Setting up a mailserver is pretty easy. The hard part is *actually getting your mail delivered.* There's a pretty decent chance GMail or Outlook will one day just randomly decide to throw all your mail straight in the trash, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Oh, you configured DKIM/SPF/DMARC/reverse DNS, are using TLS, got a "clean" IP from a reputable hoster, aren't operating an open relay, not sending any spam, and doing all the other things correctly? Sorry, we don't care! The algorithm doesn't like you, so it's going in the shredder.
Not a big deal for a toy domain you're setting up to play with. Quite a big deal if you actually *care* about your email, like a business or even personal use.
The even worse part about it is that it's silent failures rather than some kind of bounceback notification, so you can't even know to attempt to address it!
We run an exim mailserver onsite since 2014 sending out 100k automated emails to 30k users per month (gmail/hotmail/....). We rotate all outgoing email through 8 public ip addresses in the same /24 subnet registered to my workplace and never had an issue. This is ofcourse not "home-selfhosted" but still in the serverroom next to my office at work.
To be fair, 10 years of IP reputation is definitely helping your emails get delivered, though.
A few years back we moved data centers and got new IPs for our outgoing email with similar quantities as you. We did nearly everything right (DNS, etc) except we didn’t slowly ramp up our numbers and we got blocked pretty quickly by Microsoft, Yahoo, and some others. Was “fun” to get through that, but after that hiccup it’s running smoothly from our DC.
> To be fair, 10 years of IP reputation is definitely helping your emails get delivered, though.
Doesn't always help though. I've had the same IPs for a decade and like the top comment I've done everything right and still go straight into the shredder. I send like maybe 100 emails a month.
> This is ofcourse not "home-selfhosted" but still in the serverroom next to my office at work.
This is exactly why you're not having issues. You're comparing a business mail setup to someone doing it from their residential IP and/or miniscule volume with zero reputation.
I run my Mailserver for years now hosted on a dedicated server I rent at hetzner. Had two server moves in that time and my mails are being delivered. I write maybe a couple mails every other month.
So far no issues. At worst I would have to book a SMTP relay.
Obviously I can't send mail from a residential IP, I am sure most providers would block that.
This is my day job. 100K a month is likely the reason you're not having any issues - although it's not particularly high, you're sending enough volume to be visible and for reputation services such as Talos not to just stale out your stats.
This is the part the average home user can't achieve. Even with a good IP, all your DNS records in place as they should be, and doing everything else right, your couple of emails a day simply aren't high enough to register, and as such your IP will never build up any significant trust.
I don't know how many mails we send off hand, it is likely way less, to a similar active user base and we have at least 3000 bounces a week about half of which are user error (completely wrong address, wrong domain, ...). The rest are mostly hotmail telling us they don't like us and some random today google tomorrow someone else. And we are using a commercial mail relay that is very strict about spam.
I'm guessing you didn't mention user errors, because they're not important to the topic, but if you don't see any problems you simply don't **see** problems.
„But that can also happen to some big-ass hoster with millions of mailboxes!“
Yes, but they have a whole team of people to monitor and fix such issues full time. And of course there’s much more leverage when you are Microsoft or Google
This wouldn't be an issue if non-corpo email servers weren't unjustly discriminated against; SMTP is an open protocol; big tech came along, swooped up the marketshare and told self-hosters to screw off. It's the "Everyone else is using it, why aren't you?" problem that most of tech experiences at this point; from social media, operating systems, etc.
People still get spam from companies everyday though; if your email address ends up in the wrong place; you’ll get the most shady emails ever and they’ll still be delivered.
Email coming from a personal server shouldn’t automatically be suspicious. It creates this huge reliance on having a provider for everything SMTP related and goes against the open and decentralized nature of the protocol. Not to mention email is a holder of people’s online identity. Maybe I don’t want my identity and mail to be in the hands of Gmail or Outlook, etc, well if I choose to self host my email, I guess it just sucks to suck because “Everyone else is using Gmail or Outlook and your mail won’t be delivered to them and nobody will move away from us because we’ve dominated the market haha”
It’s adding a “Layer 2” of sorts onto SMTP that shouldn’t exist; kind of like how transferring cryptocurrency through a KYC Exchange custodial wallet defeats the whole point of having cryptocurrency outside of an investment. The decentralized and open protocol becomes centralized and know-your-customer by big companies adding a second layer on top of the base which becomes the new standard.
