Ask HN: Are there people still running their own mail server? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there people still running their own mail server?

9 pointstatoalo13 comments

It's been a few days that I've started to gain knowledge in the "mail stack" and I was wondering if there are people who, almost in 2019, are still running their own personal mail server and if so what are the pros & cons of it?

I was looking at Mail-in-a-Box [https://mailinabox.email] which seems a "it just works" solution, any worthy alternatives?

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From a service point of view, there are almost no advantages. Large (and even small) companies can do a very good job of providing a secure, redundant, easy-to-use, service at minimal (or no) financial cost.

For you to maintain redundant connectivity, storage, and compute will immediately be a non-trivial workload. Then you need to keep it patched, and monitored, and backed up.

Then you have to run the mail infrastructure, possibly including a web front-end. postfix + dovecot + some-spam-thing. Blacklists. Spam signatures. DNS configuration, SPF, all the other hoops you need to jump through to get the big players to accept your mail.

After a lot of work, and mucking about, and ongoing expense and effort, you can end up with something that will probably be nearly-but-not-quite as good as what you'd get from a commercial provider.

BUT ... it'll be yours, and it'll be how the Internet was meant to be, and you'll be a part of the last bastion of open standards and cooperative distributed systems until such time as the big players decide that they're sick of SMTP and collude to produce a proprietary thing that looks like email, but kinda isn't, and you'll be left talking only to the other diehards.

Personally, I have taken a middle path: I use Pobox/Fastmail with my own domain. That way I maintain the control over it, but I've outsourced the work to someone who can amortize the costs over lots of accounts. I pay for the service, and have chosen a provider who doesn't try to leverage that relationship into a whole-of-life intrusion.

Ok I got your point,but I think that “maintaining control” with the ownership of a domain is the same way I maintain control of my website when I purchase the domain but I host in a service provider dc, right? Anyway I’ve heard really good things with Fastmail...might give it a try.

I used to run my own mail server but moved to FastMail about five years ago (after a short stint with Google Apps).

I haven’t looked back.

Well, some people do it, but in almost every case I don't think its worth the bother. I set up a mail server sometime back just for the experience - and it was a good experience, but I couldn't send emails to GMail or any MS host (Outlook.com etc.) Apparently the IP of my virtual server was already on some black list. And after taking a look at the necessary procedure to get it removed, I decided I'd stick to using someone else's mail server.

It's a burning shame, because email is one of the key technologies of the Internet, and the one that ought to be the most decentralized. (At least, in my idealist mind.) But there we go, I guess reality isn't as idealistic as I am...

That is a good point indeed, with all the effort that goes into keeping your cloud server IP out of some blacklist to this day I still get extremely clear phishing mail and spam directly in my inbox on outlook.com and the majority of the time it sits there indefinitely until I manually trash it, other times the spam filter will work it out (but after several hours).

I’ve been running my own mail servers since 1994. Currently I use postfix, dovecot, and rspamd.

I use Postfix and Dovecot too. Self hosting since 2012.

I just discovered that the person who created Postfix is Wietse Venema, I read some things about him in regards to his Computer Forensic work, pretty cool that he also did this!

I'm going to look into this next weekend, thanks for this :)

I run a mail server using simple-nixos-mailserver (https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver) on an AWS EC2.

self hosting email server, or server of any type is a small blow against the destruction of the internet. ISP have mixed feelings about it, this is the big con. your emails may be flagged as spam, your ports may be filtered down to nothing over time, all depending on how your provider views server hosting. residential grade connection ususally is not allowed to host servers other than tech industry snooping devices. security is a bigger con, its a major inconveinience to discover you are a major contributor to crimes and haxn via your server. a sudden invoice for extreme bandwidth usage may be received, not so bad as if you were mirroring YTUBE, but not cost effective to say the least. make sure you do your homework, and have data, sware, and hware backups if its a seriously mission critical server.

Saw a discussion about self-hosting email on DigitalOcean a couple days ago, seems like the most consistent con is having your sent email get sent into spam (b/c many data centers have their IPs flagged by spam filters).

If it's only a personal server that sends a few messages per day, you'll likely never build up a positive enough reputation to avoid falling into the spam folder.

For me that's not the case. I am operating my own mail server for years now and am only sending maybe 10-20 emails per day. I own my own IP ranges though and make sure they are super clean.

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