their edges easily enough. Coping with edges is what we do.
If you want to give it another try, I’ve used Mailcow for about a decade now, after running on Exchange for twenty before that. Mailcow is way easier to set up and maintain than Exchange.
Key to it all is making sure you have your DKIM, dmarc and SPF records set up correctly, as well as a PTR with your internet provider if you can manage it, though that seems optional.
Never had a problem with the big providers bouncing my mails, just a couple little outfits that couldn’t figure their filters out correctly.
That’s the first thing I tried. I could receive emails but not send. Maybe I’ll give that thing one more go.
If you have trouble with outgoing mails, you can use a hybrid approach.
Receive mails directly to your server but use a mail service to relay your outgoing mails. Configuration for that is very simple in mailcow and there are a few dozen (free) transactional email providers (e.g. Scaleway).
That way you can keep receiving your mails privately and only have to give up some privacy when sending mails.
If you’re new to it all, this is probably the safest approach. Getting mail isn’t hard, sending it is where the potential gotchas will getcha.
You don’t need your own email server to degoogle your life.
Yes selfhosting it is awesome but it’s definitely not the simplest service to do host.
I think what OP means is that you can mix using an external email provider with storing your own email archive + an IMAP server + a webmail app. You can let the provider deal with the IP reputation and all that pain and just use their SMTP and IMAP to send email and pull to your local server, respectively. If you use your own domain you can also switch the provider in 10 minutes by simply changing your DNS records and retain the same address.
The hard part for me when giving up Gmail wasn’t the stuff above, it was tracking down all the places I was subscribed as @gmail.com and replacing it with @my.domain addresses. That took about 6 months. The local pull + IMAP + webmail took a weekend to set up.
What is the problem? I have been self hosting my mail for the last 20+ years and has always worked pretty well.
I rent a VPS for that since you should not use a residential address for email servers.
If you are careful enough to configure it properly I assure you that it works and it’s perfectly usable and stable
All my family primary email addresses are managed in that way on my various domains and we never had a single issue
Today it’s even easier because there are all in one docker based solutions. But going the hard way is perfectly doable as well.
Here is my experience, on my wiki, if you are interested https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=email%3Astart
Be aware that there are no optional steps: everything must be properly installed and setup from DNS entries to dkim/dmarc and certificates. But I promise, maintenance it basically zero after a proper setup. And I think twice in 20 years something broke. And the nice part of that email will just be delayed and delivered after you fix it, nothing gets ever lost
I love email, with all it downfalls, it’s still one of the most resilient and solid stuff on the internet.
I promise, maintenance it basically zero after a proper setup.
Well, it was close to zero for me until the last year dovecot update (2.3→2.4) that has broken old configs. I’ve spent a lot of time fixing them.
Yes … That is what pissed me…
But half day of cussing and swearing helped
Same here, I have been doing that for around 20 years now too and I started out with postfix and a list of vmails in a text file.
I wonder where this myth comes from. People host way more out there stuff themselves, but somehow email is too scary …
When you begin hosting you have to wait a bit before your email doesn’t go to spam, at least that was my experience in 2018.
Edit: I just checked and I can now deliver to Hotmail/MS365 too!
Because 99% of helfhosters pull containers, with zero understanding of what they do. They they try email, because heck why not also email, and hit the wall of actually must understand what you are doing or else…
Yes probably selfhosting email is for advanced users, people who at least know how to manage a DNS record and how nwtworking works. Maybe it’s just that selfhosting bar has dropped significantly thanks to docker, and indeed email hosting is a bit more complex that just “docker compose pull” approach.
Yet i think people should not be scaring others so easily on email self hosting, it’s perfectly doable and fun to do. Maybe don’t switch your primary account just imediately to mitigate risks…
I run it on residential, and since routing outgoing mail through smtp2go I don’t even get issues with my ISP putting my IP on the PBL. Once my contract is over I’m getting a static IP with a better supplier. Been solid for over two years
Bonus of running my own inbox, I learned how to discard annoying emails that can’t be unsubscribed from
Yeah ok maybe I just need to pay for a VPS.
There was a good guide by Linuxbabe on building an email server from scratch with all the bits and pieces and antispam/email verification stuff you need to send mail to the big players, I used it a few years ago to do my server.
Here’s the collection of various guides for various ways to do it:
https://www.linuxbabe.com/category/mail-server
Yeah you also need a vps. Home addresses are pretty much all marked as spam generators these days, and most ISPs proactively block all the common inbound ports for mail servers.
That is a mandatory requirement for proper email delivery.
Not an issue with email itself, more due to spam prevention and such.
I flagree that hosting email servers on residential IPs is a recipe for being filtered and blocked
I flagree that hosting email servers on residential IPs is a recipe for being filtered and blocked
Unless your ISP gives you a static address and agrees to change PTR record to your server address. Then it’s no different than any other server on the internet. Obviously odds are that you’re not getting one or if it’s an option they’ll likely charge more than VPS is going to cost you, but it’s not unheard of.
But for the actual topic, I don’t get the myth either. I’ve got a good old postfix+dovecot setup running and the only problem I have is that spam filtering isn’t quite as good as with commercial providers, but the handful of trash coming trough is easy enough to take care of manually.
I fully agree with you.
but i guess, from other replyies, people are just afraid somehow and have deep rooted fears about email and self hosting it. The people like you and me who have actually done it, understand that’s not that impossible.
And like with anything you learn only doing it, not fearing it. Maybe don’t switch your main account just from day 0 and see how it goes… :)