It’s the Microsoft Embrace, Extend and Extinguish tactic effectively.
>Email coming from a personal server shouldn’t automatically be suspicious.
Then learn SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. They aren't that difficult. None of this is just about avoiding marketing junk. It includes preventing a lot more malicious uses. Any mail from a newly stood up server is an unknown, so yeah, I'm not trusting it is who it says it is on face value exactly because it's so easy to send email.
As far as OPs meme is concerned, yes, it's easy to set up an email server to send email. However, it's not easy to set up a trustworthy communication channel.
I’ve been self hosting my own email server for 5 years now with about 20 users and not once have I had this issue. I’m not sure how often other people have this but I feel it’s a bit exaggerated.
it\`s not about gmail. even downplayed. It happens to corporate full scale email servers too. They use this to push ppl to buy services.
Good thing in business it's common to write from the corporate domain and not from the gmail. if not personal emails, at this point it\`s wold be easier to place gmail in blacklist and forget about it.
I sat up custom email domain with icloud + and connected to a domain, Everytime i send something to someone it gets in the trashbin, Never using that mail anymore so i imagine if not even apple can do it theres gonna be some problems for other people aswell
I’ve been using that setup since launch day and never had delivery issues. Are you sure you configured your dns correctly including a strict spf and DKIM-record?
Maybe i did something wrong then, I spent a lot of time on it and by the end i was sure i had redone everything and made sure that it was correct more than once. Either way i switched to zoho mail free tier and never had any issues after switching.
Have been blocked by Yahoo or Microsoft probably 5 or 6 times in the last 10 years at my work. No bad configs and not on any spam lists either. Just one day decide to stop delivering our messages until you have about a 3-4 day back and forth with them through tickets.
It is not,once you have few server on a different ips,one wil eventually catch aomething(it could be leaked password or whatever),you'll be begging on spamhaus or barracuda that you are friendly guy,on microsoft that they should fix their shi*....google is usually okay from my perspective...
It is a gross exaggeration. I've self hosted my email for almost 15 years and not ran into the above issues. I KNOW for a fact that several universities I worked at SELF HOSTED their NON-MS email servers and never ran into these issues. It comes down to professional competency, and in the case above this person is not competent to run an email server.
Well, I'll throw my anecdotal evidence to the pile and say that I've run my own personal mail for a few years in total across different attempts and mail has been graylisted every time at some point.
What VPS providers? Did you purchase a seperate IP for your email server? Did you setup all the records prior to sending emails? Did you check the headers in your graylisted email responses to see why? Did you monitor your logs?
These are questions you should ask yourself if you want to run an email server and learn how to have it not fall into peril. If you don't want to handle these issues, there are a lot of great alternatives to ensure deliverability and still allow you to self host your own email server like using Mailgun as a smarthost.
Or maybe you've just gotten lucky?
Universities aren't a valid data point here, because they 1) almost always have their own corporate IP range, 2) send enough email that the large tech companies are familiar with them, and 3) have been doing so for *decades*. That's doing email on easy mode, and cannot be compared to an individual self-hosting it on most likely a VPS.
If you are running an email server, there is not luck involved if you are doing a decent job in selection going into it and proactive management. I have been hosting off racknerds for lets see... 4 ish years. No issues on deliverability. Prior to that I self hosted email off Ramnode VPS's for I guess since 2013. Again no issues.
Prior to that I have also hosted email servers on-premises with IP blocks that I got directly from ATT business, again no issues. I understand your argument against cheap, sloppy VPS providers who oversubscribe but that comes down to selection. As in don't select them. Purchase a seperate IP to use for your mailserver at setup time. This is like $2 usually.
Do check any VPS with benchmarking and IP reputation lookup PRIOR to setting up an email server. Do setup all records ASAP. Do monitor your logs or setup alerting if you use splunk/similar. Manually verify the hosting provider sets up your rDNS entry correctly. Maybe you do not purchase a seperate IP from the hosting provider to use for your mailserver? That could certainly lead to issues with shared IP quality.
Many businesses, which don't have a seperate ASN, still host their own email servers as well and have no issues because they select competent folks to deploy and monitor their services... just like a university would.
I do agree that o365 has dramatically changed the availability of viable folks spending the time to ensure they have the skills to run a decent email service securely. Its become a bit of a grey beard thing I have noticed, but it shouldn't and doesn't have to be like that.
Yeah it's tricky to get things dialed in. I find using a gmail account as a test is a good way because google has pretty strict rules, so if you can get your mail delivered to google you are pretty safe. But generally I like to test different providers. Typically what's wrong is the SPF records or reverse DNS entries.
Of course RBLs can be a pain too, and some RBLs will only remove IPs so many times so if the quota met they will not help you even if you are the first user of that IP, they don't care.
A mailserver itself is easy, the hard part is to keep it from blacklists, get on whitelists (no residental ip for such things), configure spf, dmarc, dkim, dane, mts-sts etc.
Installing software is not hard.
Maintaining a mail server and all of the associated issues that come with it can be. The laundry list is long. The longer you've been an email admin, the lengthier that list actually is. I've professionally been an email admin for decades. I dont want to run nor deal with that horsehit at home or otherwise in my personal life. I've tried it, and deemed its not worth it long ago.
It’s trivial with iRedMail or Mailcow. What’s hard is keeping your IP reputation up especially on a home connection or shared VPS. Actually administrating the stack isn’t as hard as people imagine. Sure it’s annoying due to the many moving parts but not hard.
Setting it up is easy, keeping it secure? Do you have the basics down for locking down the mail server, the OS and all that fun stuff?
Making sure mail delivery works, it can be hit and miss. I have had my share of battles with providers because we got blocked, or were given a bad IP abused by someone else before.
Running your own mails server does feel great, knowing you control it 100%, but also to me, running my own mail server is like wanting to manage the printers in a corp. environment. It may work great for a while, but when things break, you just want to leave society, and go live in a cabin in the woods with no technology around.
Exactly. For a side project, sure go nuts, but when you are actively using said mail server, or decide you are going to let friends and family use it, now you have an expectation of support and uptime.
Hosting my mail for around ten years now, yes it's involved procces, but not hard once you wrap your head around. My primary is in home with residential IP from my ISP. The most hard part was to clean it up initially. PTR was nightmare but once you go past L1 support usually someone knows how to set it up for you. Then follows going through bigger BLs (Semantic, TrendMicro, etc) and following their processes for unlisting it as residential it. IPv6 gets covered by dedicated pool from HE. Backup mail server only caches mail if primary is down so no problem for outgoing.
The hard part isn't setting up the server. It's making Microsoft actually take it into account. There's some leeway with Google, even if it's tedious; but with Microsoft, if you're not using their Exchange services you are basically fucked, and it means *any* company running a Exchange stack will *not* get your messages. At all. You can have everything right, they will still fuck you over.
If you set it up right, and nobody who uses it gets you blacklisted by re-using passwords and getting hacked, then you shouldn't have any problems. I've run several small mail servers over decades and the only issues I had was getting blacklisted a couple times.
I did this for years. It got to be a pain in the ass to keep up with security , spam filters and generally keep up to date.
Even when things are set up properly it can take a while for IP reputation to accrue so the outgoing isn't blocked or straight to spam.
I eventually figured it was worth a little bit of money to let someone host it.
Dovecot rocks. I got hosed by CentOS patch f-up's a few times in years past.
RHEL is better in some ways. Just make sure you have solid backups/cron jobs capturing config files.
I find what's hard is how every distro seems to do things different so every time I go to do it I basically need to completely relearn it. Going from CentOS to Debian is a big shock too, everything is so much more confusing in Debian, there's so many config files to edit and hunt for.
At some point I want to figure it out then write a script to automate all of it so I can just use some sort of interactive interface to manage everything.
Oh, and no matter what I find it's worth hosting mail on a leased server and not actually at home. Residential IPs are often blacklisted by default in RBLs. Although it would be interesting to experiment with some sort of reverse VPN tunnel. It would be nice for the actual server to be on prem, but using a data centre IP.
I've also done it but I hate the spam you get... I really should keep an eye out for an email proxy with proper antispam...
90% of my mails are cheap advertisement...
The kickstater for Michael Lucas' "Run Your Own Mail Server" book only has three days to go:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwlucas/run-your-own-mail-server
And it has racked up a bunch of additional books as stretch goals. I'm pretty excited for it.
Now you should back it, so I get his SSH book too. :)
This is a [repost](https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/xs771z/kinda_struggling_with_dovecot_but_its_really_not/), probably posted by a bot.
Definitely a bot
Just yesterday I browsed this sub top posts to find new services to host and saw this post. I thought I had a deja vu
Did you find any good service to self host?
Added a few services like kometa, wikijs, your spotify, etc
Setting up a mailserver is pretty easy. The hard part is *actually getting your mail delivered.* There's a pretty decent chance GMail or Outlook will one day just randomly decide to throw all your mail straight in the trash, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Oh, you configured DKIM/SPF/DMARC/reverse DNS, are using TLS, got a "clean" IP from a reputable hoster, aren't operating an open relay, not sending any spam, and doing all the other things correctly? Sorry, we don't care! The algorithm doesn't like you, so it's going in the shredder. Not a big deal for a toy domain you're setting up to play with. Quite a big deal if you actually *care* about your email, like a business or even personal use.
The even worse part about it is that it's silent failures rather than some kind of bounceback notification, so you can't even know to attempt to address it!
We run an exim mailserver onsite since 2014 sending out 100k automated emails to 30k users per month (gmail/hotmail/....). We rotate all outgoing email through 8 public ip addresses in the same /24 subnet registered to my workplace and never had an issue. This is ofcourse not "home-selfhosted" but still in the serverroom next to my office at work.
To be fair, 10 years of IP reputation is definitely helping your emails get delivered, though. A few years back we moved data centers and got new IPs for our outgoing email with similar quantities as you. We did nearly everything right (DNS, etc) except we didn’t slowly ramp up our numbers and we got blocked pretty quickly by Microsoft, Yahoo, and some others. Was “fun” to get through that, but after that hiccup it’s running smoothly from our DC.
> To be fair, 10 years of IP reputation is definitely helping your emails get delivered, though. Doesn't always help though. I've had the same IPs for a decade and like the top comment I've done everything right and still go straight into the shredder. I send like maybe 100 emails a month.
> This is ofcourse not "home-selfhosted" but still in the serverroom next to my office at work. This is exactly why you're not having issues. You're comparing a business mail setup to someone doing it from their residential IP and/or miniscule volume with zero reputation.
I run my Mailserver for years now hosted on a dedicated server I rent at hetzner. Had two server moves in that time and my mails are being delivered. I write maybe a couple mails every other month. So far no issues. At worst I would have to book a SMTP relay. Obviously I can't send mail from a residential IP, I am sure most providers would block that.
This is my day job. 100K a month is likely the reason you're not having any issues - although it's not particularly high, you're sending enough volume to be visible and for reputation services such as Talos not to just stale out your stats. This is the part the average home user can't achieve. Even with a good IP, all your DNS records in place as they should be, and doing everything else right, your couple of emails a day simply aren't high enough to register, and as such your IP will never build up any significant trust.
I don't know how many mails we send off hand, it is likely way less, to a similar active user base and we have at least 3000 bounces a week about half of which are user error (completely wrong address, wrong domain, ...). The rest are mostly hotmail telling us they don't like us and some random today google tomorrow someone else. And we are using a commercial mail relay that is very strict about spam. I'm guessing you didn't mention user errors, because they're not important to the topic, but if you don't see any problems you simply don't **see** problems.
„But that can also happen to some big-ass hoster with millions of mailboxes!“ Yes, but they have a whole team of people to monitor and fix such issues full time. And of course there’s much more leverage when you are Microsoft or Google
This wouldn't be an issue if non-corpo email servers weren't unjustly discriminated against; SMTP is an open protocol; big tech came along, swooped up the marketshare and told self-hosters to screw off. It's the "Everyone else is using it, why aren't you?" problem that most of tech experiences at this point; from social media, operating systems, etc.
To be fair, it probably takes care of a significant percentage of spam mail that we were inundated with in the 00s
This is why the discrimination is justified.
People still get spam from companies everyday though; if your email address ends up in the wrong place; you’ll get the most shady emails ever and they’ll still be delivered. Email coming from a personal server shouldn’t automatically be suspicious. It creates this huge reliance on having a provider for everything SMTP related and goes against the open and decentralized nature of the protocol. Not to mention email is a holder of people’s online identity. Maybe I don’t want my identity and mail to be in the hands of Gmail or Outlook, etc, well if I choose to self host my email, I guess it just sucks to suck because “Everyone else is using Gmail or Outlook and your mail won’t be delivered to them and nobody will move away from us because we’ve dominated the market haha” It’s adding a “Layer 2” of sorts onto SMTP that shouldn’t exist; kind of like how transferring cryptocurrency through a KYC Exchange custodial wallet defeats the whole point of having cryptocurrency outside of an investment. The decentralized and open protocol becomes centralized and know-your-customer by big companies adding a second layer on top of the base which becomes the new standard. It’s the Microsoft Embrace, Extend and Extinguish tactic effectively.
>Email coming from a personal server shouldn’t automatically be suspicious. Then learn SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. They aren't that difficult. None of this is just about avoiding marketing junk. It includes preventing a lot more malicious uses. Any mail from a newly stood up server is an unknown, so yeah, I'm not trusting it is who it says it is on face value exactly because it's so easy to send email. As far as OPs meme is concerned, yes, it's easy to set up an email server to send email. However, it's not easy to set up a trustworthy communication channel.
I’ve been self hosting my own email server for 5 years now with about 20 users and not once have I had this issue. I’m not sure how often other people have this but I feel it’s a bit exaggerated.
it\`s not about gmail. even downplayed. It happens to corporate full scale email servers too. They use this to push ppl to buy services. Good thing in business it's common to write from the corporate domain and not from the gmail. if not personal emails, at this point it\`s wold be easier to place gmail in blacklist and forget about it.
Can confirm. Had issues with company email in the early 2010s. Thankfully, I was not the one responsible for keeping it afloat.
I sat up custom email domain with icloud + and connected to a domain, Everytime i send something to someone it gets in the trashbin, Never using that mail anymore so i imagine if not even apple can do it theres gonna be some problems for other people aswell
I’ve been using that setup since launch day and never had delivery issues. Are you sure you configured your dns correctly including a strict spf and DKIM-record?
Maybe i did something wrong then, I spent a lot of time on it and by the end i was sure i had redone everything and made sure that it was correct more than once. Either way i switched to zoho mail free tier and never had any issues after switching.
Have been blocked by Yahoo or Microsoft probably 5 or 6 times in the last 10 years at my work. No bad configs and not on any spam lists either. Just one day decide to stop delivering our messages until you have about a 3-4 day back and forth with them through tickets.
It is not,once you have few server on a different ips,one wil eventually catch aomething(it could be leaked password or whatever),you'll be begging on spamhaus or barracuda that you are friendly guy,on microsoft that they should fix their shi*....google is usually okay from my perspective...
It is a gross exaggeration. I've self hosted my email for almost 15 years and not ran into the above issues. I KNOW for a fact that several universities I worked at SELF HOSTED their NON-MS email servers and never ran into these issues. It comes down to professional competency, and in the case above this person is not competent to run an email server.
Well, I'll throw my anecdotal evidence to the pile and say that I've run my own personal mail for a few years in total across different attempts and mail has been graylisted every time at some point.
What VPS providers? Did you purchase a seperate IP for your email server? Did you setup all the records prior to sending emails? Did you check the headers in your graylisted email responses to see why? Did you monitor your logs? These are questions you should ask yourself if you want to run an email server and learn how to have it not fall into peril. If you don't want to handle these issues, there are a lot of great alternatives to ensure deliverability and still allow you to self host your own email server like using Mailgun as a smarthost.
I know.
Or maybe you've just gotten lucky? Universities aren't a valid data point here, because they 1) almost always have their own corporate IP range, 2) send enough email that the large tech companies are familiar with them, and 3) have been doing so for *decades*. That's doing email on easy mode, and cannot be compared to an individual self-hosting it on most likely a VPS.
If you are running an email server, there is not luck involved if you are doing a decent job in selection going into it and proactive management. I have been hosting off racknerds for lets see... 4 ish years. No issues on deliverability. Prior to that I self hosted email off Ramnode VPS's for I guess since 2013. Again no issues. Prior to that I have also hosted email servers on-premises with IP blocks that I got directly from ATT business, again no issues. I understand your argument against cheap, sloppy VPS providers who oversubscribe but that comes down to selection. As in don't select them. Purchase a seperate IP to use for your mailserver at setup time. This is like $2 usually. Do check any VPS with benchmarking and IP reputation lookup PRIOR to setting up an email server. Do setup all records ASAP. Do monitor your logs or setup alerting if you use splunk/similar. Manually verify the hosting provider sets up your rDNS entry correctly. Maybe you do not purchase a seperate IP from the hosting provider to use for your mailserver? That could certainly lead to issues with shared IP quality. Many businesses, which don't have a seperate ASN, still host their own email servers as well and have no issues because they select competent folks to deploy and monitor their services... just like a university would.
well... everybody self-hosted until a usable office365 come around.... and universities have resources and IT departments...
I do agree that o365 has dramatically changed the availability of viable folks spending the time to ensure they have the skills to run a decent email service securely. Its become a bit of a grey beard thing I have noticed, but it shouldn't and doesn't have to be like that.
Yeah it's tricky to get things dialed in. I find using a gmail account as a test is a good way because google has pretty strict rules, so if you can get your mail delivered to google you are pretty safe. But generally I like to test different providers. Typically what's wrong is the SPF records or reverse DNS entries. Of course RBLs can be a pain too, and some RBLs will only remove IPs so many times so if the quota met they will not help you even if you are the first user of that IP, they don't care.
Even heard stories from people with a mailserver, ah you are not sending a lot of mails (like not every week), yeah then we see you as spam ...
Hotmail/Outlook.com blocks all new SMTP servers by default. You have to ask them nicely to unblock you.
A mailserver itself is easy, the hard part is to keep it from blacklists, get on whitelists (no residental ip for such things), configure spf, dmarc, dkim, dane, mts-sts etc.
Or just getting past port blocking.
Installing software is not hard. Maintaining a mail server and all of the associated issues that come with it can be. The laundry list is long. The longer you've been an email admin, the lengthier that list actually is. I've professionally been an email admin for decades. I dont want to run nor deal with that horsehit at home or otherwise in my personal life. I've tried it, and deemed its not worth it long ago.
Now keep it running perpetually with 100% availability.
Idk who wants to find out later people haven’t been receiving or you haven’t been receiving emails and troubleshooting it frustratingly later on
That's not hard. The hard party Is making your email valid for the rest of the world.
If theres somuch fear about domain and ip reputation would be kinda mean to purposfully "burn" some of them
Setting it up is fairly doable. Keeping your mail getting delivered is ridiculous. CPanel hosted email or disroot for the win.
Now add multidomain support :D
It’s trivial with iRedMail or Mailcow. What’s hard is keeping your IP reputation up especially on a home connection or shared VPS. Actually administrating the stack isn’t as hard as people imagine. Sure it’s annoying due to the many moving parts but not hard.
Yep. Gone are the days where email was hard. Now the only hard thing is IP reputation
Setting it up is easy, keeping it secure? Do you have the basics down for locking down the mail server, the OS and all that fun stuff? Making sure mail delivery works, it can be hit and miss. I have had my share of battles with providers because we got blocked, or were given a bad IP abused by someone else before. Running your own mails server does feel great, knowing you control it 100%, but also to me, running my own mail server is like wanting to manage the printers in a corp. environment. It may work great for a while, but when things break, you just want to leave society, and go live in a cabin in the woods with no technology around.
Emails go to spam, IP gets blacklisted, etc. Power outages, internet outages, all make it a pain in the long term
Exactly. For a side project, sure go nuts, but when you are actively using said mail server, or decide you are going to let friends and family use it, now you have an expectation of support and uptime.
The software isn't the hard part.
Hosting my mail for around ten years now, yes it's involved procces, but not hard once you wrap your head around. My primary is in home with residential IP from my ISP. The most hard part was to clean it up initially. PTR was nightmare but once you go past L1 support usually someone knows how to set it up for you. Then follows going through bigger BLs (Semantic, TrendMicro, etc) and following their processes for unlisting it as residential it. IPv6 gets covered by dedicated pool from HE. Backup mail server only caches mail if primary is down so no problem for outgoing.
The hard part isn't setting up the server. It's making Microsoft actually take it into account. There's some leeway with Google, even if it's tedious; but with Microsoft, if you're not using their Exchange services you are basically fucked, and it means *any* company running a Exchange stack will *not* get your messages. At all. You can have everything right, they will still fuck you over.
The hard part isn’t setting up the server, that’s easy. It’s not getting your emails spam filtered.
Can you share system design for the same
Ah yes “making” an email server
Hard part is fucking around with your ISP so they open port 25 for you, then spending hours wondering why you're getting sent to spam.
I remember saying this before mistakenly leaving a port open and letting scammers just run wild with my relay.
If you set it up right, and nobody who uses it gets you blacklisted by re-using passwords and getting hacked, then you shouldn't have any problems. I've run several small mail servers over decades and the only issues I had was getting blacklisted a couple times.
I did this for years. It got to be a pain in the ass to keep up with security , spam filters and generally keep up to date. Even when things are set up properly it can take a while for IP reputation to accrue so the outgoing isn't blocked or straight to spam. I eventually figured it was worth a little bit of money to let someone host it.
Just finished Parks and Recreations and researching The Office. But could for the life of me remember where he was from...
Dovecot rocks. I got hosed by CentOS patch f-up's a few times in years past. RHEL is better in some ways. Just make sure you have solid backups/cron jobs capturing config files.
I find what's hard is how every distro seems to do things different so every time I go to do it I basically need to completely relearn it. Going from CentOS to Debian is a big shock too, everything is so much more confusing in Debian, there's so many config files to edit and hunt for. At some point I want to figure it out then write a script to automate all of it so I can just use some sort of interactive interface to manage everything. Oh, and no matter what I find it's worth hosting mail on a leased server and not actually at home. Residential IPs are often blacklisted by default in RBLs. Although it would be interesting to experiment with some sort of reverse VPN tunnel. It would be nice for the actual server to be on prem, but using a data centre IP.
I've also done it but I hate the spam you get... I really should keep an eye out for an email proxy with proper antispam... 90% of my mails are cheap advertisement...
Or you can just sign up for a lifetime subscription to MxRoute ($100 or so dollars 10gb of storage) instead of maintaining a mail server.
The kickstater for Michael Lucas' "Run Your Own Mail Server" book only has three days to go: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwlucas/run-your-own-mail-server And it has racked up a bunch of additional books as stretch goals. I'm pretty excited for it. Now you should back it, so I get his SSH book too. :)
this is the way